Category: Speaking of Language

In my first year of teaching classes at a Japanese kindergarten in the mid 90’s, I tried introducing Halloween as an October event to the director.  Her response was a flat-out ‘NO!’ –  too scary, strange, and foreign for Japanese children to understand.   Within a few years, an amazing series of events happened. The Nightmare … Read more

  My twin brother was a doodler. Personally, I can’t draw to save my life (as evidenced by the image above.) Bob, on the other hand, doodled everywhere and ever since I could remember. I came to understand that drawing was the way he looked at, cataloged, and processed whatever he was thinking about, planning, … Read more

In my last two posts, I talked about the popular online learning and behavior management systems of Google Classroom and ClassDojo.  In this post, I’m going to delve a little further into Learning Management Systems (LMS) for the K-12 education market. Whether you’re an online teacher with 1:1 students, or operate a network of schools, … Read more

With the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, teachers are appreciative when parents are involved with their child’s education.  Monitoring, assessing, and grading a student’s learning and behavior and then relaying that information to administration and parents, are some of the more challenging of teacher duties.  Online tech is opening a … Read more

  In 2019, bring your classes into the 21st century with a virtual classroom! Whether you’re working in a single classroom or teaching students from overseas, a virtual classroom brings teachers and students together in a way that was only possible with correspondence schools in years past.   There’s a lot of competition for online classroom … Read more

Materials and content allowing students to engage in ‘real’ communication, or simulations of what conversations may sound like, should be a goal for many language curriculums.  Drills that develop into dialogues, that in turn pave the way for roleplays, provide a rich repertoire of practice activities to nudge students toward more meaningful, and consequently, less … Read more

When it comes to Halloween class parties I keep it as simple as possible — for the main reason I have to replicate the activities six times a day for a week!  Here are 13+ simple activities you can set up and play again and again.   Candy Jar Guess. Put Halloween candies in a … Read more

  “A LARGE voice!”  The admonishment of my use of the word ‘big’ came bellowing from the back of the lecture hall where I was speaking.  I was in Nagoya talking about my experiences teaching English in a Japanese kindergarten.   I stood at the lectern fending off this and other barbs from a group … Read more

Yuki had a green paper watch wrapped around his wrist with the hands of the clock permanently drawn to 3:00.  I asked him what time it was.  “Oyatsu no jikan!” (Snack time!) he replied.  “Oh!” I said.  “That’s something to look forward to!”   Yuki couldn’t read a clock yet, but at four years old, … Read more

  Some may think of cursive as an archaic form of communication – one best left to history.  Personally, I think it’s a valuable skill and well worth teaching in my ESL classes as part of the English language.  Importantly, Japanese students will learn cursive writing in their junior high school classes where penmanship still … Read more

What are stacked adjectives? Nothing made me feel more inculcated into my own language than the idea of stacked adjectives; a revelation that blipped into my head during ‘me’ time in the shower. In an English speaker’s subconscious mind, multiple adjectives have a specific order.  When they fall out of that learned order, the brain … Read more