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13 thoughts on “My Son”

  1. Ben,

    I’m sitting down here at the Embassy Suite Hotel in Loveland preparing my presentation with Lynnette. We’re attending CCFLT and Senior Wooly is the Keynote Speaker.
    Annick Chen is going to get her celebration as the Teacher of the Year.
    Decided to take a 5 minute break and go on the blog.
    Just saw your post.
    Tears in our faces.
    We miss you and your voice here.

  2. Ben,

    This is such a touching and poignant anecdote. Poignant because your son had to endure the bullying and experience of being an outsider in what should have been an exhilarating setting. Touching because your son cares enough about you and what you think of him to write to you in french (compensating for his Francais). The sense of both achievement and joyous expectation is palpable. (Bientot, je parle beaucoup Francais!) You are a blessed man.

  3. I have an eighteen year old too. I love this post. It fills me with gratitude for the work I am fortunate to be called and able to do.

    This work is so important for us all, kids and adults. It is healing to be able to work in this way with kids. I am so sad sometimes to think that I am one of the few adults I know working in schools that just connects with the kids for a living…I wish we could all live like this in school because kids need that so much.

    But BEN if it were not for YOU and your heart and the countless hours you have put into sharing your writing, I never ever would be here leading classes where both the kids and I are feeling so happy and relaxed (most of the time). Without you, I never would have dreamed of what language teaching could FEEL like in my bones–easy and lucky and free. I would have still discovered TPRS and I would have taught stories with targets and scripts and tried to drum up interest in PQA. But when I taught this way, there was still something missing. It was YOUR HEART for kids. Without you, I never would have killed myself for two years scrambling to learn enough Spanish to become a Spanish teacher so I would be able to find full-time employment teaching language in a middle school. Because you showed me that it was worth the effort, time, and money to be able to spend all day doing this work. Without you, the kids who were smiling in my classes today would have probably been scrunching up their foreheads filling out worksheets and in ten years would say, “I took three years of French and I still can’t say anything.”

    THANK YOU for your heart, passion, leadership, and vision. I am so fortunate to be part of this community that you have built.

  4. With you, Ben. My daughter was bullied by her Spanish teacher, so I can’t really even think about this too long for you or me. Tears holes in my heart. So so glad. Love to Nathalie. And you. And Ben.

  5. Sabrina and Annick tell Diana that Kathryn Kuypers (DPS Spanish TPRS young rock star taking a year off) is ill ten days now with pneumonia here, after a few months of traveling around India. She is in Udaipur which is only an hour and a half from Delhi so she is flying in tonight and I will take her directly to our tier 1 hospital in Delhi, if we both don’t get double pneumonia crossing town. I shouldn’t kid about that. Tell Diana not to be alarmed. We got this.

  6. I love that you went all caps on that. I know it was not a conscious editing decision as much as a real flood from your heart that sprang out into the ether and even the all caps could not do it justice!

    That note is one of the sweetest I have witnessed. Just goes to show that we never really know how when or where the connections we seed will sprout and bloom. The spontaneity and unbidden nature of this takes my breath away.

    I will never tire of the reminder about what we are really doing <3

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