Beauty is a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek while the sun lights up her feet Beauty is a fat black woman riding the waves drifting in happy oblivion while the sea turns back to hug her shape Grace Nicholls Since Jeremy Harmer read this poem at…
Motivation is what you get started. Habit is what keeps you going. Unknown We think that motivation is very important and it really is. It is one of the key factors to achieve our goals. However, it isn’t enough. Although you want to change the world, although you want to go one step further, you…
One of the skills that our students must improve is writing. I believe if you have something to say it is easier to write. Usually the students do the reading tasks, vocabulary and grammar exercises eagerly but when it comes to write they can’t produce. I think it has many reasons but I still…
I’m thinking aloud … Every year we graduate groups of kids and they just fly away to the real world. Some of them manage to enter the best universities in the country, some of them are luckier with some financial support from their parents, some of them have no support at all, other than the…
I realised I mostly wrote about quick games, fillers or warmers that may help the teachers to motivate the students or change the phase or the pace of a lesson. I believe these activities are great to present and practice a new language. During the activities, students will be more involved, enthused and eager to do…
When I read Emma Herrod’s post on planning a lesson, I started thinking about my own style. Emma’s post asks a lot of useful question to the teacher and there are wonderful contributions to the post in the comments sections. I really do agree with most of them and I had some more ideas how…
We all talk about the privileges of having a PLN and we agree that twitter is one of the most powerful tools for the educators to build your PLN. If you have a PLN, it means that you have a constant professional development network. However, if you think that twitter is just for professional development…
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the…
Schools have just closed and a nice summer holiday waits. Reading will be my most favourite activity in the long, lazy afternoons. This year was very fruitful for me. So many things have happened and so many things have changed in my life. This is because of the things I’ve been doing since September. So…
Twitter enables all of us to reach fabulous links. These are my recent favourites. I know it is possible to survive as a teacher without twitter, nings, PLNs yet teachers should know they are missing great stuff because they just have a PLN at school. 1. Braingle is a site where you can find brain teasers,…
Part of the series from my PLN It’s not rocket science, you may well be saying to yourself. Of course, filing your materials in A-Z format is the obvious way to keep organised! Well, not everyone may do this, so I would like to share some tips which have helped me over the years…
Joyce is one of the most difficult authors. It is not easy to understand him so he is not usually in high school teachers’ lists. However, if you have a class who loves reading short stories, you can give it a try to Dubliners. I’m not saying that we can read all the stories but…
