We have a mental health initiative here in this learning community. We need it because in our professional lives it seems as if we are besieged by fools and in our private lives just being in this insane country right now is no easy thing. The CI movement is in shambles. The former focus on […]
You must accept that you are never going to come close to teaching your students anything more than a fraction of the language, in spite of what the College Board would have you believe in order for rapidly-burning out teachers all over the country to keep contributing to their coffers in the form of the
I paraphrased a comment Alisa made today on SEL: There is a national educational ‘trend’ right now – lots of public schools are talking about SEL (Social Emotional Learning) this year. It’s their initiative du jour. SEL means creating a positive, trusting, low-anxiety learning and playing environment. I will intentionally seek hope with this new
I got this from Jake. It’s a fairly tense situation. Below I suggest one option for him. I had sent him this reminder about his right as a teacher (see the article here from about a week ago about A Teacher’s Bill of Rights) that he has the “right not to be responsible for others’ behavior, actions,
This is from Ben Lev – Hi again Ben – Please help me think about the 100 min block: 1) attendance and check in – 5′ 2) daily routine, poem, singing, warm ups, movement – 30’ – 40’ 3) vocab and grammar direct instruction 20 ‘ What should I call this? Textbook time? 4) break
It’s a good idea to revisit the research from time to time. lest we forget our guiding star and go off in the wrong direction. The two articles below summarize the best research I’ve personally ever read, after a lifetime of snooping around, although I will give Lev Vygotsky some major props in influencing my
Q. Do you really believe that you can get all the kids in the group to buy into the story? Aren’t some kids just lazy? A. I strenuously object to the idea that some kids are lazy. Rather, they are blocked. All people want is to be accepted into a community. But the community has
Ben Lev in CA has been a member of the group for at least the past ten years. He is making a job change and needs some feedback from us: Hi Ben, hope you’re well – I need some support – I just quit my high school job to get out of a toxic environment
There is an incredible group of articles on Yahoo! News this week on teaching (see below). The basic point is that teaching is not only one of the top, if not the top, stress-inducing jobs in the country. In my view it is certainly the most dysfunctional. I didn’t say “in the world” above because
One of our group members is looking for sub plans for a 90 minute block schedule for Spanish 1 class. Any ideas from anyone in the group? My thinking is to use part of the time – maybe 45 min. – for kids to draw individually created images in pairs or by themselves or do
A repost from 2008: The floorboards of our classrooms are rotting. How long have we waited for the final cave-in of each one! All of us will be dropped, all akimbo, each at the right moment for us, into the waiting underground lake of fluency. There, we will meet each other again in collegiality and
