The vast majority of young students at Oxford Spires Academy in England are refugees and economic migrants. According to teacher Kate Clanchy, this mixture of cultures and languages creates something magical, including some remarkable poetry in...
In a passage from How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College, offers an apt description of class letting out and students wandering about while focused on their phones. This is...
Lucy, a middle-school student in San Diego, California, is puzzled by a phrase her mother uses when something is not quite up to snuff or falls short of the mark: close, but no tomato. It appears to be a variant of close, but no cigar, a phrase...
Jody calls are military cadences based on the exploits of Jody, an imaginary character blamed for all the things that might go wrong back home while a soldier is deployed, such as losing one’s girlfriend or car. In a master’s thesis...
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...
Mary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, says that growing up, she and the kids in her neighborhood used the the verb pump to refer to giving someone a lift on a bicycle. This caused a bit of confusion when she went away to college and puzzled fellow students with...