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12 thoughts on “We Throw Up 2”

  1. Danielle, Memphis

    Ben,
    I really wanted to watch your posted youtube videos, but its blocking me out each time I click on it. Since I have access to the site I was assuming I could see the videos. Is that true? Or do I need to purchase something?
    You can’t imagine how helpful your videos have been (on cd) that you generously gave to me this summer at the conference. Before school started I invited a few language friends over and drank wine and watched your videos, and then discussed best practices. Its been helpful to go back and watch them again, as this year has already been tough to feel confident and work out “new” TPRS strategies. Anyway, thanks a ton!

    1. Danielle good to hear from you. The deal is that this morning I figured out how to block public access to my YouTube links that I post here, as in yesterday and today. Only people on this blog who click on the links given on blog posts on this site (on “We Throw Up” and “We Throw Up 2”) can access those. We all can do that when we put links to our own YouTube uploads as per the blog post this morning titled “If You Upload A Video To YouTube”.

  2. BEN, I HAVE NOT BEEN GIVEN ACCESS TO YOUR VIDEO 3. Yet there was no problem with your videos 1, 2, 4, & 5.
    Why waste precious viewing time showing the test scene? Why not edit it out and replace it with you standing along side the words, briefly stating that that you gave a test on them after direct instruction of them.You could also briefly state that you are required to give such tests, despite strong evidence that direct instruction and study of word lists does little to promote acquisition.
    Why not combine some of the test words in phrases, or even sentences? That way, at least one very surely remembered word of a phrase or sentence might make it easier to be correct on others not so surely remembered. If we are required to have them read non-text, we can at least organize that non-text into the largest possible textual units at or disposal: sentences or, at least, phrases. Of course, for scoring, you simply give a point for each correctly translated word so that nothing changes in that respect.
    Re your videos 4 & 5:
    How come you don’t playfully, and with appropriate gestures, put on your movie director’s hat and try prodding your leading man into some
    quasi-acting?
    quasi- acting?
    Might it not be pedagogically better toaccompany each noun with an article, sometimes definite, sometimes indefinite?

    1. Frank there is no video 3 – it is a weird numbering system.
      You said:
      …you could also briefly state that you are required to give such tests….
      Read my response to Angela here about absenteeism being held at bay entirely by those little quizzes.
      Those word wall tests are a joke. It is wrong on my part to test that way. But I am in the first month of school and I will never ever again make the mistake of giving out high grades in the first term. I need to start the grades low, hence the totally unreasonable out of context single word tests. I won’t do them very long. I call it A Control – the process of making sure that – since we are so positive with the kids and our CI is so easy for them, we don’t want to have some kid who will take his A in the first term and use it as a ticket to skip classes all second semester, since his C is assured. We’ve talked about keeping grades down in the first six weeks and let them sky later – after winter is over and it is not cold anymore – when people stop looking. None of what I am saying has to do with best practices and everything to do with surviving in a school setting, which is not necessarily the ideal place for best practices to happen. We are all nice and everything and in DPS in our part of town high grades tomany kids mean one thing – time to skip school. It’s just that way. And if they have a D first term and an F second, the counselors let them into level 2. I have no problem with that if they want to learn but the kids I’m talking about play the system and I ain’t playin’.
      On the acting Frank I am of the school within TPRS that has the actor up there as a mere prop. So much easier because a strong actor would never be able to keep up with my key rule that says, “Actors, synchronize your actions with my words” – so that they don’t focus on the actor but on the language. It is my style and this is a good one for all sorts of ideas of what acting is.

  3. You still seem to be speaking at quite a rapid clip, and at time even speeding up from there– probably at every burst of increased emotional involvement. I have the same problem, but at least we always project our voices well, you and I. But maybe our loudness also comes from our fervor to be successful communicators, which means our loudness carries with it our tendency towards speed-up. For us, it will always be difficult to separate the two. Yet we must try.

  4. Here is what I noticed: To me, you were speaking fast. However, you were doing comprehension checks and the students seemed to be following you. How did the absent students do on the quiz? Good reviewing of structures; going back and reviewing information. You did that several times and it really helped to cement the action of the story. I don’t speak French and understood about 80-85% of what you said. I wasn’t quite sure of the actor’s role in front; maybe if he had been doing something it would have made a little more sense. I would love to see more about how to incorporate actors into stories.
    Thanks for sharing! I’m learning so much in these first few weeks and the video piece is truly awesome. Let’s keep it coming!

    1. Angela I don’t follow how absent kids do on quizzes. My feeling and sense of it in this first month has been “not very well”. Those kids are flunking the class, by and large. But as a result now, just this week, all of a sudden absenteeism is not a problem. And I have afternoon classes. Go figure. Of course, I could have been all lovey and nice and had their tire tracks over my back. But my firmness in class for the first two weeks, firmness with a personalized smile, along with those frequent quizzes – hammer blows to the grade of absent people – eventually made the serious recidivists notice the result of their actions. I may have busted what is accepted as quite common at this school, and all because of those little quizzes and not being Mr. Nice Guy in the first two weeks. I used to track such things in the past, keeping up with individual kids’ grades and worry about their possibility of failing (which is CI classes is only about not being there), but doing that takes time and makes me into a kind of helicopter teacher and this is my year for simplicity. The tradition of absences being cool in this school is fine with me. I just keep speaking in French and giving frequent quizzes on the class content for any given day via my quiz writer and if a kid is not there that day I just put in a nice little zero for them and they can bring me a release the next day to get the zero taken out of the gradebook. The onus is on them to get the zero expunged from the book. Guess what? My students’ percentage of being in class has increased greatly over the four weeks we’ve been in school. They know that being in class is the only way to avoid zeros on quizzes. It’s working. Probably not a big deal for teachers who work in certain schools, but a huge deal for us who work in others.

    2. …I don’t speak French and understood about 80-85% of what you said….
      Angela your saying this gives me an insight into why the CI is so fast. If you can get that much and if they (not only speak Spanish but also) had at least 200 reps on the three structures over three full days of class the week before, it explains the speed. This is a takeaway for me, because I have never PQA’d any structures anywhere near that much in previous years. All that hammering of the targets produced a very fast class. I tried to slow down today, because those three structures (that we needed to finish the first location – they didn’t have the words as fourth week students only) hadn’t been PQA’d at all. I hope you see that it is slower when all three clips are up later tonight. I’m still thinking about how important a voiceover version of each clip might be…. Thank you Angela.

  5. Re “Frank there is no video 3 ”
    Ben, whatever the You Tube link cited in Out There is called, I have not been allowed to access it. Am I the only one who has not. I have had no problem with the other links.

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