Hi, faithful Visual Thesaurus subscribers! I'm back! Did you have a good summer? Did you miss me? I missed writing this column for you. One of the nice things about having some time off from full-time teaching (besides the long days spent in pajamas and sleeping past 6 a.m.) was that I had an opportunity to think about the next direction to take my contributions to the "Teachers at Work" feature. Continue reading...

The other day, my two teenage sons cajoled me into watching a movie they both find tremendously amusing. The film is not new. It's called Kangaroo Jack, and features Christopher Walken playing a small-time thug named Sal. Although Sal is the head of a bumbling crime family, he feels very insecure about his word knowledge, and throughout the film he is seen making a desperate attempt at self-improvement through the use of a tape-recorded vocabulary tutorial. In my favorite scene, a soothing female voice on Sal's tape player defines the word amorphous — having no shape or form, and then directs Sal to use the word in a sentence. Sal responds with this beauty: "After Joey Clams got whacked, his head was amorphous." Continue reading...

Okay, y'all, last month's column wore me out. So I turned off the interweb, rested my mouse-clickin' hand, and took a nap with Julie Andrews' wonderful memoir, Home, on my chest. Now, as I promised, I'm back with more resources to help teachers get their students to grasp literature through historical context. Continue reading...

On a test given on The Crucible during my first year of teaching high school English, I asked my juniors to name the time period of the play. Now, I'm sure I mentioned this several times while we read it, and — call me crazy — but I'm also fairly certain Miller specified that his play is set in the 1600's, what with his bonnets and "Goodys" and the fact that the Salem Witch Hunt took place in that century. I assumed that this was enough information to answer the question correctly.

O, foolish young teacher! Among the responses I received: "The Civil War," "American times," "Long ago," "the Colonial Era," and, my favorite, "the Early Twentieth Century." Continue reading...

Writing opportunities within the content area classroom can be exciting and motivational, but some content area teachers feel they are not up to the task of "teaching writing." The first step in assuaging this authentic concern is to let content area teachers off the hook. They are not writing teachers. Content area teachers can appreciate strongly supported arguments and easily spot a well-turned phrase, but they should not be held accountable for teaching the skills needed to accomplish these writing goals. Their field of expertise may be science or history or math, and because these teachers have done quite a bit of writing in their own academic careers, they are experts in the type of writing required in their respective disciplines. These rich backgrounds help content area teachers make indispensable contributions to the refinement of writing skills. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions that might encourage more content area teachers to infuse writing into their curriculum. Continue reading...

My Juniors are beginning research papers this month, so last week, I broke the news to them, as I do every year: For their papers, they'll have to get up from their computers, go to an actual library building, and do some of their research with old-fashioned paper sources: newspapers, magazines, books. The horror in their eyes grows stronger every year, for each subsequent class I encounter lives more and more enmeshed in the online world. Yet, like my fellow teachers, I persevere with my insistence, for we know that research is a skill best learned in a library. Continue reading...

Our youngest generation is a scarce and precious resource facing a human wave of global competition. This reality is changing the way teachers think of literacy, and more importantly, it is changing their classroom practice. Teachers across the entire curriculum spectrum are beginning to realize that they are responsible for producing learners who possess the literacy skills needed for the 21st Century. They are realizing that literacy is the ability to comprehend all sorts of text, and helping students accomplish the goal of comprehension requires more than asking them to open a book and read the chapter. Continue reading...