I was recently asked by a young and annoyingly successful poet how I thought language learners dealt with the special demands that poetry puts on the reader, and the discussion that followed led us into a marvelous land.  Continue reading...

Recently I made a big gaffe in one of my columns. Despite the fact I read my columns over dozens of times, and then I have a peer edit, and then there's a Visual Thesaurus editor who reads and edits, I still misspelled the name of one of my favorite authors. (I also was chided for making up words, but as an author that's my creative prerogative and we can debate my taking that license another time.)  Continue reading...

Do you remember the anti-red pen mania of a few years ago? If you worked in education, you probably do. This movement, arising from who knows where (I suspect the Chair of a Department of Education at a major university), stipulated that teachers should abandon the dreaded red pen for correcting students’ work. Too much red pen was debilitating, apparently, leaving students far too despondent to even consider making the suggested corrections. As I recall, we were encouraged, instead, to use green or purple pen, which carried less stigma.  Continue reading...

Award-winning educator Bob Greenman says teachers should promote pun-making in the classroom. "The pun is liberating," Greenman writes. "It says to students, you can make language do as you please. You can twist words to make them your own. You can make connections between two entirely different things and think on two planes at once. You can improvise language and play with words. Isn't that a great thing to help develop in students?"  Continue reading...

We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Fitch considers how a fun exercise in concocting collective nouns could be used as a tool for vocabulary expansion.  Continue reading...

Literature is everywhere. Well, literary allusions are everywhere, that is.

Students of today live in a time where they have always known cable television, computers and cell phones. Movies come in the mail or via the Wii. Yet that doesn’t mean the classics of literature have faded away. They are around — often referenced in new forms or adapted completely.  Continue reading...

A cold and brisk hello from snowy New York City! Winter is a great time to, as a friend of mine said, "Cozy down," at home and in the classroom. To that end, I've been knitting, reading and cooking a lot at home, and digging in with my kids to improve our practices at school.  Continue reading...