Laura just returned to her classroom after a family loss. Normally, that would be a tall order, to restore the classroom to prime form after a month of subs and right before a vacation. Here is her report: Hi Ben, I was out from school for over a month. When I got back, the clamor […]
Here are the Director’s Cues mentioned as a major tool in the milking processes described earlier in this series of posts. They are also listed in A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS) and in A Natural Approach to the Year (ANATTY). Properly posted (high above the screen), they can be easily used at any point
Eugene and Bonnie Hamilton once spent a few days with me when I was still teaching in a middle school here in the Denver area. Eugene is a Latin teacher and musician (French Horn) and Bonnie is a high school German teacher. We were talking between classes and Eugene said that he thought of stories
Live in your classroom in full confidence that the next moment will manifest safely, creatively, just as the next note manifests in a piece of jazz, naturally. The next note is the next word or word group. Language is not predictable and controlled, but by its very nature free. This is called teaching from faith
A modified (to reflect the current topic of milking) repost from 2009: In one Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger repeats only the words “I’m all right” for the entire song. That’s the message. (Apparently even Mick needs reps on that one, right? I certainly do!) Anyway, that ultra simplistic patterning of meaning made me think that maybe we sometimes try to introduce too much language into our
I spent many years working hard trying to make sure that things got funny in stories. I would think outside of class of ways to bring in a certain celebrity, or some fact about a kid, so that, if it weren’t a home run story, it would at least be at least a single or
Making a story with the Invisibles is truly a team effort. So remind your students to be on the lookout for those little insight moments – those moments to milk – that, in a second, can improve the quality of the movie being made in the minds of your students via a catch phrase. There
We take delight in leaving our old stodgy paranoid piece of our teacher self behind. We relax no matter how hard it is for us. All we have to do is be aware of our intention to be relaxed and milk the right sentences and do the only thing that we really have to do
The idea of milking certain sentences to let the story have more freedom and thus more interest is one that challenges us to step outside of our comfort zones. We pretty much have to let go of control if we want the story to be charged with interest. We can’t just let our own internal
When we let go of trying to teach the language in favor of letting those milking moments drive the story, we change. We become real teachers. It’s as if we don’t even care if they learn it, because in those moments of freedom, of rendering that one line quickly, in a high voice, with sadness,
Milking a phrase is of course scary, but only at first. Really, it is so much fun, and largely because you are released from having to know what it going to happen next. Now that is NTCI and when you first do it in class, you feel like something great just happened. Maybe in those
When we don’t target, we are much more aware of the kinds of cool sentences described in the last post because when we don’t target we align with the flow of language and not shackled language. Thus, everyone who works with NTCI eventually creates their own process. Non-targeting (Invisibles, OWI, etc.) frees our work. Like if a
