You can keep your Liz Taylor screaming in her white sundresses, and your bellowing Marlon Brando in an undershirt bellowing outside Stella's window: I think Tennessee William's finest work isn't A Streetcar Named Desire or Suddenly Last Summer, or even Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Genius as they all are, I think his most magical, lyrical play is The Glass Menagerie.  Continue reading...

Teachers all over look to Gerald G. Duffy, EdD, for his expert advice on how to teach reading, and part and parcel of Duffy's reading strategies is his focus on vocabulary. In this excerpt from his best-selling text Explaining Reading, Duffy demonstrates how semantic maps can help students visualize how word meanings can be categorized.  Continue reading...

Bob Greenman, an award-winning writer, educator, and speaker, has written two outstanding guides to vocabulary enrichment: Words That Make a Difference and More Words That Make a Difference, with illustrative passages from the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, respectively. We asked Bob to pick some choice words from the second volume (co-authored with his wife, Carol), and he came up with a trio of words exposing the seamy underbelly of Old Hollywood.  Continue reading...

On a foggy February morning in 1983, fourteen people were gunned down at the Wah Mee club in Maynard Alley, just shy of South King Street in Seattle's Chinatown. It was the worst mass-murder in Washington State history.  Continue reading...

The National Book Critics Circle has announced its awards for the best books of 2008.

2666 (fiction)

The Forever War (nonfiction)

My Father's Paradise (autobiography)

The World Is What It Is (biography)

When renowned education writers Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey are not presenting at prominent ed conferences across the country, they are putting their innovative ideas to work back in their San Diego high school and college classrooms. In this excerpt from their fantastic book on teaching academic vocabulary across the disciplines, Word Wise and Content Rich, Fisher and Frey encourage teachers to use paint chips to get students to recognize that words — just like similar shades of paint — can be arranged in a continuum.  Continue reading...