Lily Allen and the big fat gay collab
Lily Allen wrote that her song “Fuck you” (2008) “is not a direct attack at anyone, it was originally written about the BNP in the UK but then I felt this issue has become relevant pretty much everywhere, we are the youth, we can make coolness for our future, it’s up to us. Go green […]
Question: What risks do you like, and what’s your survival kit?
I’ve been called a control freak by people who actually call themselves my friends. So what do my enemies call me? I think it’s a teacher thing, wanting to be prepared for all eventualities. Yet I’m fascinated by teachers who “teach barefoot”, taking nothing but a smile and a good night’s sleep. I know that will get you far, and I do it too, quite a lot, actually. But I only do it when I know the terrain, when I figure that I have enough tricks up my sleeve to handle pretty much anything that can happen. So while I hate taking blind risks, I love taking calculated ones.
Grammar Guru: make/take a break
Every single visitor who did the “used to” poll last week got it right – congratulations! “I’m used to getting up at 6. And you?” (talking about my habits) is sometimes confused with: “I used to get up at 5, but now I sleep until 6″. So I used to do something that I don’t […]
For teachers only: Vocabulary
Yesterday I ran a workshop for English teachers at VW in Wolfsburg who are having trouble adapting the coursebook they are using for their mixed level courses. Before they get started on the given tasks, they have to pre-teach the more challenging vocabulary. The coursebook comes with great texts that can be exploited, along with […]
For teachers only: One to one
In a workshop that I’ve given for Cornelsen (and will be giving again on Friday) to promote a book on one-to-one teaching, I invite English teachers to formulate questions. Teachers at MELTA asked these questions last Saturday, and I’ve sorted them into three groups: 1. My role as the teacher vis a vis the student […]
Teacher training
My dear friend and mentor Elena Gallo organized a series of workshops for college teachers called kommUNIkation a few years ago at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität Fach- und Fremdsprachenprogramm. I learned there that you need to be clear about your expectations of a course in order to really get something out of it, including thinking about your […]
For all practical purposes
For all practical purposes, it’s autumn. Fall, as we say over where I’m from. Yesterday it was the fog that came rolling in, today it’s the rain. I love fog, the element most closely connected with the Great Spirit, Gitche Manitou. In the religion of the Chippewa (or: Ojibwe) Indians, “manitou” is the spirit inside […]
