Hi Ben – I think the last email I sent you the subject line read, “Worst Year Ever.” So I thought it appropriate to give the subject of this email the title “Best Two Years Ever.” I switched schools two years ago and now work part time (every other day) at a fabulous high school. […]
This is a repost for Dana from April of 2016 when I was in India. It’s also for anyone else following the Helena Curtain thread, which has been going on since 2012: We have about twelve World Language teachers here at the American Embassy School. There are also what seem like countless ESL teachers all
Kids teach us. Let’s embrace that idea. So when they refuse our academic overtures, those are teaching moments. For us. Students are not mean spirited or lazy, as the Teacher’s Lounge Crew would often have it. They are just bored. That’s what the textbook does – it bores people. Now that we have a way
Another repost from 2017: If it is true that targeted instruction increases constraints on interest, then why do it? How can we possibly get acquisition when the interest isn’t really there, even with 100 repetitions per class? It’s not the amount of reps, but their quality. It’s about how much what we say approaches compelling.
I’m going to do a workshop in Chicago tomorrow, returning Thursday. Ironically I won’t be able to see Alisa even though the training I’m doing is close to her, because she will also be on the road doing a training. She’s lighting up the Hebrew scene in NYC. We are all very very proud of
A repost from last year, before ANATTY: It always comes down to submitting docs, it seems, and we just need to get the problem solved. If anyone has a middle school unit plan S/S we need one for a middle school teacher: Basically she says that after ten years of TPRS, in the past three
5 Step OWI Process We want complete buy-in from our students when creating a one word image with them. This requires that we are 100% understood when building the image. Here is one way to accomplish that goal. The process is done in English: (1) First, point to the space with respect. Convey the idea
A questionable quality found in teachers is perfectionism. So when they see that the new game (CI) is better than the old game (grammar worksheets), they delay entry into the new game because they don’t have anywhere near the command over it that they had over the old game. No blame, but Anne Lamott below
Communication is not about trying to say the same word or grammar concept a number of times over and over in class. Communication is about sharing ideas. It is about focusing on the people with whom we are communicating. Communication is not about teaching lists of words. It is about learning about the other person
Most of us take on stuff in our classrooms that isn’t our responsibility. We do everything in our power to uplift others and make them feel better so we can make all the comprehensible input work better and thus feel better ourselves too. The Invisibles approach works to bring a lot of happiness, levels of
Those who go back over the years know that the mental health piece has emerged, percolated to the top, as the most important thing we discuss here. So as we now start moving into the thick part of the year, we need to reinforce, always reinforce, our mental health. Otherwise, this job is just too
Here is a repost from 2016 for Dana, following our recent discussion on the 25 minute thing on NTCI stories: There are, of course, many keys to success with storytelling. But one of the most important is brevity. We tend to clutter our stories with too many facts and then we wonder why our kids
