Personal development
January 30, 2017
Do you remember Napster? Did you use it to download music without anyone contributing to the work the artist and the artist’s team put into it? I did not. But I’ve got no high horses around here- fifteen years ago, I used a similar “service” (I’m not trying to be coy; I cannot even remember the […]
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January 24, 2017
Shall we talk politics? Everyone else is, so, why not. But wait a minute. There’s quite a bit of politics in this post that’s not about politics. So, I should start here: what is it about? A call to meatloaf – I mean, empathy As 2016 turned into 2017 and the most divisive spirit most of us have […]
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January 11, 2017
Are you a bad teacher or a good teacher? Will anything about your teaching change in 2017? I’m pretty sure at every Camp Musicuentos, I’ve had a crier. At least one person has broken down in tears. At least one person has talked about applying to work at Starbucks. Teachers are feeling crushed under the […]
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December 26, 2016
The title of Who Owns the Learning came up as a possibility for this past summer’s #langchat, and the title immediately caught my eye. It’s been a huge dilemma in my quest to figure out why students don’t continue in their language journey – if they don’t own the learning past my classroom, have we all wasted […]
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December 19, 2016
Book Club 2016: All the Fluff
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It’s that time again – the time of year when I take a bit to reflect on what I’ve read this year, and since this is my blog, I do it here. Like last year, I’m putting all the non-professional-related books I read in this one post and I’ll make dedicated posts to other books I […]
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December 13, 2016
The fourth-most popular post of 2016 on Musicuentos was a post in which I detailed where I felt the agreement was among people with very different opinions in our field (and there are as many opinions as there are us!). Where are the points of agreement in language teaching? When I graduated from my master’s […]
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November 14, 2016
Where will I meet you? I’d love to learn with you at any of these professional development opportunities this year. ACTFL Convention & Expo 2016 I’m headed to the annual Convention and Expo of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (gulp) THIS WEEK. I am participating in three sessions at the convention, […]
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July 20, 2016
When I graduated from my master’s program in Linguistics with an emphasis on Second Language Acquisition, I suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding. I thought that there was a consensus on the general principles guiding how language acquisition works, what that means the second time around, and what that understanding ought to mean for the classroom […]
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July 5, 2016
Ever feel like the world and our profession are changing so fast you can’t keep up? Which of those five new tech tools appearing on your Bloglovin’ feed is the one that you should use to finally start your students on proficiency portfolios (and where will you find the time to figure it out?)? It’s […]
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May 25, 2016
The internet and the calendar (and Allison, Maris, Wendy, Melanie, Valerie, and Megan) say it’s time to confess and reflect. Inspired by a summary of an old #langchat, and then having that inspiration reinforced by these reflective teachers sharing their journey, here is a post more for me than for you. What will – or […]
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April 14, 2016
Have you ever felt like as much as you know your students need more comprehensible input than they’ve been getting, the strategies you’ve tried have fallen flat in your classroom? How about we explore what’s up with that together this summer? Kim Earley and the administration and world languages department at Liberty Christian School in […]
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April 12, 2016
Dear Everyboy, The other day I saw you at your new cashier job in Kroger – congratulations! The two women in front of me- wow, that was a situation, wasn’t it? Buying all those chips and Diet Coke with their food stamp card. Except their card only had $1.28 left on it. And their English […]
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