How do / Hello,

Well below are some comments passed on from Mr Ben. They may include quotes or the like.

Thank you kindly for your time. Take care!

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LOVE this rubric. Good work. I agree that it will prove very valuable especially as a repeated tool or maybe a classroom environment resource (on the wall).

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Hiraeth [hiːrai̯θ] is real.  I absolutely empathize. Its one of the reason why reading the Hobbit this past year hit me so hard and moved me so deeply. 

Our students undergo a similar experience; imagine hitting your limit for foreign, non-homestyle etiquette or expectations or communication or food or cultural normalities… and you just sink into a state of longing or maybe homesickness; at the very least a sense of bitterness about things here not being the way you know/feel they are back home; this frequently happens multiple times a day in the life of an ELL in the international school. you and i may now have developed and matured enough skillsets for living and maintaining sustained life abroad to only feel this way occasionally and usually only when we confront certain nostalgic memory-inducing reminders. But for the ELL, young, immature, undeveloped, and almost always ill-equipped to deal well with the difficulties that you and I confronted on our first abroad experiences, or maybe in university when we had to get used to the big city or the lack of family, whatever the case may be. It is these difficulties that we strive to remove from their day-to-day academic life; after all, study in our own mother tongue can be strenuous to the max, let alone in another language. This sensitivity, and the toolset to deal with it effectively, makes us English-language-in-addition-to-mainstream-subject teachers.

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“For many of us, we may be able to pre-read and digest a news article, magazine piece or a book blurb just from experience. Our pre-formed ideas and exposure to templates could settle our mind on a track to read with ease. The imagination and interpretation of a seasoned-mind will draw out bold titles, enhance key points, find text captions, and articulate the who, when, what, why and how etc.”

You’ve successfully articulated the objectives of the language-in-addition-to-subject teacher’s instructional planning when re consider granting out students access to written/visual texts. With a bit-o-revision you could change this quote into a succinct set of reading objectives that you should now be better equipped than ever to address explicitly as a teacher.

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Polias, Nominalisation, meaning making in the written realm by Brian Dare, and How accessible are the texts we use by John Polias made for riveting reading. They kept me up into the wee hours and on my toes. Why? They made me question my teaching and my selection of textbooks. Hugely.” I’ll be sure to pass this on to the two writers of TESMC (now called TEMC) though i’ll be careful to leave out the ‘fellow hair challenged Brian Dare’ bit; in the meantime, remind me to pass on some other works sure to ‘rivet’ and further call into question instructional practices. 

” Our job is much more proactive though. We’re targeting an end product.” Your use of ‘targeting’ here carries such a nuanced depth of meaning, it is hard to ignore or avoid commenting on; everything we do should be focused on how to grant access to the end product on behalf of our students. 

I’ll also admit to opening the test your vocab link you shared….thanks for that time-murdering resource. Appreciate it.

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“I never teach my pupils. I can only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” – Albert Einstein

This of all your quotes most closely aligns with my educator sensibilities. And it is upon this mentality that I think the TEMC course is based;  assessment should not be a method  of judging student efforts and progress, but of success of failure of our attempts to create the necessary conditions for learning to occur; teacher who take their responsibility seriously immediately embrace this, while those who’ve been slighted or taken advantage of by schools/districts/governing forces using assessment result as the rationale tend to knee-jerk push back against this, citing student lack of effort. I understand both responses intimately. We must be aware that in practice and in theory it is the student at the forefront of our motives and to forget, when necessary, and to embrace when available, the inclinations and perspectives of administrations be them top-down or adjunctory (there’s wordplay for you).  Teachers must draw a line and say within themselves “if it is in the best interest of my students, I’ll do it without grumbling and even with determination. If I cannot see how it even benefits my students or that it in fact takes away from the learning environment, I reject it, all personal repercussions aside.” Thus you sleep well at night and must choose employers very selectively.