successes
February 20, 2018
I saw a tweet by a professor with 41,000 followers. I listened to a podcast by a teacher who wrote a book, and has a sponsor, and knows everybody. I read a book by a consultant who knows I could do better if I could just do it right, though he left the classroom to be a […]
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February 9, 2015
Preservice world language teachers are asking experienced teachers questions they’d like to hear about from the trenches. To find out more about what #Teach2Teach is, see here for an explanation of how it came about, and what the questions are, or how to submit your own question if you’re a teacher in training or a […]
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November 8, 2014
Since I had my precious Cottrell-itos on my trip to the annual conference of the Indiana Foreign Language Teacher’s Association, I didn’t get to spend as much time involved in the conference as I would have liked to, but I did greatly enjoy the time I did have. I reconnected with “old” friends, made new […]
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April 19, 2013
Why I love mistakes
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I love mistakes. Not because they give me a chance to point out the grammar. Not because I get to circle something in red pen. Not because I can recast it and see if they notice the correction. No, I love mistakes because I’m a second language acquisition nerd and mistakes give me a change […]
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April 5, 2013
One of my top two most widely-used ideas ever is abandoning homework in favor of a weekly “fluency” activity involving a whole lot of student choice. [Incidentally, the other is the YouTube commercial cloze quizzes – in 2.5 years about 60 teachers have joined this project.] Basically, the concept is that instead of you assigning students […]
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April 4, 2013
300 times thank you
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This may look like an ordinary post, but it’s not. Look closer. This is what 300 blog posts looks like! Not very long ago I tweeted my 10,000th tweet: “10,000 bricks down the yellow brick road and no Oz in sight. Turns out the journey IS Oz.” Who needs an audience? I remember when I first started […]
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January 25, 2013
A while ago this comment was left on the old Musicuentos site, on the post “Do something drastic – kick the vocab quiz“: “Can you give us some examples of what activities you do to ensure mastery of the vocabulary? And do you have any advice on how to promote this kind of teaching/learning in […]
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February 3, 2012
A storytelling success story
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In honor of last night’s #langchat topic, I want to share something that happened in one of my kindergarten classes this week. At my school, we have mandatory Spanish from age 3 in preschool through 10th grade. Until 2nd grade, however, students only receive between 15 and 20 minutes of instruction per week. I’ve been […]
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October 29, 2010
And the winner is…
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This year I picked up some early childhood Spanish to free up some time for our K-8 teacher to increase his instruction in our grades 6-8. So I teach 3-year-olds through 1st grade. I get 10 minutes per week with 3-year-olds, 15 minutes with 4-year-olds, and 20 minutes with kindergarten and 1st grade. The first […]
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October 30, 2009
You can’t buy this in a textbook
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There are so many reasons to dislike conventional world language curriculum; my #1 is that the books are out of date before they go to press. So your students are reading about how there hasn’t been a successful coup d’etat in Latin America since the end of the Cold War, and meanwhile Micheletti and the […]
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November 28, 2008
Two of my favorite groups personally are the Mexican trio Camila and their compatriot duo Jesse y Joy. One of the reasons I like them so much is that I can pretty much play any of their songs, and most videos too, in class. They’re fairly positive & upbeat as far as content goes. Right […]
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November 27, 2008
Things to be thankful for
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It’s Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving. :o) Hope you’re enjoying your days off of school or whatever you’re up to this holiday. As I think about what’s been going right in my class these days, what to be thankful for there, I thought I’d let you know that in my difficult period, I finally had to give […]
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