Best practices
May 9, 2023
Remember that car that was parked two spaces down from you, at that store you went to, for that thing you wanted to buy? Of course you don’t. Every day, thousands of events pass through our experience, and they do not stay with us. For most of us, these experiences go in, they’re briefly acknowledged […]
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December 23, 2019
In the final Musicuentos post next week, you’ll see what posts are at the top of all 700(ish) of them, in terms of hits overall. But there are some that perhaps didn’t get viewed as much that are special to me, either because I said something I really thought was meaningful and needed, or because […]
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October 24, 2019
One thing at a time: Step Five.
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Someone, somewhere, is going to comment, I can’t believe she put this one last. It’s ok. Everyone has their cross to bear, and I’m that person’s. You see, I think that before you make big changes, you need to know sound research principles involving how people acquire and learn languages (that was step one). I want you […]
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September 2, 2019
What’s the most powerful use of your voice in the classroom? That’s a question that Justin Slocum Bailey (BlackBox videocast creator extraordinaire!) asked and answered on the most recent episode of WeTeachLang, an excellent podcast for hearing diverse perspectives of language teachers. I highly recommend you listen to it, but I was inspired to blog […]
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August 1, 2019
For a teacher, opening old files is like opening an old photo album. You’re flooded with memories, and also reflections on what went wrong and what went right: Why did I let my mom talk me into that perm? Stirrup pants with winter boots! When are those coming back? If I had real friends, they […]
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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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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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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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August 30, 2018
This podcast on productivity was the last straw for me. Near the beginning, the host reminded me of the research on how much better the brain works when you not only see something written down, but you wrote it there. Sacrificing a good idea on the altar of a new idea I don’t remember when and […]
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April 23, 2018
Since I developed a student handout with the highest-frequency Spanish words organized by type and including translation and rank, and recently posted about how we put our most helpful high-frequency words and phrases on our shower-curtain word walls, it stands to reason that I’m a big fan of high-frequency words. Well, I am and I’m […]
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March 23, 2018
What do you do when you’re entering a new classroom, but this time, you have to leave it the way you found it, every single week? Well, you ask #langchat, of course. Two and a half years ago I took to Twitter to get ideas from my amazing #langchat PLN could come up. I was re-entering the […]
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