In a previous post I wrote that John Gatto taught at the Albany Free School. In the comments to that post Ted Becker informed me that that is not the case. Thanks Ted for the correction.

Of all the tools we use in the virtual collaboration mentioned last post, Basecamp is the foundation (well, together with Skype). Basecamp is simply brilliant.

Now Basecamp’s free for teachers.

English360 needs document uploading and timetracking, so we need a different version, but the free version is 80% of the goodness for 0% of the cost. Congrats to 37signals.

For our web application build we’ve got a distributed team: Miami, Washington, Canada, and Venezuela. So I’m always on the lookout to acquire better virtual collaboration skills, and The Bumble Bee is a new resource I found after they wrote a manifesto in Seth Godin’s Change This (actually, I think Change This passed into new hands recently). I love Robin Good and Change This always has great content for BE teaching.

Anyway, the BB enters my aggregator every morning now, and today there’s a post that will make a great class or class activity on intonation and meaning. Off the cuff, I see one possible staging like this (read the post first for this to make sense):

1) a warmer discussion on company culture, or projects and team autonomy, etc.

2) whiteboard the sentence and talk about what it means for a bit without getting into the word stress issue

3) have individual Ss say it: T, group, or partner notes which word is stressed. You will probably need to contextualize the sentence with some scenario, so that it’s not artificial

4) do the “stressed word” vs “what that means” as a jumbled text activity - lots of good vocab should come out

5) go back to the notes on what word each Ss stressed - discuss

6) discuss if this whole thing is valid…what do the Ss think? In real life would a NS actually stress “do”? (seems to me infrequently). If the word “can’t” is stressed, does that reflect concern over “beliefs and values”… or “ability”? (seems to me the latter).

+ Option (regarding validity): if you work in a school, go around and record fellow teachers saying the sentence. Which word do they stress? Discuss.

Lots of different options here and I think lots of cool language could come out of this. Very Ss-centered as well - much discussion is about their personal beliefs, business or otherwise. You could do it with a fluency, vocab, or intonation work focus - I’d probably blend all three by digging up a few more intonation / word stress examples. And I think you could tweak this to make it successful at any level except beginner - higher elementary and up.

What do you think?

I may be late to the game, and everyone’s seen this, but it looks really decent for a content-based language e-learning site. And I love the idea of micro-content (something we’re working with here at English360). The company also has an English learning site but much of it is in Mandarin so I couldn’t glean much info.

Regarding the post below, 20 minutes later I ran across this, on the Eide Neurolearning Blog. Check out #1.

Also and incidentally, via Boing Boing, a nice clock for your whiteboard.

And a nice idea for a BE reading class or two.

I always feel silly using emoticons when in chat and email, but this post by BJ Fogg explains why I still do it, regardless. BJ Fogg is the author of Persuasive Technology and an expert on how interfaces can influence behavior. His new project YackPack looks like an extremely cool tool, in addition to being a Good Thing, and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares.

And regarding the power of emotion, Fogg states

We humans are wired to be emotional, and we broadcast these emotions naturally — facial expressions, body movements, and voice inflections. When we know someone’s emotional state, we can interact with them more effectively at home or at work. We can make better decisions about what to say and do. For example, if my neighbor’s face shows tension and her voice is stressed, I know it’s a bad time to ask a favor. Emotions have practical value.

So regardless of which role we occupy with our learners, a key competency for teachers is emotional intelligence. Coupled with what Malcolm Gladwell calls thin-slicing, emotional intelligence allows teachers to make split-second decisions regarding correction, classroom management, and learner motivation that can make the difference between effective learning and tuned-out students.

In fact, let me propose this as a foundation principle for teaching:

The single most important component in your teaching is your emotional connection with your students.

I’ve thought this through for a few minutes and this seems a solid proposition, as long as we maintain the implicit “all other things being equal” clause. In other words, although there are hundreds of variables to address, the most critical single variable in teaching success would be this emotional connection: recognizing and understanding our students’ emotions, and using this communicative connection to direct our classroom decisions (like this).

Thoughts?

Sorry for disappearing but Wilma wreaked havoc with downtown Miami…some parts still don’t have power.

When I finally got back onto Bloglines I had over 3500 unread posts to catch up on (…sigh…). So, where to start? Well, the ESL folder of course, and, alphabetically, Autono Blogger came up first, which is a great way to start, since he’s been on a roll recently, with some great stuff on the nature of teacher authority, classroom management, and a teacher’s role in a learner-centered classroom. I was reading along with pleasure, scrolling down the posts, when…No! It can’t be! It’s spreading! The viral “violence in the classroom” hyperbole is still propagating!

If you’re not familiar with Violence-in-the-Classroom Hyperbole (VICH) syndrome, anyone infected will grotesquely stretch the word “violence” to describe what our educational institutions do everyday to students. Following the highly contagious patient zero, who stated that “any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence”, VICH sufferers believe that “standardized testing and being forced to submit to institutionally defined learning objectives without [the students’] informed consent, that is violence”.

The main symptom of VICH is a loss of perspective, and is manifested by an obsessive fixation on university students in Australia, Canada, Japan, and the US. Instead of recognizing that these students have won the lottery of life, with opportunities and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of 99% of humanity, VICH sufferers bemoan the “organized child abuse” of “compulsory training in subordination” which leads students to behave like “domesticated livestock”.

The VICH syndrome is dehabilitating for a number of reasons. First, by (mis)using the word “violence” when referring to non-violent behaviour, those infected desensitize others to the word and more importantly the meaning of violence. The tragic paradox of the VICH syndrome is apparent here, because although the infected may be the first to condemn violence against the young, they are the first to equate violence with, say, the TOEIC, thus depreciating the word and those who truly suffer from what the word means. Secondly, due to this misuse of language, those infected lose credibility as change agents (and again the paradox: they are therefore less able to improve the very thing they are criticizing). Thus, late-stage VICH sufferers are reduced to a state of impassioned impotence.*

I am however a bit worried, since, in terms of VICH syndrome, I’m definitely in the high-risk population:
+ I’m a true believer in the need to change the way we educate
+ I agree with much of what VICH sufferers complain about
+ I majored in philosophy at university, fervently discussed Fanon (a Freire fellow-traveller), and wore black clothes and rimless glasses while passionately arguing the failures of the capitalist-industrialist complex.**

So I’m definitely in danger of VICH infection. But, fortunately, I was inoculated in my youth. You see, I went to a public school in Salina, Kansas, where I was subjected to the “Six Lessons” that according to chronic VICH sufferer John Taylor Gatto*** lead to “moral and intellectual paralysis”: I had a classroom, classes were announced using bells, the teacher was in charge of classroom and curriculum, I got a report card, and I was supervised. Oh the horror. I guess I’ve repressed memories of the violence I was subjected to, because 30 years later it seems to me that, far from being a victim, I was blessed with a wonderful education. I suppose though that VICH sufferers would counter that my warm memories are proof of the brainwashing I experienced.

* Apologies for linking to myself twice in the same paragraph.

** Actually as I wrote this I realized that I’m still doing all that.

*** Gatto is a study in contrasts. Although a long-term VICH sufferer, he left the System to teach at the Albany Free School, which rocks. And he is an amazing wordsmith. Check this out on the tyranny of bells (one of the Six Lessons):

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

Man…I wish I could write like that! “The secret logic of schooltime …that inoculates each undertaking with indifference.” Whoa! In fact it’s so good you could almost fail to notice that it’s absolute bullshit.