I got this cool email from Mark Knowles at UC Boulder: Hi Ben, I heard another absurd language teaching story yesterday that you may want to post on your blog. I happened to hear it at a discussion about “Absorb, Do, and Connect” and “Absorb activities”(http://www.horton.com/portfolioabsorb.htm), but the context is somewhat irrelevant for our purposes. […]
Classroom Management is 100% a function of student engagement. Without the latter, you can’t have the former. So make it your goal to engage your students and quit worrying about all those little Fred Jones types of tricks to manage the kids. Nothing against Fred Jones, but wouldn’t it be easier to just make your
What this work with comprehensible input really entails is lots of mediocre stories, some really pathetic ones, and on occasion a few really good ones. I really want to debunk the notion in this work that we all have to be wonderful and creative and funny and impressive in this work. I must keep saying
What is this work really about? It’s about laughing with kids. If you spend your time in class laughing with kids, and it’s in the target language, you will probably end up by the end of the year having taught a nuclear explosion amount of language compared to what is possible in what you were
If you haven’t read this yet, read it: http://sdkrashen.com/content/articles/1994_the_pleasure_hypothesis.pdf
I really think that I need to get over it and exit the profession because it just nags at me so. I see injustices everywhere and they appear monstrous to me and I just don’t know what to do about it. I see kids that are not in the “club” (you know what I mean
I saw this this morning on a TikTok video: “Don’t burn yourself out trying to change the culture of an organization where you are not in a position of power.” Hmmm. I guess I heard that one about 40 years too late….
CI presenters don’t need to fly around the world anymore to present to schools and districts who want to adopt CI. That way of training people is an outdated model. Now, it can all be done online. Besides, who uses air travel anymore, with the planet about to burn up? An interesting result of this
Blaine Ray calls teaching this way “Playing the Game”. It’s when they try to guess what you are thinking. You put your hand on your chin after asking a question to get student input into building the story, and you look up to the ceiling and wait for cute answers. If you choose to blame
The old days of “challenging” language students is over. Our field is challenging enough for them and for us. Those days were part of something in language education that didn’t work, and so good riddance. The research tells us that if it isn’t effortless for them, then it doesn’t align with the research about how
Let’s say it’s a year from now and it’s a Thursday morning in March of next year (2023), and you’ve been using the Star in your language instruction for about a year now, having signed up for both the Book 1 and 2 trainings a year ago back in March of 2022 with great results,
Hello, Ben! We are in Germany near Berlin at my sister’s friend’s house. Everything is good. Waiting to see who’s available to drive with me to Portugal. We were blessed to get out on time. We had a sleepover in Vinnits, – it was calm at the time but 2 days later it was bombed
