Acquisition vs. Learning

Picasso Quote

By |2025-12-02T14:47:39-07:00December 2nd, 2025|

“Los ordenadores son inútiles. Solo pueden darnos respuestas.” "Computers are useless. They can only give us answers." —Pablo Picasso, artista español (1881-1973) Picasso died while the computer age was still in its infancy. He did not experience laptop computers, the internet, or artificial intelligence, but he got it about [...]

Middle School Special Person Demo

By |2025-09-27T07:48:54-06:00September 26th, 2025|

I did a demonstration for teachers this week. The students were from a 7th grade middle school Spanish I class. All of the middle school world language team leaders in the school district observed. The students were in the middle of a unit that focused on: Greetings Classroom expressions [...]

Special Person How-To

By |2022-06-16T20:16:08-06:00June 16th, 2022|

Anita, a reader of this blog writes: . Hi Bryce, . I've just about completed my Persona Especial for the year and saw some good and bad things about my first time. I wanted to share these with you. . • Spanish I did well with answering questions in [...]

IS THE EXPENSE OF PROM WORTH IT?

By |2022-03-26T16:45:42-06:00March 26th, 2022|

After two years away prom is back. But is prom worth it? Here's how to structure an activity in the target language and engage disinterested students. This is an activity that I have done with Spanish 2 - AP classes. It's about how much prom costs: LOS GASTOS DEL [...]

TEACHING WORLD LANGUAGE LIKE SOCRATES

By |2021-08-07T15:37:35-06:00July 12th, 2021|

Asking students a series of purposeful questions and follow-up questions supercharges learning. It engages them and drives acquisition of language and complex ideas like nothing else. Plato modeled this technique brilliantly in Socrates’ dialogues. Special Person student interviews are similar to Socratic teaching. It is asking questions with a [...]

MANIAC: A Useful Acronym to Remember Krashen’s Hypotheses

By |2021-06-11T17:39:13-06:00June 11th, 2021|

MANIAC: Krashen's 6 Hypotheses is a document that will help you to remember the core ideas of comprehension-based teaching. MANIAC is an acronym that will help you to remember six of Dr. Stephen Krashen's hypotheses about language acquisition, and how they can be applied in the classroom. I chose maniac [...]

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