Serendipity

I’ve always liked that word. The definition is “an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident”.

In November, I did a 5 day, 5 city presentation schedule for BER. It was exhilarating and exhausting. What I didn’t expect was that the more I did my presentations, the more I thought about the SATPAC Program and what could be changed to make it better. We are in the process of a major overhaul so the workshops were very helpful in being able to pinpoint ways to make the program better.

For example, there is often a breakdown for postvocalic /r/ when the student transitions from the final Practice Phase list which includes sentences like “The boy bought a new EERGA.” to the Transfer/Generalization Phase phrase list (dear Barney). I realized after one of the workshops that there needs to be a list to practice to help make this transition and that list will be part of the program soon.

On a different topic, last summer I did a couple of workshops that took place in people’s living rooms. The host attended the workshop for free and got a free SATPAC Program and the other participants received a reduced rate as I did not need to pay for an expensive conference room. I did this in my home state in Southern California last year but this year I would be willing to travel. If you are interested, let me know and we can work out the details.

Stephen SacksSATPAC Speech

Workshops:I will be doing two workshops in Houston and Dallas on Feb. 19 – 20. Details are here. Future workshops will be in Sacramento and San Jose in May and Kansas City and St. Louis in October.