[See Part 1 here. And trust your friendly Salesman: the gifts at the end of this post can make you happier for the rest of your life.] Then she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me Written by an Italian poet from the 15th century. And every one of those words [...]

[S]peaking about his own spiritual development, Confucius said: “At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At thirty I could stand. At forty I had no doubts. At fifty I knew the Decree of Heaven. At sixty I was already obedient [to this Decree]. At seventy I could follow the desires of my mind without [...]

If you happen to be so good at Photoshop or Illustrator that you can knock out a decent website banner in 20 minutes or so — unlike me, for whom a miserably failed attempt takes hours — I’d appreciate your help. I’m ready to launch a new website that I think is important, and want [...]

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread: What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution? I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can [...]

Oh, the French wit. Just the right sauce for my Freedom Fries: Asked to sum up Bush’s record on the [climate change] issue, France’s climate ambassador Brice Lalonde chose instead to pass on a story he had heard. A man comes to the White House asking to see Bush. “He doesn’t live here anymore,” he [...]

Yes, I’m still gushing. I know he won’t be perfect, and is possibly farther right than Nixon in several ways, but by god, I just almost choked up watching Obama say these words in his Meet the Press interview with Tom Brokaw: MR. BROKAW: Let me ask you as we conclude this program this morning [...]

I’ve spent the morning telling my little Korean nieces and nephew that their grandmother has “gone to sleep,” while others are telling them she “go into the sky.”  Always the teacher. It makes me think of the end of Gilgamesh. But that’s ten chapters away. Wherever my mother-in-law is, my wife’s family and I agree [...]

I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking [...]

I put a colon in the title of the last post. That made commenting impossible. I changed the slugline so people can comment, but it only works if you click the link on my blog itself. Commenting by clicking on the post title in your feed reader won’t work. Lesson learned: avoid colons in your [...]

E-School News just published an article (free registration may be required) about what we geeks would call “science digital storytelling.” What I find exciting about this is that it shows scientists in action, in their labs, explaining their real-world scientific experiments for the layperson. It links to four new online video sites, modeled after YouTube, [...]