How can students use the Visual Thesaurus and mnemonics to help them identify and memorize the continents and oceans of the world?  Continue reading...

Impact. Ideate. Interface. Those are just 3 of 30 business buzzwords that you should remove from your vocabulary. See goodcopybadcopy for the whole list.

While I was visiting friends over the 4th of July weekend, we all panicked when a flyer from a local store advertised a big "Back to School" sale. If you were in the Boston area, you may have heard me scream, "I have ten more weeks! TEN MORE WEEKS!" Perhaps you recognize that horror. But, don't worry, folks, most teachers have at least a month left. No need to get up from the hammock yet.  Continue reading...

Have you ever tasted something that was so wonderful that experiencing it for the first time transported you rapturously to another plane, the food itself rising to the level of the divine, the perfect essence of what that food was supposed to be?  Continue reading...

Last week, after the death of Walter Cronkite, I wrote about how two words seemed irrevocably linked to the great newsman: avuncular and anchorman. Obituaries claimed that the term anchorman was first coined to refer to Cronkite, but as I wrote in Slate, this isn't exactly true: there were earlier "anchormen" on television, even if they didn't play quite the same coordinating role as Cronkite and his emulators. The Associated Press obituary, which was picked up by news outlets around the world, followed up the anchorman claim with another linguistic nugget about Cronkite, and this one is on even shakier factual ground.  Continue reading...

Earlier this week in the Book Nook section of our Educators page, we featured an excerpt from Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's Learning Words Inside and Out, all about how teachers can use mnemonics to help students commit words to memory. Some of these memory aids are extremely well-known: most everyone knows Roy G. Biv spells out the initial letters of the seven colors in the spectrum, for instance. But there's an endless number of other mnemonic devices that get passed down from generation to generation, covering just about every field of human endeavor.  Continue reading...