Thirty years ago I was at summer camp and Bakke was all the rage. For those of you under fifty, Bakke was a White man (Continue Reading)
Thirty years ago I was at summer camp and Bakke was all the rage. For those of you under fifty, Bakke was a White man (Continue Reading)
Recently, Cliff May, a highly respected scholar, public servant, talk-show pundit, and president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, made some remarks about (Continue Reading)
Much of the attitude toward rigor in fl instruction can be traced back to the struggle modern languages had to be accepted in the face (Continue Reading)
Brian recently asked me my definition of communicative language teaching and tprs. I have written many short essays on clt. Rather than dig them out (Continue Reading)
Recently some comments were made on a listserv about a movie called ’La Misma Luna’. I haven’t seen the movie and felt that the brouhaha (Continue Reading)
A friend of mine would tell me about the book club he was in at a local independent bookstore. A book in Spanish was selected (Continue Reading)
Interrogation experts say building rapport gets results with interrogation and punishment does not. Can we apply this to the classroom?
Brian Barabe wrote: If a student has five 95’s and one zero, his arithmetic average is 79. Many teachers would easily bump the grade up (Continue Reading)
Last night my wife and I got together with another couple whose anniversary is the same date as ours. We’ve been doing this for 5 (Continue Reading)
On CNN, a spokesperson for an organization called Citizens for Community Values piqued my interest. Going to their website, I discovered it is a James (Continue Reading)
Today’s NYT had 2 front page articles detailing events that indirectly affect what goes on in our classrooms. The first dealt with financial and research (Continue Reading)
Stanley Fish wrote a column in the NYT on Monday’s website: In it he says that norms are set by society and those who fall (Continue Reading)
I just started John McWhorter’s new book, Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars, Oxford, 2007. Just a few pages in, I (Continue Reading)
A Chinese monk observed that the earthquake there demonstrated that the world is out of balance. What a terrible thing to say! Blaming the earthquake (Continue Reading)
My wife, who takes little interest in my linguistic pursuits, was intrigued today when I mentioned, as part of our conversation about what to do (Continue Reading)
Yesterday I subbed in a class where the teacher had seating charts. Each was in a different classroom but I noticed that in the one (Continue Reading)
This very plea invokes the image of master/pupil. One time I had a client who brought his kids in for counseling. Over several years the (Continue Reading)
Sometimes a form comes down to us in a way that makes it fit right into a entirely different paradigm. In this way, we often (Continue Reading)
Situation: large, noisy class with about 6 “ring-leaders?. Note: majority of the class has textbooks, binders and other notebooks and seem to be looking to (Continue Reading)
The following excerpt from Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories was posted to a listserv concerned with the so-called paleolithic diet. I read Taube’s (Continue Reading)
Tonight offered an interesting contrast in social change. I checked this out with my wife and she agreed with me (miracle!). Her niece’s mother got (Continue Reading)
My major reason for wanting a blog was to have discussions on language issues that would attract serious and open-minded people. One way to do (Continue Reading)
To continue……… I don’t mean by their being entranced that I spoke French that it was my ability to do so that entranced them but (Continue Reading)