We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal. Fitch reveals what happened when students in his classes were asked to select their favorite words.  Continue reading...

This week's worksheet goes out to all those weary high school juniors who are taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test this Saturday, June 4th. Instead of practicing more random sentence completion exercises out of a prep book, your students can try completing sentences collected from famous Victorian novels.  Continue reading...

Teachers at Work contributor Shannon Reed had a "bad class" this year at the Brooklyn public school where she teaches English and theater. Shannon describes how she found a way to engage with the students through "spoken word" poetry.  Continue reading...

When English scholar E.D. Hirsch, Jr. was called upon to try to figure out why the communication skills of contemporary Americans were deteriorating, he answered that call by bemoaning this generation's lack of "cultural literacy" — a cultural knowledge base that previous generations of well-educated folks supposedly shared.  Continue reading...

If, as Polonius proclaimed in Hamlet, "brevity is the soul of wit," then Shakespeare surely mastered the art of coming up with witty and brief expressions that have managed to stick around for centuries. This week's worksheet features sixteen Shakespearean phrases that students can explore using the Visual Thesaurus.  Continue reading...

I'm an avid reader, and when I was little, I'd ride my bike down to the library bookmobile at the start of June and sign up for the summer reading program. Each week I'd read book after book, make the pilgrimage and watch my goal chart fill up with stars.  Continue reading...