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)
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)
Today I had a chance to observe a teacher working with a small group of special ed kids in an English class. I had had (Continue Reading)
I subbed in a class last week. It was a fl class, Spanish. There were 3 block classes so they lasted an hour and a (Continue Reading)
You know, attitude and personality seem to determine just about everything. It’s not reason, knowledge or logic. On a listserv populated by fl teachers, a (Continue Reading)
It is always fascinating to hear of people talk about trends in teaching Latin – particularly when this is aimed at the idea of teaching (Continue Reading)
Someone on a listserv thought perhaps Bill VanPatten had mentioned the problem with correcting an error by simply repeating the structure in its correct form, (Continue Reading)