"china in a bullshop" - this was a slip of someone's tongue, but I've never heard a better summary of the neurodivergent experience of capitalism

Glad to finally file for divorce from the g-n-cidaires! bsky.app/profile/aliv...

Shoutout to Proton for finally adding a booking link feature to the calendar, thereby alleviating the single biggest obstacle I faced in my #deGoogle process. I tried cal.com, calendly, and Zoom (absolutely horrible) and still ended up stuck with google for months!

“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so th...

We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.

“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a man in California wrote.

(Published Dec. 2024)

The Strange Death of Orbánism Franz Pokorny

Hungarian taxpayers paid American “post-liberal” Rod Dreher $105,000 last year to produce propaganda for Orban’s regime. www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/the-strang...

We start this with research: what do adults who are fluent in their second language actually know? Amazingly, very underrated research from 1995 gives us a detailed roadmap for that. bsky.app/profile/aliv...

The second reason is what we are going to work on this week. It is that basic, daily communication has mostly been mastered- students can "survive" - and so they can easily lack specific goals for themselves, and we for them.

Essentially, this is solved by expanding our frustration tolerance and being aware that the lack of novelty is a GOOD sign, not a bad one.

Now, however, as they advance, much of the language they use in a day is already known - so fewer "hits- and what they need to learn is much more complex, so it takes more trial and error, review, and use in context before things stick. A classic case of being cursed by our own success!

That led to a consistent dopamine cycle of challenge and success, and built the foundation of their motivation to continue as language learners.

That reason is that when they were Novices, they knew very little! So each day, or even each few minutes, we were able to facilitate their acquisition of something new!

There are 2 main reasons that intermediate and advanced learners can feel like they are "stalled." The first is not something teachers need to change, but rather something that it's good to make explicit so that we, and the learners, can adjust our expectations accordingly.

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Today in our Multilingual Futures Spring 5 Day Challenge, we started by identifying the skills we can nurture so that intermediate and advanced #language learners don't stall out.

I know they put your thesis online and I am a big advocate for making research publicly available, but it's still shocking and blush-inducing every time that someone reads or cites your weird little passion manifesto from a former lifetime. 🥰 #education #research #endangeredlanguages

poster for free professional development starting april 20, 2026

We start today, but there's still time to join! The challenge can be completed on your own time, following video tutorials and sharing your ideas and questions in the discussion. We all help one another, and you'll see activity spark through effective communicative lessons tailored to your

The most recent Lego video underlines an important lesson of the darkest timeline: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"....except that sometimes the incompetence IS the malice.

If I was made entirely of federal crimes, I too would seek to implode the bureau assigned

You’re most likely the one called to build the community you crave and can’t find.

When people ask me which apps, textbooks, methods, etc I recommend so they can become multilingual, I measure all the options against the human heart of language: relationships.
#education #curriculum #decolonial #languages #ELT

The result is that learners become highly proficient much more rapidly (conversational within a month, highly proficient within 2 years), reach fluency more reliably than in conventional methods, and experience deep personal growth and genuine bonding that makes their lives better.

We then build relationships to the land, the plants, and the animals through the language. We build relationships to our own ancestors. We build relationships through inventing solutions to local problems, creating original designs, and engaging in critiques of power together.

Interestingly, explicitly building relationships is also how we make each othwr learn languages faster, even if we're doing it in a classroom. In our ALIVE! Framework, we start by building relationships to each other as relatives - through the language we're learning.

We gain new worldviews, we participate in more meaningful communities, we get our hearts broken in new ways, we experience joys we didn't previously know about. And, importantly, we develop new ties, obligations, and positions in relation to one another.

Instead of perpetuating that mentality of domination and extraction, I advocate language learning for one main reason: relationships. Relationships to one another are what fulfills, matures, and evolves us.

I studied at an institution that was created by the British empire to equip its colonizers to go out and extract from the colonies, using their languages. And I thought the whole time about how poorly most of them spoke the languages they learned, and how they hurt the world rather than helping us.

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I am the world's most passionate person about learning new languages, but you'll never hear me say you should do it to get a job. That's the least powerful motivation a person can have, and I think focusing on it steals what really drives people to succeed at it.

This is why I didn't report. When others did and I testified, he got a year unpaid leave and now still has tenure for life in a better job than I'll ever have, control over students.

In this free, 5-Day Challenge, we'll work together to build activities, routines, and units for your classroom that lead to students owning their own learning, taking risks in communicating complex ideas, and expressing themselves creatively in language class.

multilingual-futures.mn.co

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Have you seen your intermediate and advanced students start to plateau? Do you see them recycling the language they know and avoiding challenging themselves with more conversation or more complex discussions?

L2 learners should be connected to appopriate proficiency assessment, with a clear goal and evidence before graduation.

Rather than an admission requirement of Advanced proficienty in the target language, I recommend a requirement of intermediate proficiency in a language learned outside the home.

If the institution doesn't offer courses in the candidate's focal language, they should facilitate and individual learning plan. If they admit L1 speakers, a course in the linguistic pedagogy of their language should be required.