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...

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...

Last week, we published the first part of our interview with Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson about their new book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools. We also presented an excerpt describing a student's approach to learning vocabulary through rap. Now we hear more from Anne and Christine about their experiences working with teachers and students on issues of linguistic diversity.  Continue reading...

A newly published book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, takes on a topic that has long confounded American schoolteachers: how should standard English be taught while respecting the diverse variants of English spoken by students? The authors, Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson, provide fresh insights into this question, providing practical solutions that teachers can apply in the classroom. We talked to Anne and Christine about what inspired them to write the book.  Continue reading...

“Stop and think!” was a phrase deployed numerous times an hour by a former co-teacher, when we worked together in a preschool classroom. Whether it was a girl about to try to eat some sand from the sand table, or a boy seconds away from hurling himself off of the top of a slide, “Stop and think!” would ring out.  Continue reading...