Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell
May 14, 2019
Think about yourself and the bilingual people you know. How did you all become proficient in a new language? A while ago, Marc’s post on 5 things to tell kids on the first day of class reminded me that I had done a survey related to that question. I felt like I discovered some important […]
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March 28, 2019
Athletic events. Widespread illness. Someone’s unprepared (teacher or students) or arrived late (“Teachers, due to a car accident on the highway, do not count any student tardy in first period today”). Emergency drill – or a passing kindergartener decided to pull the fun red handle on the wall. Half the class gone for an AP exam, […]
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March 8, 2019
Love is amazing, but man, it can hurt. At least, that’s what pop music says! Indeed, the metaphors involving love and sickness, pain, and medicine abound in pop music. That means a health unit rivals any other theme in the contest for most applicable music options! My high school students are currently wrapping up such […]
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March 1, 2019
Let me sing a little Rascal Flatts for you. I woke up this morning With this feeling inside me that I can’t explain Like a weight that I’ve carried Been carried away, away. It’s been over four years since I released a novel guide. More than four years. Four long years I’ve had this project on my plate, moving […]
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February 28, 2019
My father was a white male. He lived the last 32 years of his life in the Deep South. After he became an evangelical Christian around the age of 30, he attended independent Baptist and Southern Baptist churches for the rest of his life, and he always voted Republican. Now that you have the picture in […]
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February 21, 2019
I pledge allegiance to teaching with comprehensible input. Truly, I do. Though I have perhaps a bit infamously blogged about where I depart from classic TPRS, including modifying translation as a way to establish meaning, where I land on the points of agreement/distinction in world language teaching, and how we need a couple of cures […]
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January 29, 2019
By now we’re all back into the language class swing, right? I love my breaks and I love teaching and I confess I have a love-hate relationship with that first day back after a break. I almost always have at least one dream sometime in the few days beforehand with one of the following scenarios: I can’t […]
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January 4, 2019
2019 is my Elsa year. And by that I mean, of course, Let it go. As I shared echoing some very smart people in the last couple of years at “resolution time,” what good is an intention without a plan? This year, for various reasons, I find myself needing to streamline my life, to find […]
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December 30, 2018
Happy new year, friends. 2018 is a wrap! I’ll end this year as a tie for the lowest number of posts in my 10 years of blogging, but that’s understandable. The first part of the year was a major step back as I rested from several professional areas between November 2017 and September 2018. I’m […]
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December 24, 2018
All the Fluff: Book Club 2018
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It’s that time again! My mind scattered in a lot of directions this year and I didn’t read as much as I should have, but here’s a run-down of what I did get to read. I’ll end with some items on my to-read list and ask you for some recommendations. Must read I’m ending the […]
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November 30, 2018
Are you wrapping up a particular reading in your language class? My middle-grades class has just finished El Ekeko by Katie Baker. This book is perhaps my favorite Fluency Matters reader yet! This week, as we look to end our semester, I’ll be going back to something I tried last year. It was a great segue from […]
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November 20, 2018
From the “icky” test to the Supreme Court: Reflections on teachers sharing (& selling) ideas
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Last year, a fellow homeschool parent sent me a file she’d downloaded from an early childhood education resource site. “I’m sure it’s fine, because it was free,” she wrote. But this email came to me after probably years of disquiet and investigation into what exactly is okay for teachers to use and reproduce in the […]
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