July 3rd, 2010
The field of education has been pushing lifelong learning for years, and there’s still no place like home for cultivating an attitude of ongoing curiosity and exploration. Education is done best when students go on learning beyond class time, beyond the academic year, and beyond graduation. As elective courses and nonrequired activities are cut from public and private schools, home is more important than ever.
Home is where everyone should grow up with an attitude of lifelong learning. Families can make language-learning a habit around the house, instead of leaving it all up to the school down the street.
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June 19th, 2010
I took a 60-minute flight in a hot air balloon two days ago. It was a dream ride from the start. I had one person videotaping from below, and I videotaped from the basket. People waved as I floated over their neighborhoods. I saw houses, trees, grass, bicycles, cars, roads, schools, parking lots, swimming pools, people old and young, animals, and a big round earth and sky. A group of kids 11 to 15 years of age called to us, “Can you hear us?” I said, “Yes,” and they broke into screams as though they had connected with a lost world.
The balloon ride will become a series of video lessons using ordinary vocabulary as seen from an un-ordinary perspective. The series will appear in our third batch of 100+ ten-minute video lessons for homes and schools.
Tags: context, Feature Stories
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June 8th, 2010
Making standards meaningful in the classroom is possible if you have plenty of time for mastery.
Some people say standards are dumbed down. Maybe they mean mastery is dumbed down. Mastery takes lots of time, and the regular school schedule is more inflexible than ever.
Max and Max Spanish videos are made with this in mind. We get very strong, positive feedback from schools who understand that we are interested in real schedules, not theoretical ones. The only way to look at language standards in most K-8 situations is across the years, not year by year.
It’s smart to see them that way, because the daily school schedule rarely aligns with the standards.
Tags: Academia
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June 2nd, 2010
Pennsylvanians talk with a wide variety of accent. As I was exiting a toll road in that state a few days ago, the woman in the toll booth greeted me, and I asked her where she was from. I meant what part of Australia. I have been planning a trip to that continent to collect fun recordings of the way people there speak English. That trip is now canceled. The Australian in the toll booth told me she is a native Pennsylvanian and lives a mile or so down the road. I just could not believe my ears. However, I noticed other Pennsylvanian accents several months ago that are strange to my ear, not to mention Dutch and its influences.
I’m going to miss the trip I never made to Australia.
Tags: Speaking
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May 21st, 2010
Today I begin interviewing an African-American man who gives himself away. He teaches people to fly big radio-controlled planes. He says he was married to the greatest wife in the world…until she died six years ago. His daddy died in the 1970s, his momma died two years ago. He retired early to take care of her for 12 years. I said it must have been very hard to care for a mother with Alzheimer’s Disease, losing her a little more each month. He doesn’t see it that way at all. He says it was a blessing to return a small part of the favor she had done him during his lifetime. He said, “I look at it as returning a dime on the dollar she gave me.”
Tim is one of many interesting men and women I introduce to people who would otherwise never know them. Tim’s Toys will be a two- or three-part feature series teaching Spanish and wholesome values to students who have been through the first two batches of our video lessons. Students will be glad to meet Tim.
Tags: Feature Stories
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May 5th, 2010
A Mexican entrepreneur who attended one of the cultural sessions I conduct for small businesses said, “We adopt Cinco de Mayo when we come here.” She does not celebrate it in her homeland. She never saw it celebrated in Mexico.
Another Mexican gave an extended amount of time during her Spanish radio program last year to wonder out loud how people in this country have come to make such a big deal of Cinco de Mayo. “You go around to the cities of Mexico and nobody’s celebrating it,” she said. “It’s incredible, it’s just incredible how the people here in the U.S. make such a big deal of it!”
Only a few minutes ago I received an email telling me about a local Mexican-American woman who had to calm down a friend who wanted to decorate the woman’s car in a Cinco de Mayo theme. The woman told her friend, “It’s not even a holiday.”
Schools in the U.S. continue to think Cinco de Mayo represents a significant part of Hispanic tradition and history. The day is not on Mexico’s list of national holidays. In fact, all the hoopla here confuses a lot of Mexicans and other Hispanics, who mistake it for Mexico’s day of independence from Spain. Mexicans are forever telling fellow Mexicans in the U.S. that Cinco de Mayo is NOT their independence day. (The town of Puebla, Mexico, where the people initially overwhelmed the invading French, still celebrates May 5.)
There is nothing wrong with celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It’s just remarkable that May 5 is given the priority it has in our schools. This is what I tell my students: If you miss on something like this, imagine how much more you don’t know about our neighbors to the south.
Tags: fiestas
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April 29th, 2010
Most people have a hard time sorting through claims about great, new methods that teach language the natural way. Companies and people who make the claims don’t understand how learning happens. We learn our first language by hearing, seeing, doing. That is natural. We learn later language by hearing, seeing, doing–if in fact we learn it naturally. Academic language lessons are not so natural, because they are full of rules, descriptions and penalties that don’t correspond too well with daily communication.
There is no ground-breaking method for learning language in a natural way. It’s always a natural thing for human beings to learn language at any age they desire. We are tailor-made for it, and we bring different skills and knowledge to it as we progress through life.
Here’s the natural way: you either make time to hear, see and do (mainly with other humans)–or you don’t. You either make hear-see-do the main thing–or you don’t. You either go natural, or you don’t.
This always requires patience and a willingness to let exposure to the language accumulate to a great quantity.
Tags: Academia, learning like children
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April 16th, 2010
I was on a plane out of state to collect material for video lessons. A woman asked if I could do her a favor and find an internet connection for her computer. No connection was available, as it turned out, and I’m glad because we started talking and I found that she teaches Spanish at a local university. She said everything that I like to say. About how language is taught in school. She’s disgusted with the overly academic approach to modern language. She said what I say, and it was so nice to hear it from her. What she and some of her colleagues want is to see their students leave with practical competence that justifies all the coursework. Something besides an A. Like I’ve said elsewhere more than once, almost every single school official I talk to about language tells me, “I took years of language in high school and college, and I can’t speak a word of it.”
At some point this needs to get through everyone’s head and into the brain. We learn useful language by being exposed to it over and over and over, and using it along the way without the pressure of upcoming tests. Language instruction needs lots of room for a climate of use, motivating the learning beyond class time.
Tags: Academia
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April 4th, 2010
Feedback on our K-8 Spanish video lessons is now equal to the feedback I got when I taught in the classroom. In short, people appreciate the (1) personalness, (2) the wide variety of techniques and content, and (3) the fact that students are using the language outside the classroom. This is a significant result, partly because it proves what some people did not think was possible on the K-8 level.
The first year of developing the videos was sometimes rugged, and with lots of embarrassing mistakes that occur when your attention is strewn across new software and hardware. Half the lessons needed major revision.
There’s no question that much of what I do in the videos is way beyond what I was able to do on site. The videos provide many, many field trips to people and events that I was unable to access before, and because the lessons are in digital form, all of them can be repeated and scheduled as the users please. I used to dream about having such a resource. Now I spend my time developing and expanding it for the benefit of anyone who looks long enough to realize what it can do. This project is a matter of following the principles of learning and of educational media design.
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March 29th, 2010
My family uses many languages, but all of us agree that Spanish has an advantage in this country that can’t be argued. It used to be that people had to leave the U.S. in order to be near the people who spoke and lived a language taught in the schools. You pretty much still have to do that with most languages, but Spanish-speakers abound, and you have to be asleep to miss the opportunity that surrounds the student of Spanish. While foreign language instruction becomes rarer and rarer in elementary schools, people who study Spanish on their own can still depend on a handy context for practicing it. Homes and schools that make language learning a group thing will get a lot farther than by just completing a course. After all, almost everyone in the U.S. takes language courses in high school or college.
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