One of the topics teachers most benefited from on Musicuentos was certainly homework choice. Are you wondering how you can assign achievable, meaningful homework that allows for student voice and furthers proficiency goals? Read on!

How’s homework going?

If you’ve known me long, you know I’m not a fan of bandwagons. I prefer to wait in the background and quietly watch to see if the app gets killed, the research turns out to be negative, and so on. Sometimes, though, what appears to be a bandwagon turns into something bigger. Something that changes the face of education. Revolutionizing the concept of homework is one of these for me.

As a general rule, I’m not a fan of homework at all. The more years I spend homeschooling my children, the more appalled I am that we ever thought 7 hours a day wasn’t enough time to get a proper education.

The more I watch my local school district flounder over everything from chronic absenteeism to assessment issues to bus drivers quitting over student behavior, the more I want to shout from the rooftops,

WHERE ARE THE PARENTS?

Much of what’s wrong with our education system could be vastly improved with some brave parenting, but in return, teachers need to give parents time for brave parenting.

The research is rock solid: the more quality time children spend with parents, the higher outcomes we see across their whole lives.

Curious to know more? Read The Homework Myth.

Okay, enough of that soapbox. What if you’re required to assign homework? What about the fact that we don’t have time in class to expose them to enough of the target language? What about the extra activities that will spark that love of the target culture in them?

Enter homework choice.

Years ago, after I ditched the textbook, I was faced with a requirement for “daily grades” (homework) but no ideas for what to assign. So, I came up with a list of choices. We called it “Choose your aventura.” I shared it. Others ran with it, they added theirs. Many of us saw great success inspiring kids to interact with language outside of the classroom by using homework choice lists.

Here’s the system in a nutshell.

• Develop a list of ways learners can interact with the target language outside the classroom.
• Decide whether to classify options on a point system. That is, easier options would be 1 point, and the hardest ones might be 3 or 4.
• Decide whether to require a certain number of points per week.
• Give a way for learners to report their activity, like a reflection chart to fill out or a post to make on your online platform.
• Count the activity as a homework grade.

What’s the problem?

Glad you asked. Some of our old choices don’t exist anymore. For example, near the beginning of Musicuentos, I did a post suggesting Nickelodeon’s Spanish-language offering “Mundonick.” But Mundonick died years ago. As I slowly clean up 11 years of blog, I find these out-of-date issues and now know to direct you to Nickelodeon en Español’s YouTube channel.

Hanging out on Facebook? Join me there.

I thought about deleting or hiding my old posts about homework choice, but some of you have linked to them. So, I’ve simply added a link to this post at the top of each.

Here’s the work I shared over the years, in reverse order:

• 2016: Nine homework choice systems
• 2015: Homework choice for elementary learners
• 2015: Homework choices for very early novices
• 2014: Putting homework in their hands: Sample systems
• 2013: Homework choice, updated
• 2013: A sample homework report from a student
• 2013: Add more music to homework choices
• 2012: More student choice in homework
• 2011: The post that started it all: It’s time for them to use their time

The question it, how can I best aggregate the options and lessons we collectively amassed over the years on this topic? I think the answer is an old-school Google Doc. That way, I can change and update it as time goes on and things go out of date. It won’t be fancy, but it’ll be useful, and that’s more important. Sorry, formatting it pretty will be up to you!

Scroll down for a list of contributors who have helped me over the years re: homework choice, but without further ado, enjoy:

The Ultimate List of Homework Options for Spanish Teachers.

Every link has been tested for 2025 (and I can tell you, a lot of them were broken)! For resources that went away, I did my best to find a replacement

– like, did you know LyricsTraining is now an app called LingoClip?!

and while combing my amigos‘ old posts, I discovered ideas I hadn’t seen before or was inspired to tweak for this purpose

– like, of course build a fantasy sports team with names and descriptions of players from Spanish-speaking countries?!

I hope you’ll love it. Please share back what you create from it!

Three things before I go. First, if you teach a different language and are inspired to create something similar for your colleagues, will you share it with me so I can spread the good resources around?

Second, remember that these things only have value if they do one of two things:

1) directly improve learner proficiency, and/or

2) inspire learners to engage the target language culture/speakers on their own so they live a lifetime of improving their own proficiency.

Last but not least, this is included at the end of the document but I want to post here that I’m also grateful to the following teachers for their contributions: Sharon Birch, Bethanie Carlson-Drew, Laura Sexton, Kara Jacobs, Pilar Munday, Sharon Birch, Kara Parker, Megan Johnson-Smith, and Noah Geisel.

In June 2009, the same month that Elon Musk created a Twitter account, so did I. I didn’t do much with it. I think my husband suggested it to me. Then, I went to my state conference that fall, where professional challenger Thomas Sauer asked me if I had an account, and had I heard about #edchat? At least, that’s how I remember it. It was, after all, 15 years ago.

I do not exaggerate when I say that Twitter changed my professional life. Over the years, it became the professional community I desperately needed. I was a lone teacher trying to build a language program at my school. I was inspired to be a better teacher and to help others. Then, in January 2011, 14 years ago this month, we started #langchat, and oh my, wasn’t that the golden age of language teacher Twitter?

Like almost every avenue of discourse in our country, our community’s decline on Twitter started before we all had the name of Donald Trump on our lips. Back then, I think we knew deep down that we, collectively, were the real problem. Far too many of us lack self control. We continually unleash our most critical, biting, offensive thoughts when we’re hiding behind a keyboard. Talking to people who are little more than avatars to us brings out our worst side.

Need proof? Within 10 months of starting #langchat, we were already having so many clashes that this is what I wrote.

Everyone deserves respect, face-to-face and online. Respect me, and give me the benefit of the doubt. Bring problems with me, to me.

I tried to stay and I tried to help, to create a respectful space where we could all become a part of each other’s journey to be a better teacher. I posted about Twitter lingo, shared lots of authentic resources. We read books together, we tweeted conference after conference together. We presented the chat at ACTFL. I tried for years.

But when we lose sight of the fact that “free speech” doesn’t mean “freedom from speech I don’t like,” we tend to get huffy. When we forget that the screen between me and you doesn’t make either of us less of a person, we may get nasty. When we don’t pay attention to the tools that help curate the feed to fit what we need, we deflate. We give up.

Everyone knew social media was off the rails. We’ve known it since long before people started talking about banning accounts for minors or banning TikTok altogether or writing books about The Anxious Generation. In 2018, The New York Times called it “the high school we can’t log of off.” It was always that.

Except, I told everyone, you can log off of it. And I did. I left. In the summer of 2020, Independence Day in fact, I signed off.

So, how did I end up back? It’s a long story, involving quitting the best job I ever had, and getting involved in politics, which led me to create an account for that. And then Amtrak accidentally tweeted the word “trains,” just that, and it became a viral thing. It’s time, I thought. Time to find Musicuentos again. Being still resolved to not use social media with a purpose of making friends, I left my personal account dead. I used my lesser-known Musicuentos account. I tweeted one word.

It had been two years.

What changed? I’d come to believe that I’d known the answer all along: it was always to ooze empathy. I could make it work for me.

Now, we find ourselves on the other end of more wildly contentious national events. Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, who rebranded it as X, and a massive change commenced. Many of the people who had built and sustained this beautiful, messy online community we called #langchat left for other platforms, Threads mostly, I think. Having staunchly resolved that another social media platform was the last thing I needed in my life, I stayed.

Then, Donald Trump was elected again. By now we’ve thrown around the words “unprecedented” and “like never before” so much that they mean little. Still, a staggering number of people thought that canceling their account on Trump supporter Musk’s platform would be an effective protest. This time, many fled to open-source microblogging platform Bluesky.

Twitter or X, Threads or Bluesky, none of them will be a community that is your happy place. Progress here is only possible when we realize that social media will never replace the work of building real relationships, and real relationships have always been messy, and that’s totally worth it. I invite you to stay. And I offer some advice for how to make that as productive (and maybe peaceful?) as possible.

Hanging out on Facebook? Join me there.

1. Tailor your content.

The thing about these platforms is that they want you to stay. In order to get you to stay, they’ll show you more of what they think you want to see. How do they know what you want to see? You tell them, by how much time you spend watching that video, by whether you repost or click the heart, by whether you engage in the conversation. That’s the way algorithms work: they track your behavior, then try to capitalize on it to keep you there. So, my first tip is for you to tell the algorithm useful things. There are a several ways you can do that.

• One account, one focus.

Talk about things you love and not just things you hate. Really, think about focusing on one thing you love. Not all of the time, but most. If you want to talk about something else, create a different account.

I like talking politics. I’m part of my local party’s executive council and I ran for State Representative twice. I want to improve the political conversation in this country. But I don’t want my teacher feed to be about politics. I actually don’t want to talk politics with my language teacher friends. So, I have a separate account for politics. I use my Musicuentos account strictly for education content.

Bottom line, the more you talk about one thing, the more the platform will show you that. (Or, it should.)

• Mute, don’t block.

For the love of all peace and harmony, don’t block people. It just fosters more drama, because at least on X, it’s very easy to see that someone has blocked you. Then, you post a screenshot of the fact that they blocked you, and it just fosters more drama.

Instead, mute indiscriminately. X has this lovely mute feature, in which you don’t see a particular person’s posts. Rather, you see a notice that “this post is from an account you muted,” and you can choose to override the feature and see the post. (Don’t.)

I mute people I’d wave and smile at and sit next to at ACTFL. I disagree with them on so many levels, the benefit of engaging them on X doesn’t outweigh the risks of a tense (at best) conversation drowned in the lack of context and accountability that is social media. Mute me. I’ll never know, and you’ll live protected from whatever it is about me that bothers you.

Last year, I had become frustrated trying to dialogue with a particularly immature politician, one running in my district, trying to be on my ballot. When I asked her to stop calling me “sweetheart,” she just doubled down, and if I ever replied to her or mentioned her platform, she’d accuse me of obsessing over her. (I’ve noticed that people out of valid points often use this strategy to shut down an argument on social media.) I muted her, and voilà, more peaceful timeline.

Don’t just mute people. Mute words. During the election, I muted the words “Trump” and “Kamala” (yes, even on my political account). It’s amazing how much that simple step decreased the tension on my timeline. I didn’t care what anyone on X had to say about either of them, so why let the platform show me that?

Mute “bitcoin” and “porn.” Mute “TPRS” if you think we’re a weird cult, mute ACTFL if you’re mad about executive shakeups, mute whatever you want. Mute TPT. (Also use the “not interested” function that X, for example, offers.) You can curate your own feed into something that is really tailored to what inspires, challenges, and educates you.

• Make use of the hearts.

Another way to make the algorithm work for you by clicking the heart or whatever “like” button is used on your chosen platform. Spend time reading a post, watching a video that uplifts you. Then, like it, and occasionally, repost one. I recommend the feeds of state Departments of Wildlife.

Animal video and photo accounts like WeRateDogs are another source of laughter and joy. Try NASA. And ACTFL, and TPRS, and me. If muting and “not interested” shows the platform what you don’t want to see, seconds dwelling on a post and using the like and repost features tells it what you do want to see.

Be a source of empathy.

Allow me to repeat some advice in my 2017 resolution post on empathy, and add to it:

• Remember you are talking to a person, not to pedagogy. Talking to inanimate objects isn’t a conversation.
• Related, use your real name and picture. The more people use their name and photo, the more they police their own content, because people naturally want to promote a positive view of themselves.
• Also related, refuse to engage with bots and anonymous accounts. 99% of the time, if you don’t use your name and photo, I will not interact with you, because it usually means you’re using the medium to unleash the worst version of yourself.
• Resist the urge to lecture. Ask a question, read the answer, don’t jump to conclusions.

Honestly, leaving a platform because people say things you don’t like doesn’t make sense. It’s what authoritarian regimes do, not American teachers. Choosing to affiliate only with people who are like you makes you part of an echo chamber that exactly mirrors the one you thought you were leaving.

The only way you can fix the echo chamber is to stay.

So Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it, so what? So he endorsed the candidate you hate, and what of it? When you see something that makes you think, I want this out of my content, take a deep breath, say “Thank God we live in a country with free speech, but that is some crazy twisted free speech,” and then mute. Mute and mute some more.

You can’t escape the crazy. The thing about free speech in the country is you can only guideline it so much. The crazy will follow you wherever you’re going. The sooner we learn to sideline it without sidelining ourselves, the better our communities will be.

You may have left X for “bluer skies” but blue skies never stay that way. And come on, my language teacher community, we know this better than most. Remember Wikispaces? PhotoPeach? Remember Flipgrid? TodaysMeet? inkleWriter? Padlet? (Check out Matt’s post on paying for digital classroom tools.)

Free, open-source technology is not a sustainable model. Unless someone is paying something and restricting something, it’s going to turn paid or restrictive, or it’s going to die. Either there will be restricted access (ChatGPT), subscription fees (Padlet), fundraising (Wikipedia), or advertising (YouTube, X, Facebook).

It took about ten minutes for the peace to break on BlueSky. People fled X, but then they found more of what they didn’t like on BlueSky. Much of the feed is taken up with screenshots from X! Also, users were reporting content so fast and furiously that it broke the system:

(CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material). Here’s the thing: if there’s no money involved, who is going to monitor reports? Who’s going to take down content promoting sexual abuse? The AI doesn’t care. It’ll boot you off as soon as it will the person you disagree with.

This line from the above-referenced 2018 opinion piece at the NYT about Twitter, you can replace it with any social media and say the same thing.

Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys hellbent on the innocents of Oz.

I lasted on Reddit for approximately 3 days before I couldn’t take how the anonymity contributed to the most insulting online community I’d ever seen.

It takes a human making a salary to help make your online platform a safe place to be (I mean literally safe, not what we’ve come to call “safe,” meaning you don’t get to say anything that hurts my feelings).

Bottom line: If you learn to curate your feed and filter the noise, before you know it, you’ll have what we used to have and what made us all better teachers: a feed of people who

1) know how to answer a question thoughtfully,
2) know how to disagree respectfully, and
3) want you and all of us to be the best teachers we can be.

It’s nearly the end of the school year and as the good proficiency-focused language teachers we are, we’ve got some modal assessments going on, likely including some presentational speaking. I’ve got to say something I should have thought of long before the fail described below: most kids are not great at presentational speaking. In their native language, I mean. If you want to set them up for success, it’s going to take a more holistic approach then what I did here.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to final assessment day in a middle grades class of early novice Spanish speakers.

The semester theme was travel, with a focus on places of interest (including restaurants and lodging) and how people describe them. We explored travel reviews, and based on those reviews, students were to develop an itinerary of where they would choose to go, and why. We’re talking basic sentences like “On Day 1, I visit ____ (park, museum), because it is ____. I eat at _____ because I like ______.” That sort of thing. Nothing too complicated, right? Even the “because” is practiced, repetitive, provided. On the final day, the students were to present their country itineraries.

Let’s talk about the seven middle-grades students doing this presentation:

• Two students– not there.
• Two more– left the entire itinerary at home, including the written portion they were to turn in.
• Two more– mysteriously lost the first day of the 3-day itinerary.
• Last one– had done his with his sister, and expected to read the exact thing she had read to me in another class.

That’s it. Those were the presenters. These itinerary presentations were my entire 90-minute lesson plan. I don’t even remember what we did instead (for one idea, check out finger puppet presentations), but I remember the hard lesson I learned. The one I want to pass along to you today.

Kids don’t know what a presentation is supposed to be like.

So, how do we troubleshoot together this epic fail of mine? I came away with four key tips for trying to prevent this sort of thing in the future.

Model, model, model.

I recently had the opportunity to teach a communications class, where 6th-10th grade students were working on writing an essay and the developing a presentation based on it. I started modeling from the first day, incorporating specific speaking tips (eye contact, humor, knowing your material). And then I did it every time we met, highlighting each time a different aspect of what it means to deliver an effective presentation. We even analyzed some TED talks. Kids don’t know what they should do without seeing it.

Why not do this in world language as well?

• “When I say ‘introduce yourself,’ I mean… (model it).”
• “When I say ‘just talk from key word notes,’ I mean… (model it).”
• “When I say ‘give several reasons,’ I mean… (model it).”

And then of course, after you’ve seen someone else do it, you need a low-stakes way to put it into practice before there’s a grade involved…

Present early, present often.

This would have made all the difference. It would have been so easy, too, because I had the written portion of the project due by stages– by days of the trip, actually. We should have started “presenting” from the time the first day was due: “I want to go to… because it’s…” Especially with this presentation, with each day being similar content but just new sites to visit/see, early mini-presentations could have built so much confidence.

In that communications class I mentioned above, whenever I introduced a presentation tip or method, I asked them to try it immediately. I’d show what it meant to introduce yourself and your speech with a curiosity-inspiring question instead of just announcing your topic, and then have them stand up and do it. After a while, they stopped being self-conscious about it. They got to know each other better. They knew what to do.

Put expectations on the rubric.

We’re language teachers. Our expectations are necessarily focused on the actual language produced in an assessment. But that doesn’t mean that we have no other expectations.

In my favorite iteration of my performance assessment rubric, my network helped me have an epiphany about this. Instead of including these non-language expectations in a language performance assessment grade, I gave them their own segment on the rubric, and yes, their own grade. Because language isn’t always just about the words you say; sometimes it’s also about how you deliver them.

I should have let these students know far ahead of time on a clear rubric: Introduce yourself and your topic. Speak from key-word notes. Give at least two reasons per site chosen. Conclude with an overall opinion or suggestion to the audience. Whatever the expectations, they needed to be clear, on the rubric, and shared early.

Play the long game.

Let’s be honest, as always. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and presentational speaking skills aren’t developed fast, either. At the end of my communications skills class, as the students got up to deliver their presentations, only one truly knocked it out of the park. That’s because she’s had more modeling and more practice. But everyone, even the kid who read every word on the one slide in his presentation, showed growth. The tips I’ve shared here won’t have sixth-graders ready to keynote a conference. But they’re a stone in the pillar, some steps up the path, a solid start to avoid my Spanish class’s epic presentation fail and foster even more skills that will help learners in so many areas of life.

It’s May, and you’ve got extra time on your hands. Perhaps the proficiency assessment is over, or the last unit went faster than expected. Maybe signing ceremonies or ring ceremonies or a horse race (yeah, I live in Louisville) is messing with the schedule and making it so one period of Level 2 has an extra class.

What do you do?

The answer is not Encanto.

You could always show a movie, but hitting play on a TL movie and sitting back to relax is one of the biggest wastes of class time for any student below Intermediate Mid, and even worse if you put on English subtitles. I’m sorry, it just is.

Let’s look at the extra time as a gift. This set of students has extra moments in which to get more input and interaction (what I’m calling I² these days). As always, you have a primary goal of comprehensibility and as it’s May, you have a secondary goal of please do not give me more work to do.

So, how about puppets?

I’ve always heard that kids and teens love to talk about themselves. I don’t know if it’s that times have changed so much or what, but for my crew, it doesn’t ring true. My learners decidedly don’t always like to talk about themselves. And frankly, sometimes pushing them to do so can put the whole language experience at risk. It can increase anxiety. It can bring up content and structures they’re not ready for. It can get your whole class into the weeds. Building relationships with kids to the point they trust you to help them is one thing; keeping a whole-class language-building activity from turning into an impromptu counseling session is entirely another. (Remember, you’re not the therapist in the room.)

I’ve got a solution for you, and it’s imaginative, anxiety-free (mostly, anyway), and builds proficiency. Read on.

Step 1: Build a puppet supply.

Over the years, I’ve collected quite a supply of finger puppets. I have the Christmas ones, the cheap animal ones, and even a fabulous Diego Rivera puppet I acquired, I think, at a PD session presented by the eminent Diego Ojeda. He’s magnetic. He hangs out on my dishwasher sometimes. (Rivera, not Ojeda.) We also use a quite special, whole-hand armadillo puppet that became our class mascot after my late father sent it to me (complete with a name and a baseball card, it’s a long story) in my first year teaching.

Large collections of finger puppets are ridiculously cheap and easy to get on Amazon. I believe this one is the one I carry around. In a pinch, you can of course use stuffies. If you haven’t started that collection yet (and you should), possibly another teacher has some you can use. You can also print some and glue them to craft sticks. Let your creativity loose, but don’t stress.

Step 2: Frame the presentation, by level.

You can do this in a number of ways, and all of them are extremely low (or no) prep. The key is to make it appropriate to the level you’re teaching.

What’s the topic?

To make this easy to do with spur-of-the-moment extra time, establish some topics to use. You might write topics on crafts sticks or on papers you put in a jar. You might decide you’ll just ask a student to open to a random chapter in a textbook, or even a chapter in a CI novel.

For lower novices, the topics will include basics like introducing myself, telling age, likes and dislikes, talking about my family, etc. As proficiency goes up, you might add talking about where I live, who my friends are, activities I do on the weekend.

Who’s talking, and how much?

What if you have elementary early novices who can’t say much yet? The easy answer is that you’ll be talking, using sentence frames. For example, you’ll hold up the puppet and greet kids, and expect a greeting back. You’ll frame it up with “My name is…” and invite kids to supply the name. In this way, they’re getting more comprehensible input without having to produce much target language. You can also give either/or answers for frames like “Today I want to… (eat pizza or buy a bicycle?).”

If learners are above that level, of course, just let them have at it. You can still do a demo at the beginning, and even intervene every other time, or less frequently, so they are getting more accurate input from you. Remember, large chunks of inaccurate input from classmates with low proficiency isn’t going to help anyone much.

Step 3: Increase engagement by setting a goal.

Of course, your goal here is to use extra class time wisely with a low- to no-prep activity that fosters proficiency. But will they pay attention, because remember, attention is the key to memory? Here are some suggested goals to set for them:

• Which puppet would they want to be friends with the most, and why?
• “Who” (the puppet, of course) gave the most interesting presentation?
• What five words do you remember from this one?
• Name one thing you have in common and one thing you don’t with this one.

What other goal-setting questions could you ask to keep their attention?

Your turn. Share your favorite tips, links, etc. for what to do with extra time that still keeps proficiency in mind. What’s your favorite class puppet/stuffy? What other topics would be great here?

Friends, buckle up for a Sara-Elizabeth post on fire.

I am so frustrated about the current narrative around teachers. To hear some talk, we’re all so terrible we’ve failed the children forever. To hear others, we’re all so good we deserve sainthood. We’ve heard how schools (and often families and society) often expect us to be therapists, drill sergeants, conflict resolution specialists, nutritionists, and experts in every subject, none of which we were trained to do. But it’s not just what our schools are asking us to do. It’s what we’re asking each other to do.

If you don’t feel like reading, well… try anyway. And you can scroll down for a pledge from me to re-commit to keeping ineffective, stressful distractions off my blog.

Are you tired yet? The professional publications, the online communities, the blog posts (yes, my blog posts!) give us an unending litany. Here’s how you should be using AI, and don’t forget to revolutionize your grading practices. You must incorporate social emotional learning into world language class because it will solve everything. And above all, don’t forget that you must make sure your students– all of them– see their skin shade, hairstyle, gender, family type, and sexual preference in all your curriculum materials. If those materials don’t exist, make your own. Because if the students don’t find their own true current today self in the materials, they will not be okay.

I’d like to offer a hypothesis that actually, they will.

Professional education organizations, especially national ones, are dominated by PhD  college professors. I’m not sure if they’re the ones with the time and motivation to participate at that “high” a level, but go to a national education conference and you will be inundated with every philosophy imaginable from consultants, supervisors, and university researchers.

Hanging out on Facebook? Join me there.

Remember that famous Ken Robinson TED Talk? You know, the most-watched one of all time, Do Schools Kill Creativity? He comments on this phenomenon. Here are some of the quotes pertinent here:

If you were to visit education as an alien and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top.

There’s something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.

Point taken, Sir Ken (who was a university professor, actually). When I come away from big conferences I often feel disembodied, living in my head and slightly to one side, convinced that I should be convinced that if I could just incorporate the right acronyms then my students would rise above a less than ideal life and live their true selves and become… university language professors.

Come now, let’s stop pretending 1) that kids can’t survive the crap in life without us and 2) they should aim to be nerds like us who can’t get enough degrees.  The fact is, college enrollment peaked in 2010 and there’s no evidence for more people being able to afford insane tuition costs to end up in crippling debt for an education that trains them to over-analyze everything and play the victim at all times.

You can do hard things. So can the kids in your room.

The fact is, generations who didn’t know anything about SEL or DEI or AI or even CI grew up and faced hard things and then built one of the most successful countries on earth. There has always been abuse in front of us, real anxiety, hunger, people fleeing war, and all the other things that confront you every day in the newspaper and in your classroom and make you feel like you could scream for the justice you cannot find.

Let me ask you this: what if, just what if, your classroom was a space where it wasn’t your job to make the unjust world behave, it wasn’t your job to convince children and young adults that they cannot learn unless they feel validated in everything they see and do– what if it was your job to just, well, teach?

One of my current students is homeless. His and his brother’s father lives in another state, their mother has custody, and her second husband told them to leave a few months ago. They’re caught in an incredibly difficult web. Do we have emotion check-ins in class and excuse him from the final presentation? No, we don’t. We applaud his presentation and encourage him to make his essay metaphor more prominent throughout. Do we discuss that they’re coming to my house to do their laundry and ask classmates to weigh in on their trauma? No, I accept the compliment on how much he likes my lattes and tell him they’re welcome anytime. Their mom, church, and counselors help them deal with the other adults in their lives who can’t get it together, but I’m not one of them, and that’s not my job. And they’re better off because I know the boundaries. Because someone in their life dares to act like crap happens, and you can still be okay, and you can still learn and get your work done.

Remember when college professors canceled finals during COVID for anyone who felt like their mental health couldn’t handle it? How many times in the last several years have we been told that because life gets hard, it’s okay to skip out on the commitments you’ve made, rather than just get it done and re-evaluate what commitments you can handle in the near future?

Maybe the real problem isn’t that life got too hard and you aren’t able to quite meet all your commitments. Maybe the real problem is that your field over-committed you. They’ve made it a commercial enterprise to convince you that your job is something more than “just” teaching.

Does anyone else feel like you’re staring at the emperor and he’s stark naked? Like we’ve been sold a pack of lies and we’re all afraid to say something, lest we be the only one and get buried by cancel culture?

It’s a funny thing about having a midlife crisis of career and health with not much to lose– you stop worrying so much about cancel culture. And so, you stiffen your spine and speak your mind.

Here’s my mind. There are often not enough work hours in the day for you to do the things that are your job. I’d like to encourage you to stop trying to do things that are not your job. Can I gently suggest that our learners would be better served if many of us spent more time improving our own TL proficiency and less time feeding our outrage addiction on social media and in online teacher communities?

After years of professional development adventures, I’ve identified this brief list of tempting professions that distract us from our real job: teaching language well.

Teacher, Not Entertainer

I’ve blogged about this quite a bit, so I’m not going to elaborate too much here. I just want to reassure you that your job is to teach, and not to entertain. I’ll reiterate (and you can follow this link to read the brief-ish post) that in the end, whether or not learners pay attention is entirely their own responsibility. Part of functioning in this world means buckling up and accomplishing something even when it’s not flashy, funny, amazing, amusing, or even fun.

Your job: Plan and present language input that is comprehensible in an environment that is reasonably pleasant.

Their job: Listen, watch, and try new things with the language, every day, without expecting class to be a constant SNL skit.

Teacher, Not Therapist

No one denies that there’s a mental health crisis in this country, but a growing number of unqualified voices are applying well-meaning but ineffective efforts to it. It’s become a cult phrase to throw around: Check on the kids, they are not okay. Watch this video, the boys are not okay. Look at this post, the girls are not okay. Do more of this, the students are not okay.

Any therapist worth her degree will tell you that you ought to help kids run from ruminating, not embrace it. What if instead of encouraging kids to focus on how not okay they are, we helped them see that they can do hard things? I do not mean to imply that it’s good to sweep actual trauma under the rug. What I do mean is that perhaps you are not the person to identify actual trauma, much less deal with it, especially in a society when people use the word “trauma” to describe seeing a dead animal on the road or being called a name they don’t like. I have friends who watched their family members get murdered by African warlords or tortured in a Nepali prison. I drive some boys to school who watched their mother, my friend, die a slow and excruciating death from breast cancer in her bed in their home.  I have become very careful about how I rate pain and throw around the word “trauma.” People who are actual experts are ready to caution you that you are not one (an expert, I mean), and that’s fine.

Your job: Plan and present comprehensible input that fosters learning and inspires real thought without demeaning people. Assign tasks and expect them to be done. Leverage the experts in your building to address issues outside your expertise.

Their job: Listen, watch, and think about how to use this new language to do the work that’s been assigned, because not doing it is not going to help the matter of whether there was enough breakfast this morning or the family pet ran away.

Teacher, Not Friend

In my undergraduate training, I was at a very strict school quite focused on traditional education. Education happened with kids following a strict dress code, seated in rows, led by the teacher. Accordingly, I was taught to dress and act 100% professionally, especially because I was so young (and looked younger). My first year teaching, I was 3 years older than my oldest student. I wore a blazer almost every day and never participated in blue-jean Fridays. And you know, it worked. My students knew that I cared about them at the same time I was not looking for new friends among them.

I was stymied the farther I got into the teaching community at being encouraged to act like things would go better if we were pals with our students. Just don’t. Your students can learn from you even if they don’t like you. They don’t have to like you. They have to respect you. You don’t have to like them. You can accept a compliment without telling them where you bought your earrings and for how much (they’re only asking about it for the distraction, anyway). Get your validation elsewhere. And for the love of all that’s holy, you don’t have to see them outside of school hours, not in your classroom, not in your home, not in your car. Just speaking in general terms, think of how many issues crossing those boundaries has caused. You can refer them to the school counselor. You should recommend they be honest with their parents, religious leaders, and friends. But none of those positions is your job.

Your students belong solidly in the realm of acquaintances in Robin Dunbar’s social network theory, at least until they graduate. I have a handful of students whose weddings and other events I have attended, and I follow them on social media. But while they were in my classroom, the teacher-student relationship was usually well-defined. When I strayed beyond that, I always ended up regretting it.

Your job: Plan and present comprehensible input and activities that encourage a pleasant environment. Earn and demand respect. Find your friends elsewhere.

Their job: Respect the work and expertise you have put into the class. Listen when others are talking. In a good year pass along a teacher appreciation gift, maybe even a senior photo if you’ve had them a long time and helped them a lot.

Teacher, Not Magician

When a new teacher learns about proficiency-based teaching, the natural question that arises is this:

What level can I reasonably expect for my students at the end of Level X?

If you ask this question on social media, you’ll get all kinds of answers. ACTFL cites the Foreign Service Institute‘s research and experience on how many class hours it takes to achieve “General Professional Proficiency” in a language. Depending on your language choice, they estimate this time as little as 600 class hours and as many as 2200 class hours.

To this and every other recommendation you see, you should ask some good questions: What is a “class hour?” Does it involve taking attendance or writing up a referral slip? Does it go up or down depending on class size? Is it more or less for a student who already knows 2 other languages? More or less for a student who is dyslexic, or always hungry, or bored, or wishes he were anywhere else but here?

Your teacher friends will tell you they have students at intermediate by the end of Level 2. Advanced by the end of high school. Novice High in the fourth grade. Again, ask good questions: what percentage of your students? What background did they have when they got to your class? My daughter scored Intermediate High on the AAPPL listening and speaking at the end of fifth grade in her dual immersion school. It would be easy to use her as a poster child to champion dual immersion and make you feel bad about your own elementary program. But she was only there for one year, and she’d heard Spanish spoken to her every day since she was born. Her proficiency, quite honestly, came from me, not from the immersion program.

In my upcoming ebook, I’ll help you ask questions that help you select a general proficiency goal for your specific learners. But you should know this: we can set goals all we want based on an ideal scenario, but you are not a magician. You cannot wave your input wand and have learners speaking in full-length conversations by the end of the first year. There’s no magic spell to compel attention. There’s no comprehensibility potion. Relax– that’s not your job.

Your job: Use what you know about second language learning and acquisition to set realistic expectations. Then, present comprehensible input and tasks designed to foster that proficiency. If you don’t know enough about it, keep learning. Be content with their progress, even if it’s not what Mr. Peacock is seeing from his eight learners at the school that costs $45,000 a year.

Their job: Listen and watch and trust that the teacher knows more about proficiency and language learning than they do, and trust the process. Accept the grades and feedback they earn based on the effort and attention they put into it.

Teacher, Not Victim

Are you familiar with the phrase “external locus of control”? It’s a psychology term that has to do with what you believe about cause and effect in your daily life. If you’re stuck in a mindset that the locus of the control is external, you believe that forces outside yourself determine outcomes.

In common everyday function, a person with external locus of control talks a lot about bad luck, karma, Murphy’s Law, and the like. A person who moves through life this way often feels like a victim. Some teachers’ unions and mainstream media are excellent at getting teachers into an external-locus-of-control mindset. They tell you you’re a victim. Society has turned against you, the administration is too demanding, the pay is not enough, the parents are obnoxiously meddling. It’s not you, it’s the weather, the season, the sports, the textbook or lack thereof, the voters, the legislature, the funding, your undergrad professor’s failure, the virus.

Any one of those things may be true in a given situation, but with an external locus of control, you just wallow as a helpless victim of such circumstances.

On the other hand, if you have an internal locus of control, you do something about your circumstances. You can influence your own journey. A person with this perspective believes that there’s no such thing as “fate,” and you are responsible for your own actions. You can take steps to improve a bad hand.

Be encouraged, dear teacher. You may feel stuck, but you probably aren’t. It’s likely within your power to change something about your lousy circumstances, even if it’s just your attitude, response, or expectations. Think about this. It will make a huge difference. People with a higher internal locus of control are more satisfied with their careers, among other positive effects.

This isn’t an either-or proposition. It’s a spectrum, and it’s something you can work on. You can choose to turn your locus of control around. Two years ago, my curriculum development job turned into something that I wasn’t willing to do. So I quit. Internal locus of control. But I’d been in that job for 11 years, and then I floated in time, wondering who I even was now, waiting for some even more amazing opportunity to magically appear. When it didn’t, I just floated lower. External locus of control. Eventually, I decided to get up and do something, fill out some paperwork, return to ACTFL, start getting back in the classroom from time to time as a substitute. Internal locus of control.

It’s possible your job isn’t what you expected, or it was, and then it turned ugly. You have the power to make your job more like what you want it to be. Try it.

Your job: Be ready to put in an honest day’s work for the pay that you were promised. If it’s not enough, or your administration is making your life hell with its lack of support, then quit, or advocate for yourself and realistic job/wage expectations through your faculty meetings, union, and/or legislative advocacy.

Their job: Listen and watch and do the tasks assigned without making your life hell, because no one pays you enough for that.

Teacher, focus

I hope this post is both encouraging and challenging. I hope it nudges you that if you’re on TikTok for 2 hours a day, you might not be doing your job. That if you think belonging to ACTFL’s new DEI community is a better use of your time than getting better at your target language, you might not be doing your job. That if you suspected all along that the push to be an entertainer, therapist, magician, friend, and/or victim was pushing you beyond the limits of your job, you were right.

I may burn bridges with this post, but please know that I have the best intentions for our profession. We’re hemorrhaging students and the teacher supply isn’t that high either. Something about our focus is off.

My point is simply that it’s okay to show kids they can have a good day and learn some Spanish. It’s okay to be the kind but firm adult in the room, who doesn’t feed kids’ worst feelings about themselves and the world. If I’ve offended you here, please know that I always appreciate respectful dialogue and I’m more than willing to explain further, re-evaluate, and converse. But also, if you find this message unforgivably offensive, your avoiding my corner of the internet is probably better for the both of us. We’ll both be fine. I promise.

If, on the other hand, you appreciate my honesty, help, and materials, I’d love for you to stick around. Because now that you’ve made it all the way through this post to the end, I’d like to recommit to something for you. I’m excited to get back to the basics on my blog, and help you do your actual job. From now on, look here for posts that help you do the things I’ve described above as what I see as a language teacher’s job, and nothing else. If you spot something that distracts from or adds to your job, call me out on it. My skin is getting thicker all the time.

1. A really fabulous bag ($$$)

I still think Artifact is one of the best bag makers out there, but on a writing trip to St. Simon’s Island last year, I walked into a boutique shop and saw a computer bag I fell in love with immediately. Literally, I went back out to the car and got my laptop and tried it to make sure it would fit just right. It cost a pretty penny and I thought long and hard about it, but I’m so glad I didn’t walk away and leave it there. It’s from a company called Consuela, and they have a ton of amazing bags to choose from. Mine is the Sally Sling (expensive – I warned you). I love that there are three ways to carry it, I love the craftsmanship, I love that the company was founded by an artist based in Texas.

2. Amazing soap ($)

I remember as a kid seeing commercials about how soap would “dry out your skin,” and I was convinced that I needed lots of cleansing products, anything that wasn’t soap. Surprisingly, the whole dry-skin thing doesn’t have to be true. One way I’ve handled inflation in our budget is to replace no fewer than 4 shower products with nice soap, and artisan, sweet-smelling soap is one of the top items on my gift idea list. My kids know I specifically want Buff City Soap and a loofah that holds it. I’m telling you, once you’ve bathed with (or washed your clothes in) Narcissist you’ll have trouble settling for anything else. (But also, have you seen esponjabon? It’s not above Buff City for me, but I can confirm it’s an interesting experience!)

3. Tea / infuser ($)

If you’ve not been introduced to the flavorful, meditative world of full-leaf tea, let me help. I love my Grosche tea infuser that steeps my full-leaf tea and then drains the tea into my mug simply by setting it on top of the mug. A bit different: I recently gave my tea-obsessed seminary friend this travel set that she could take with her for a day full of classes. As for tea, I highly recommend the varieties at Full Leaf Tea Co.; given my fight with multiple sclerosis, I’m partial to Organic Brain Health, because while Remember (Lisa Genova) told me the supposed benefits of ginkgo for brain health have been debunked, ashwagandha and turmeric have been key components in my fight to stay off of immunomodulating medication.

4. Whimsy for your glasses ($$)

Those of us getting up in middle age know that it’s only a matter of time before most of us need what my friends call “cheaters” – the reading glasses stashed in various places in my home. A teacher who occasionally needs a little help to see those students’ presentational writing will love this bear glasses holder. There are lots of variations on this idea- look it up! We got one for my husband to use for his glasses at bedtime, and it really is just so cute.

5. Travel tracker ($$)

As a demographic, teachers, and especially language teachers, often love to get around. I’m a sucker for anything that helps me document and remember my wanderings, like a photo travel map of the US, or a scratch-off countries-I’ve-visited map/frame.

6. Feed the birds ($/$$)

One of my COVID hobbies is birds – until the lockdowns, I never paid much attention. Now I have binoculars, feeders, a life list journal, field guides- I love all things bird! Feeders need constant refilling and seed isn’t cheap, especially my favorite- no-waste bird seed (it doesn’t end up with shells everywhere and seeds that sprout in my flowerbeds). Want to pair it with a feeder? Good idea! You could go with something cute or my preference, anything squirrel-proof. (Ugh, squirrels.)

7. Coffee & cookies ($/$$)

Finally, almost every teacher I know is a big coffee drinker, and you can’t go wrong with some great coffee beans. Consider adding a quality coffee grinder. Even better, pair the coffee with a local treat, or a not-so-local one. One evening at the recent ACTFL convention, some friends and I stopped by the Levain bakery and oh wow, what a cookie, and what a bag of coffee. Turns out you can order that.

There you have it, my updated recommendations for teacher gifts! What’s on your list this year? Everything you share could be a new idea for someone else!

Earlier this year, I blogged about the lessons we can learn from Lisa Genova‘s book Remember. Check out that blog post for a more in-depth look at the content of the book. I mentioned there that my dear colleague and friend Haylee Ziegler were going to present this topic at ACTFL ’23. Our session was called Teaching on TL Memory Lane, and it was a great time with great participants!

The purpose of this blog post is to serve as a sort of handout to our participants as well as those who couldn’t attend. (Yes! The promised slides are below!) We also want to share some suggestions that came up in our session.

Briefly, let me outline the content and add some highlights.

1. How you make a memory

Key takeaway: The number one thing you can do to improve your memory is pay attention. The problem is that attention is insufficient. It’s just a gateway to your working memory, where you keep spoken words about 15-30 seconds before getting rid of them. In order to make a memory, your brain has to believe that something about this moment is worth keeping.

Essentially, your brain follows two steps to make a memory. First, you perceive something with your senses. Then, your brain changes. How? Through the four steps to making a memory:

1. encoding (translating input to neurological information)
2. consolidation (linking pieces of input, like how the car sounded, plus the color of it, plus the person driving, plus the words she shouted, like weaving a tapestry)
3. storage (formatting the information to be “persistently maintained”)
4. retrieval (activating connections to remember them, which cements the memory further)

2. Types of memory

There are three types of memory:

1. Semantic memory is data unattached to a specific life event.
2. Episodic memory is personal and always about the past.
   Improve it by asking learners to look up from devices, shake up the routine, and write something down.
   Hot take: The deskless classroom is not necessarily supporting learner memory. Consider a rule from my classroom: Keep your composition notebook close, and if I write it, you have to write it.
3. Motor memory is how you know how to do things, like ride a bike.
   It’s remarkably stable and doesn’t degrade with age.
   Hot take: Requiring output and addressing pronunciation problems is a solid memory strategy. Unless the learner brain trains the muscles in the mouth and face to form the words, off-target pronunciation can impede comprehensibility.

3. The Map to Memory Lane

Genova’s book identifies five features of very strong memories that we suggest you incorporate in your input strategies and general class environment:

1. Repetition
   Hot take: It is possible to tell if a learner is putting in effort.
   Hot take: Language learning is not actually easy. The brain is working hard during the whole process.
   Incorporate repetition in your class by a) recycling themes, structures, and vocabulary across units; b) asking for retrieval after learners have slept (sleep is essential for the brain to encode memory) and c) use strategies like retrieval grids (see the book Make It Stick) and flashcards.
   Hot take: Flashcards have value. Old school isn’t always bad!
   Hot take: Language class doesn’t provide enough time for enough repetition for broad acquisition. Be content with deeper memory of few words and structures, inspire learners to keep going, and be encouraged that if they leave language learning aside and pick it up again later, the trace memories left in the brain will make it easier the next time around.
2. Meaning
   Wrap meaning around everything in order to foster better memory. You’ll struggle to remember there’s a Rutgers basketball player named Baker (I mean, unless you just really love Rutgers) but if I introduce you to a baker named Baker, suddenly you’ve connected the name to an outfit, smells, a taste – and a year from now you’ll be like, “Oh yeah! That’s the baker who was actually NAMED Baker!” Meaningful connections.
   Use stories, sounds (like the “dr” sound in taladro helps my construction supervisor student recall that it means “drill”), and caring- help students care about the content. Suggestions for helping them care include tailoring content, offering student choice (check out my post on homework choice options), and ask for opinions regularly- learners can get passionate about their opinions on many topics!
   Hot take: Memorizing translations of target language words does not create deep neural connections favorable for memory retrieval.
   
3. Emotion
   You remember where you were when 9/11 happened or when schools shut down for COVID because emotion sears memory into your brain. These are called “flashbulb” memories. Evoke emotion using class polling, supporting input with highly engaging and dramatic video clips, incorporating Socratic seminar discussions, and playing more games (fun!).
4. Novelty
5. Surprise
   They’re not the same- what’s novel is not always surprising- but they’re close enough that we put them together.
   Hot take: Connecting input to craziness is a solid memory strategy. So keep telling those crazy stories!

We created a mnemonic character, Jack the mean clown, to help you remember these five elements:

There you have it- meaning, surprise, novelty, emotion, repetition.

We asked participants to take a look at three meaningful but forgettable tasks typical in a world language classroom, and suggest ways they could add these elements to the task. Tasks included comparing your school schedule to that of a classmate, creating a Pizza Hut menu in the target language, or describing an animal at risk in the rainforest. We didn’t have a lot of time for discussion and sharing, but a great suggestion was to make the menu like a Fear Factor menu, including such delicacies as crickets on the pizza.

We ended with three takeaways of things you could do next week to put this information into practice (besides reading Genova’s book!):

1. Write: Have learners write information down during an activity.
2. Retrieve: Make an exit ticket or other retrieval practice about information several days or weeks old, not what was learned that day.
3. Refute: Spark a debate, create a mnemonic character, or otherwise connect content with emotion and surprise.

On the topic of that last suggestion, by mnemonic character I mean an image that helps learners remember vocabulary and/or structures. I have long been on a slow journey to develop proficiency in Russian, and I recently started creating my own mnemonic image each week to help me learn 4-5 new words. This week, my mnemonic image is a cow named Rover with a noose around his neck. He’s standing on the road to Brementown, and he’s holding an empty bowl- the bowl had time in it, but it’s empty now, because he needs more time (I mean, there’s a noose around his neck). My memory sentence is “Корова говорит: «Мне нужно больше времени».” It sounds like this: Korova govorit: «Mne nuzhno bol’she vremeni». Get it? Cow-rover (govorit – a word I already know) noose – bowl – Bremen. It means, “The cow says, ‘I need more time.’”

And of course, the promised slides.

Last weekend, the annual conference of the Kentucky World Language Association returned to Lexington, Kentucky. Last year, KWLA was my first conference since I paused blogging while I wrapped my mind around a diagnosis of MS. I embraced friends, sat quietly, absorbed the learning– but I didn’t present. This year, I presented a session for the first time since ACTFL ’19. I hope all attendees learned a lot as I had a blast publicly nerding out on language acquisition research and the brain. I promised those present that I would post my session here on the blog. So, here it is.

Where next?
You can catch me at ACTFL ’23 presenting more brain research in the session Teaching on TL Memory Lane Haylee Zieglerwith my amiga .

i+1 and the 5 C’s: Clarify, Amplify, Apply

In keeping with a conference theme focused on the ACTFL World Readiness Standards (known as the 5 C’s), my session attempted to help teachers see how the concept of i+1 could help them better prepare learners to meet the communication and comparisons standards, in particular. First, though, I knew that teachers don’t understand what i+1 is, so we needed to clarify before we could apply.

How we got here, and where we got confused

I’ve known for a long time that teachers don’t understand interlanguage. Years ago some fellow #langchat teachers and I had a conversation about it on Twitter and I was truly stunned at how much we’d made i+1 into what we wanted it to be. Those entrenched and successful in the Teaching with Comprehensible Input (TCI) / TPRS realm were convinced that the i was the input, and the +1 was input that was a little past the learner’s comprehension.

Don’t think that I had it all right, either, though. I did study i+1 in grad school, but then I became so enamored of TCI strategies and further brain research and thoughts like the Goldilocks corollary that I started talking about the +1 as being effort involved. (That is actually explicitly contrary to what is suggested in the linked article, by the way– but I think my view is more neurologically sound.) See, what’s called desirable difficulty in learning actually results in deeper learning and better memory encoding. So it made sense to me to start publicly advocating for what I call Goldilocks input. I’ll blog more about it soon, but basically, I advise teachers to strive for input that learners can understand but it takes effort to do so (not too hard, not too easy).

I digress. Because we all did. We all abandoned what i+1 actually meant. I knew it, but I didn’t know how deep it went. When I polled it on Twitter, 77% of respondents said the i stood for input. When I polled my session participants, 100% said it was input– and half the room had never heard of i+1 to begin with. My SLA research nerd heart was broken!

So let me take you back. The i stands for interlanguage. Some history will help:

• 1972– Larry Selinker publishes an article coining the word interlanguage. It refers to the systematic language a learner uses at any point on his/her individual journey. The article spurs a whole lot of helpful discussion and research.
• 1977– Stephen Krashen further upends the language acquisition field by proposing his five hypotheses, including the input hypothesis, which states that learners progress when they receive input at the level of i+1, where the i is their current state of interlanguage, and +1 is the next point in the journey.
• 1980’s– Blaine Ray’s TPRS methods resonate with teachers and spark a revolution that will become…
• 2000s– Teaching with Comprehensible Input (TCI) becomes a clarified set of strategies teachers use to deliver comprehensible input to learners.

To help teachers begin to see how this applies to lessons, we discussed a couple of clarifying principles.

Clarifying Principles

1. Interlanguage is about output.

We can’t take Selinker’s term and then make it about input. Furthermore, it’s a disservice to everyone who loves the input hypothesis and comprehensible input in general to suggest the +1 refers to anything that’s not comprehended. Learners don’t acquire language that is not comprehended. Period.

So, then, let’s go back to Selinker. In his definition he made it about their output: it’s “based on the observable output” and the “learner’s attempted production.”

To apply i+1, you must know that interlanguage describes output.

2. Effective lessons follow the interlanguage journey.

Here I had to insert some more language acquisition theory jargon, including processability theory, the inner syllabus, the structural syllabus, and the learnability problem. Simply stated, though, putting all of those together, you end up with this theory:

• The learner brain acquires language in a certain order (processability theory);
• that order works (inner/learner syllabus),
• and if you try to hijack it with your own plan (structural syllabus),
• the brain won’t learn what it’s not ready for (learnability problem).

That brings up the key question to apply this in the classroom then, right? If effective lessons follow the interlanguage journey, how do I know what’s next on that journey? So, to start discussing that answer, I led participants through how second language acquisition researchers have proposed to draw the map, and then how researchers through first language acquisition have done it. You can see my suggested progression on slide 24 in the presentation, starting with one-word responses and moving through to questioning:

Designing i+1 Lessons

I offered the following advice for how to design lessons through an i+1 lens, focusing on the communication and comparisons standards:

1. Pick something comprehensible, and make it comprehended.
2. Ask for output you can reasonably expect here in the journey.
3. Expect embrace the errors that naturally come.
   (I originally said expect, but in the session, I encouraged teachers to enjoy the errors that show a learner is progressing along the interlanguage spectrum.)

We went through several examples I called the “walk of shame” of language learning exercises asking for communication far beyond the learner’s current interlanguage. Click the slides to see more, but I’ll offer this one here. It’s asking for case endings on the Russian word for fish, to make it work in the sentence “I eat fish.”

Which of these options means “fish”? They all do. Am I ready at my spot in the Russian journey to know which case to choose for fish when I’m eating it as opposed to when it’s on the table? No. I am not. Especially when Duolingo is purporting to use natural input and doesn’t explain case, and the only reason I know what they’re asking for is that I’m a linguist, for heaven’s sake, and I know Russian has case and what case is.

I left participants with some guiding questions for developing effective i+1 lessons:

1. What can you do that is purely passive?
2. What tasks expect one-word output?
3. What task expects two-word output where one word acts on the other?
4. What multiword tasks come next?
5. What’s the end goal (shooting for emergent fluency)?

And now, the resources.

Ready for some resources?

Here are the slides, including 2 lesson samples and application of this with tasks under Communication and Comparisons that you can ask for, with brief additional ideas for the other 3 C’s.

Here is the handout.

And now the end of every session… any questions? Comments?

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My next announcement involves travel itineraries– eventually, for every Spanish-speaking country. My original three itinerary products are moving from TPT to be exclusively available on my site (and spoiler alert, so am I). I want to introduce you to the product, but what I really want to do in this post is to help you discover travel reviews as a source of public domain, comprehensible authentic language for your learners. Let’s discuss: why travel reviews, and what to do with them?

Travel reviews = input gold mine

I discovered how useful TripAdvisor’s Spanish-language reviews were several years ago. It might have been in the year of the death of my creativity when we worked on building our own site of reviews for our city. (See what the kids in Washington, Iowa did with that project!) In any case, it didn’t take me long to realize how useful they were.

1. They’re free.

Inflation’s up, real wages are crashing, and we’re all tightening our budgets. Right now I’m having to pick and document my grocery purchases like I did when my first daughter was born and my husband and I were both working part-time. Who can pass up something free when it comes along? Great news! Spanish-speakers around the world are busily creating free content for you by reviewing their favorite tourist spots every day.

2. They’re public domain.

Some people have learned this the hard way. Some haven’t learned it at all, unfortunately. The rough truth of the internet is that when you publish something for all the world to see (or, to be honest, have a breakdown in public), you’ve relinquished your right to privacy on that content. In certain aspects, you’ve relinquished any right you have to the content itself.

On TripAdvisor, this is a good thing. TripAdvisor holds copyright on their own content, but in scouring all their terms of service, I didn’t find any legal issue with using (and adapting) the content found in reviews. If you know what a stickler I am for copyright violation, you are cheering hurra with me!

In short, you can pretty much do what you want with travel reviews.

3. They’re made to be comprehensible input.

The shortest review on the first page of the Museo Frida Kahlo is 22 words:

Un lugar bellísimo y lleno de historia, imperdible en Coyoacán. Haz tu reservación porque si no es bastante difícil asegurar la entrada!

The longest is 112 words. Sure, some contain phrases like “Sin embargo uno es libre de bajarse en cualquier parada,“ but it’s so easy to find text that’s short, clear, and repetitive, like “definitivamente una gran experiencia.”

You may see a phrase like this:

El personal ha sido muy amable y ha tenido una actitud fantástica.

and you think “ha sido, that’s comprehensible, really?” But- take a closer look. If a learner knows the novice person descriptor amable, the whole sentence is really evident, as far as what it means. As a huge bonus, this sort of exercise can help students face text they may not fully understand with the confidence that they may still get not only something from it, but the actual main idea.

4. They’re truly authentic.

These are Spanish speakers writing for Spanish speakers. They don’t have you and your learners in mind at all. They’ll help you learn some slang, some abbreviations, regional variations, and how to navigate lack of punctuation. You can’t avoid ha sido, but you can learn to navigate it when it’s there.

A couple of gems from that same first page of reviews on the Frida Kahlo museum:

todo su talento wao

en definitiva hizo q le diéramos dinero, tirándoselo x la ventana del pasajero

And don’t negate the magic that can happen when kids are reading real opinions about real places they’ve never heard of. It’s amazing the places you’ll discover together!

So, choose a city, choose a site of interest, perhaps an amusement park, a resort hotel, a street fair, a restaurant. Click on the reviews, and then change the language to Spanish. Find something that will engage and push your learners. Don’t be afraid to cut incomprehensible pieces or combine reviews to make a longer text that offers more language, but I encourage you not to mess with the language too much. If you do, it’s no longer authentic. For sure there are totally incomprehensible reviews in the mix – skip them and keep going. You’ll find some gold in there, I’m sure of it!

Travel itinerary = all modes + high interest

When you combine reviews into a travel itinerary the way I have in my new itinerary downloads, you’re taking an authentic resource and making into so much more than interpretive reading.

DISCOVER AND PURCHASE A MUSICUENTOS TRIP ITINERARY

Let me give you an overview of how my trip itinerary activities work.

1.Explore multiple cities, and multiple sites in each.

For most of these itineraries, there are four major cities/areas in each. In Mexico, learners explore San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, CDMX, and Mérida.

Within each city, there are three categories of places. It might be a restaurant, a nature excursion, and a museum. Or it might be a beach, a cathedral, and a hotel.

2. Side-by-side reviews ask for a choice.

Learners will choose which location they will visit based on the review. For example, they read reviews on two different museums in Bogotá, and based on the review, choose which museum to visit.

3. After the choice, give a reason.

In the document, learners write their choice and defend it using reasons from the review. This adds a presentational writing task.

As they work through the reviews, consider adding interpersonal tasks. For example, start by asking kids to stand here if you chose this museum, stand there if you chose the other. Then, ask for simple reasons. Model questions and answers about reasons and changing one’s mind. Finally, give learners an opportunity to convince someone who chose the other museum to change her/his mind.

4. Front-load (& follow up) using your favorite strategies.

Every itinerary resource includes a list of useful/new vocabulary that will appear in the reviews. Often, these words appear multiple times (think how much you might see ambiente or caro). Front-load the activity by using a variety of strategies to introduce the vocabulary. The list at the beginning is in Spanish only, but there’s a glossary with translations at the end.

If you teach with storytelling, consider taking a day per city and telling a story in which you place a character in the city and the character finds him/herself in funny situations choosing one place over the other. In this way, students will be primed to read the reviews about the actual place and choose.

You can also show or ask students to watch at home a video on the place(s). One of my favorite resources is “eating in X place with only Y amount of money.” These are great!

Also, asking students to present their choices and reasons to a small group or the whole class, especially if they can only use a card with key words, adds an element of presentational speaking.

4. Pair with a country focus or comprehensible reader.

I started making these for broad use to accompany learner novels we were reading in class. Use an itinerary as a culminating project for a unit on Costa Rica, or a learner novel set in Colombia such as Peter va a Colombia. Consider assigning the preliminary plans and each day’s choices to prescribed dates and having learners present their itineraries as a unit-end or semester-end project. Honestly, doing the whole thing at once is a bit of overkill on the same skills; it’ll be a lot more engaging and useful if you spread it out a bit.

5. Use as anything from a sub plan to a unit assessment.

As I mentioned, you can stagger the activities over a unit of just about any length. It’s also a great option for a sudden sub plan.

Because it lends itself to all the modes, if you’re making a unit out of this specific country and the travel / opinion vocabulary it contains, the itinerary makes a really good unit assessment. You can do three days together as a class activity and then give the fourth day as your assessment. Don’t forget to ask for an interpretive task (negotiate agreement on which one to use and why) and a presentational task (present your itinerary including reasons) to add to the reading (and you could throw in a video task in there for fun, too).

When time and creativity fail, I’ve really appreciated the authentic, public-domain, high-interest material that’s there for the taking in travel reviews. It’s saved me a lot of work. Hope over to the Travel Itinerary Shop and let me save you some work, too.

Can I help with the clarity?

As we start yet another school year, let me offer a few words on three lies every language teacher should stop believing this year.

1. Lie: Say something new.
Truth: Say something real.

It’s almost conference season. I’m headed to the Kentucky conference to present on “i+1 and the Five C’s” in September (and yes, I will blog on this). Then, in November I’ll head to Chicago with my Ohio friend Haylee for ACTFL. We’re presenting “Teaching on TL Memory Lane,” a session on memory research and how it should affect our curriculum and lesson planning.

Yes, our session was accepted to ACTL (and last year it wasn’t) and I can tell you mainly why – conferences, especially the big, competitive ones, are looking for teachers to say something new. I get it, I really do, but it perpetuates this deceptive sense that if you don’t have something new to say, you don’t have anything valuable to say.

Really, I don’t know anyone who would outright say that. But between the conference sessions, the proliferation of resources, and the broad, loud, talented field of world language consultants out there, it can get intimidating. We’ve put people on a pedestal because they said something new to us, and we’ve let it silence us because we feel we can’t do the same.

You know I’d love to meet you on Twitter, or X, or whatever they’re calling it these days. I’d love for you to start a blog because it’s an amazing way to publicly talk through all the things you’re learning, as well as the problems that are challenging you. If you’ve been held back from doing these things because you think you don’t have something to “add” to the conversation, you’ve bought the lie that you have to say something new or stay quiet.

My dear teacher, new teacher, seasoned teacher, tired teacher, ready-to-retire teacher, energizer bunny teacher – don’t worry about saying something new. Just say something real. To your students, to yourself, to us.

2. Lie: Your classroom exists primarily to show to other teachers.
Truth: The hearts in your seats matter; the hearts on your posts do not.

It’s that time of year when social media is going to ramp up with posts of teachers’ Target deals haul, fabulous bulletin boards, first-day outfits.

Instagram is lying to us. We know it. And we still buy this lie, that our classroom, even our clothing, is not quite enough unless we can broadcast it to the world and get enough hearts, enough thumbs-up, enough comments praising our fashion and shopping strategies.

If you found great stuff at Dollar Tree, that’s great. If you are still loving the thing that was the big thing five years ago and isn’t “Insta-worthy,” that’s even better – look at the money you’re saving. If you don’t spend a cent on a fancy TPT bulletin board setup and instead staple up some authentic resources from a trip to the Hispanic foods store, step back and admire it! Can I encourage you this year to focus more on the hearts in your classroom than the hearts on social media posts about it?

3. Lie: You’re failing if they’re not entertained.
Truth:  Be pleasant and kind, and that’s enough.

Spanish teacher-author A.C. Quintero said this first and better in a recent absolutely dynamite post, so I’ll start by linking it here. It rang so true; I was reminded how much we buy the lie that ends up “privileging entertainment over education” and I knew I had to include it here.

Really, go read her post.

If you’ve been anywhere on the conference circuit, you’ve seen some really entertaining teacher-trainers. Some of the best TPRS teacher-trainers are so much fun to watch. They’re high-energy, they’re creative, and they’re effective. If you’re not careful, you’ll come away thinking that you have to dial up the entertainment factor or your learners will not be acquiring language. But don’t let yourself believe this lie! You can’t let someone else’s God-given personality dictate how you present input to your learners. You’re the person in front of them every day, not that trainer.

One of the most highly respected TPRS trainers, Donna Tatum-Johns, lives and teaches in the city where I live. She’s a classy, down-to-earth, effective realist of a teacher. Something she has said has stuck with me over the years: your job is to make your classroom pleasant, not fun. Fun and pleasant are not the same thing.

Yes, learners have to pay attention in order to acquire language. But in the end, whether or not they pay attention is entirely their own responsibility. Do not take the responsibility for their attention; that’s a soul-sucking lie that will defeat you. If you stand up in front of them and present and guide with kindness and a pleasant atmosphere, that’s enough. Feeding the dopamine hit of constant entertainment may seem to work, and it may get you points with families and administrators, but in the end, it’s sending our education system down a dangerous road. One might say we’re amusing ourselves to death.

Have a great year, teacher! Truth be told, it’ll be even greater if you can reject the deception swirling around us and believe that you can say what’s real even if it’s not new, focus on the real hearts in your real learners instead of Insta-approval, and be content to be kind instead of lamenting that you can’t compete with Taylor Swift and Tik Tok.