Joey from Orono, Minnesota, has been learning Italian and its many idioms, which makes him wonder if there are other languages that can simply be learned in a classroom without input from a larger cultural context of new and evolving expressions...
Eric from Scranton, Pennsylvania, shares a funny story about having his hopes dashed as a five-year-old when his teacher told the class they were going down the hall to the laboratory. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Laboratory...
A third-grade teacher from Michigan reports that one of her young students pronounced the word crayon as “crown.” There’s more than one regional variant in the United States, though. Others include “CRAY-ahn,” “CRAY-awn,” and “CRAN.” This is part of...
Jason from De Pere, Wisconsin, was surprised to see that among the spelling words his twin second-graders were studying was the contraction this’ll. Is a term like this’ll really appropriate for a second-grade spelling test? This is part of a...
In response to our conversation about how to handle swearing in high-school classrooms, a longtime teacher shares a strategy that works for her. She insists that anytime students want to swear in her presence, they should instead say the words moo...
After hearing our discussion about pangrams, those sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet at least once, a middle-school teacher in Bishop, California, assigned her students to write some. They’re great! This is part of a complete...