If a student encounters an unfamiliar word, he or she should examine the word's ending for a clue to its meaning. This week's worksheet helps students discover how words ending in certain suffixes (-ee, -er, and -or) may have something important in common.  Continue reading...

I used to be a personal journal person. Every January I would buy one of those 6x9 inch spiral wildlife calendars, the kind where you can see a week at a glance and have lots of space to write. At the end of each day, before I turned off my light, I'd scrawl in very tiny handwriting all my thoughts for the day. Sometimes I didn't say much. Other times I went into the margins or the white space below the pictures.  Continue reading...

Bob Greenman is an award-winning educator who spent 30 years in Brooklyn, New York teaching English and journalism at the high school and college level, as well as advising student publications. Despite Bob's long and distinguished career, even he could experience anxiety dreams about teaching.  Continue reading...

Ever ask a group of students the difference between a regular word and a vocabulary word? They would probably respond by telling you that vocabulary words are words that they are supposed to learn in school, unfamiliar words that they encounter in newspapers and novels, or words that show up in workbooks with titles like "100 Vocabulary Words You Need to Know by Graduation."  Continue reading...

By the time you read this, my babies will have graduated. Yes, Brooklyn Theatre Arts High School, founded in 2007, graduated its first class on June 24, 2011, at 9:30 in the morning in what's got to be one of the largest school auditoriums in New York City.  Continue reading...

In over 10 years of teaching college writing classes (my other gig besides reporting on obscure euphemisms in Evasive Maneuvers) I've seen boatloads of comma splices, goofy fonts, and misspellings of not only my name but the student's own. Plus plagiarism. Oh, the plagiarism I've seen! If plagiarism were flowers, I'd have earned a second Ph.D. in botany by now. Here are a few examples harvested from my ever-blooming garden of academic dishonesty. Warning: you may need to hold your nose.  Continue reading...