Thanks for the great link!

... If the learner hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught, and that it’s not a question of the learner’s ability, it’s a question of the teacher’s ability. These kids are capable of learning, certainly at different rates, but learning anything we want to teach them.

This seems like the right attitude for a teacher, I'll have to work to attain and maintain it. It reminds me of a comment by Solomon Messing in his blog post about Cleveland and Tufte's information design

other quotes I want to think about:

... given that the kids are not prescribed a particular area of work, we have to design education so we create generalists…

... who have skills in a number of areas and are able to make choices about where they prefer to place their emphasis. So I think the goal is to provide kids with choices, and do so through non-spurious means, to where it’s systematic, and it is referenced to what they have to do later.

... the specific kind of teaching that’s involved in preparing them for that, the sequence of examples, and how you teach them.

... we try to teach things efficiently so we can cover a whole series of things in one format. But it has to apply to all of these examples we want it to apply to. So there is such a form. It took us a long time to figure this out.

... designing the practice so that it is based on how fast they’re actually learning this stuff, not how fast you’d like them to learn it.

The quotes seem a lot like I.A. Richards on Sequencing and the Graded Direct Method....

Articles and videos by Siegfried Engelmann:
- http://zigsite.com/DIArticlesPrologues.html
- http://zigsite.com/TrainPronunciationVideos.html
- http://zigsite.com/DISE.html

The point is that form finds form; the thought finds the language, and the language finds the thought. At the heart of the composition process is the fact that ends and means are mutually dependent.

Studying the composing process can teach you that ideas are not floating in the air, waiting to be brought down to earth; thoughts are not nonverbal butterflies that you catch with a verbal butterfly net; meanings are not lying out there like Easter eggs, waiting for you to find them. The relationship between thought and language is dialectical: ideas are conceived by language; language is generated by thought.

Dialectic is the term used throughout this book to name the mutual dependence of language and thought, all the ways in which a word finds a thought and a thought, a word. The most useful definition comes from I.A. Richards, who calls dialectic a continuing audit of meaning. Just as a bookkeeper has to account for income and expenditures in order to balance credits and debits, an audit of meanings would have to balance what one sentence seems to say against what others seem to say; how one way of saying something compares with another; what one word seems to refer to in a certain context with what it seems to refer to in another. Of course, _audit _also has to do with listening. In composing, you have to be your own auditor in both senses: you have to listen in on the inner dialogue, which is thinking, and you have to be able to balance the account of what you’ve been hearing against what is set down on paper. [1]

[1] Ann E. Berthoff (1988), Forming-Thinking-Writing.

@0690 I'm back! Thank you ruhrspora.de people!!! I wonder what happened?

I printed out your comments/quotes and am still thinking about them. An Albert Camus quote from the Myth of Sisyphus keeps coming to mind:

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing).

Thanks for the links @0690 . I'm not very good with watching video on-line but I'll try the links when I get some quiet time. I'm sorry for my late response, we've been getting a lot of visitors so I haven't been on-line very much. And classes have been keeping me busy. I just uploaded this semesters worksheets, i've been adjusting some some things. The comments by learners on the worksheets seem to be better this year, and the classes feel more active and interesting.

There were a lot of mistakes (the same patterns recur "Very few people make an original mistake" I.A. Richards) on the worksheet for Class 3, Lesson 4. And its hard to be sure my red pen lines and hints are clear, or even accurate with 125 and 52 students. So I decided to dedicate Class 4 to more training with This/That/These/Those and in/on. On Class 3's worksheet student from an English-speaking country wrote that many of the Japanese students didn't seem to understand the differences among This--->Those... At least one Japanese student seem to overcome his English writing block after I told him to look at the layout as a logic game, to use the pictures above, below, and to the side for hints....

• https://papers.goblinrefuge.com/u/bsmall2/m/s1-c4-l5/
• https://wordsmith.social/bs2gdmteacher/

I had to upload the .pdfs to media goblin because I don't have time to experiment and find a way to make a 2-column layout with WriteFreely. And if students do every take a look at the wordsmith gdmteacher blog, they will probably look with little hand-screens....

I think the two-column layout on an A4 or Letter-size page has potential as a further alternative to the EP book and film. I don't use the film in class, since today's learners already get some much screen time it feels like a waste of class-room face-to-face time to use the screen, But my feeling might be different if i had more than one class a week with these learners.

Thanks again!