Let me tell you: it’s BIG. This is a road map for language teachers who are teaching “comprehensible input”.  What is comprehensible input? It’s learning language and being exposed to a language without understanding every word and structures in it. It’s considered to be one level above what the learners understand. Teachers are teaching the class in the target language, and students are getting input that’s well…comprehensible. There are various tools and cool activities that are delineated in this book. It’s very comprehensive…not to be confused with comprehensible. (lulz) I liked a lot of what the author Ben Slavic suggests such as

•  speaking much, much slower while teaching in general. We teachers don’t realize how quickly we speak because we understand the material really well. This isn’t a thing that just applies to language teachers, this is across the board. He suggests that language teachers have about a 2-3 second pause between EACH WORD. I find that to be very tedious, however if the students are brand new to the language, I guess that makes sense. One of my biggest take aways from this book is that we all need to slow down the speech because I guarantee you, that many students are getting about half of what we’re saying. Which leads me to my next point:
• Slavic also suggests “circling” concepts. Again, it’s not just applicable to language teachers. The more students hear a certain word, or structure, the more input they are receiving and they won’t have to memorize all of the conjugations (I still like conjugations, but I guess I’m weird). Students will simply have the material ingrained in their consciousness and the structures will just sound right. This is what language learning is about. This can be applied to other classes as well. Perhaps the “structures” are being circled hundreds of times, like Slavic suggests, however I believe that reiterating material over and over again until the students are sick of hearing it, is important. When they’re sick of hearing it, that finally means that they got it and then it’s redundant, and it finally stuck. Maybe…that’s my theory anyway. 

The New Normal

Day 3 of week 1:  On-line, virtual learning.

How do I manage volunteer work, family life, department responsibilities, and four activity classes with a total of about 165 students in an online environment successfully?  The jury is still deliberating as I contemplate the best route to take to manage our community’s emotional, mental, physical and social well-being.   That is the question I have been trying to answer and today I shared a response in the only way those over 50 know how how… Facebook.  Yes, I admit it.  I can be old school even as I am eager to learn the new technology.  There is comfort in leaning on what is familiar. And so, my Carondelet family, I decided to share my thoughts here too.

xx
Steph
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About a week ago, my husband and I started watching a limited documentary series from 2009 about Monty Python called Monty Python Almost the Truth: The Lawyer’s Cut.  My husband, my kids, and I are huge Monty Python fans.  As we spread this documentary over the whole week, watching it 20 minutes of it at a time (which is the amount of time it takes for exhaustion to take over and sleep to arrive), I found more nuggets of wisdom beyond just the comic relief that we so desperately needed.

The documentary covers how the six members of Monty Python met, struggles with the BBC and with finding money to make their first movies.  However, the comedy group also discussed what it was like to collaborate with each other and the ins and outs of the creative process.  Although these six men were friends, they did not always get along.  Creative and personal tensions actually fueled some of the comic genius.  For example, when John Cleese left the BBC show, the remaining members only lasted one more season, partly because the creative disagreements between Cleese and Terry Jones sharpened the wit of them all.  I also found the discussion of how they worked separately, then in writing teams, then all together interesting.  They weren’t afraid of telling each other if something wasn’t working.  They tried to play up to each person’s strengths, and relied on each other to speak the truth.  I found it all fascinating.

Anyway, I highly recommend this series which can be found on Netflix.  We all need some humor in the coming days.  You will also get the side benefit of watching and listening to this group discuss collaboration, creativity, and problem solving.  Note:  Language and some nudity is found in this documentary.