Pat’s Polemics

Wes wrote: The comment on how all this math gives the illusion of objectivity to an argumentative parent reminds me of a quote from long (Continue Reading)

Being from Maricopa County, I have long experience with the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio. But apparently another Sheriff has joined in the chorus of those who (Continue Reading)

Tell me if I’ve got it wrong:   The reasoning behind grading students on each unit of study is that the units coming before have (Continue Reading)

There’s a story that may be apocryphal that the U.S. spent several million dollars in the space program developing a pen that would write in (Continue Reading)

In going over work assigned to a second year Latin student in college, I notice a couple of corrections made by the instructor that strike (Continue Reading)

A friend of mine took a course at a local community college in Navaho. The teacher was an English teacher for whom the Navaho was (Continue Reading)

Prior to going to AZLA, in the morning, I got an e-mail saying Cambridge classical was setting up a trial for tprs using Book I (Continue Reading)

OK. You guys are driving me to my blog. It’s why I had Wes set the blog up for me, to get to the bottom (Continue Reading)

We talk about a safe environment for children in our classrooms. By safe, we mean emotionally safe as well as physically safe: safe from bullying, (Continue Reading)

tprs going into a whole district is something I’ve seen recently on a listserv for fl teachers. Then two Spanish teachers needed, tprs-ready preferred. Also, (Continue Reading)

Has anyone done a study on the origins on the school culture of punishment? I have Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards but haven’t read it. (Continue Reading)

Here’s a post written by Bob Patrick to a member of a Latin teacher listserv who complained about discussions on the list being taken over (Continue Reading)

This in response to a request on my views re tprs and on staying in the TL: First of all, thanks for recognizing that I (Continue Reading)

Grading and testing go together in some ways: both are too often conceived of in narrow ways and too often seen as a kind of (Continue Reading)

As you start the very first meeting with your new students (it’ll be different for students following you from a previous year), plan out how (Continue Reading)

How do you start off with your students? This is crucial. One mistake my school used to make was loading up classes with 38 to (Continue Reading)

Corny, I know, or, as kids would say now, cheesy. And thus we start our lessons on how to teach a fl. We must be (Continue Reading)

According to researchers featured on an npr piece, multipliers are leaders who bring out the best in people. Their opposite number are diminishers. The most (Continue Reading)

Well done. The blog item misses the point, however. The idea is to throw in as much abstract and confusing material as possible to show (Continue Reading)

On an npr interview with Michael Long, a renowned SLA researcher, the president of the MLA, and Richard Brecht, none of the three mentioned the (Continue Reading)

Americans are ahistorical. We simply cannot bring ourselves to believe that anything that happened more than 6 months ago could possibly affect us now. I (Continue Reading)

Being pretty sure that writing in L2 is as specialized an activity as writing in L1 is, I was interested in looking at the writing (Continue Reading)

L = language or languages. Having decided against posting this to a listserv, I only hope someone will read these and comment. I am particularly (Continue Reading)