Hey, have you guys heard about this crazy new thing lots of teachers are doing? It's a little nuts, so you may want to sit down. I was floored myself when I heard, but lots of language arts teachers are using recently-written literature in their classrooms! Like, literature not written by Hawthorne, Williams or Dickinson. Nuts!  Continue reading...

David Hollander is a critically acclaimed novelist and essayist who teaches fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. We asked him to share some of the more peculiar recurring errors of spelling and usage that he's come across in his students' work.

 Continue reading...

I feel like I ought to begin this column with some kind of public service announcement. Maybe a shaky close-up of the cover of the script of Death of a Salesman (preferably the one of Dustin Hoffman in old-age makeup), followed by a slow pan out as we hear Morgan Freeman's voice saying, "Teachers of America, before you teach Arthur Miller's classic, you should know... your students will not understand this play. If you have any choice in the matter — any choice at all — you should choose The Crucible."  Continue reading...

I'm a big Langston Hughes fan; he had a gift for putting ideas into challenging yet embracing truths, and boy, was the man prolific. He wrote dozens of poems, plays, short stories and novels, many that are appropriate for a middle- and high-school-age classroom.  Continue reading...

Last week, Visual Thesaurus contributor and New York public school teacher Shannon Reed shared some experiences about the richness of student slang that she had encountered. Here is a counterpoint to Shannon's piece, from a new member of the VT sales staff, Elissa Seto. Before joining the VT team Elissa taught science at an urban middle school in the South Bronx. While a fan of slang, Elissa is also concerned about how student reliance on nonstandard speech may be symptomatic of what educators call the achievement gap.  Continue reading...

Teachers sometimes feel like their students live in a different linguistic world. The varieties of English spoken by students these days may be jam-packed with slang and other colloquialisms largely impenetrable to their teachers, especially when there's a difference in cultural background. Though the teacher's job is to train students in the proper use of standard English, can that be balanced by an appreciation of the diversity of student slang? To answer that question, we're checking in with two teachers with experience in the New York City public school system. First up is Shannon Reed, who writes regularly for our Teachers At Work section.  Continue reading...

True confession time: I'd never read Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea until a couple of weeks ago, for this column. Yeesh, I know, I know, and I'm sorry. Walk away from this column if you must, convinced I'm not qualified to give you any advice for your ELA classroom. I wouldn't blame you. All I can say is that the high school I went to didn't have a cracker-jack curriculum, and, um, I hate fish. I really do. I have a phobia about all creatures of the sea, actually, and fish aren't even my most dreaded. Let's put it this way: if the book was titled The Old Man and the Squid, this column would be about a Jane Austen book.  Continue reading...