Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
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...
If you think they refer to umbrellas as bumbershoots in the UK, think again. The word bumbershoot actually originated in the United States! In Britain, it’s prolly a brolly. • Also: snow-grooming language, more than one way to say bagel...
A middle-school teacher and her students in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, have a question about one girl’s pronunciation of the word bagel. Is this round yeast roll with a hole in the middle pronounced BAY-gull, BAG-ull, or BEG-ull? Although...
A middle school teacher in Flower Mound, Texas, responds to students’ protests and excuses with if all our buts were candied nuts, we’d all be fat for Christmas. It’s probably a variation of a phrase popularized by former Dallas...
A Texas caller says her child’s middle-school teacher insists that students should never begin a sentence with a preposition. The hosts are shocked, shocked. This is part of a complete episode.