When a student turned in a paragraph that was clearly written by an A.I., I shoveled the paragraph into my own A.I. and asked it to give her feedback. Then I printed both and gave the paper back to her. “Now wasn’t that easy?” I said. She […]
Monday, I asked my evening students, “What do you remember from last week?” They thought for a minute, then Grielda said, “Paco lost his leg!” Ana chimed in. “There was a fire, a . . .an explosion.” It was not the present simple, conjunctions, or paragraph organization. […]
In his ground-breaking work, The Literary Mind (1996, Oxford University Press), the cognitive scientist Mark Turner, quotes the following lines from a Robert Browning Poem, Porphyria’s Lover. The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did […]
At first glance, Rashid seems like a difficult guest. He’s coming out of war-torn Syria. His father died in the conflict, and Rashid has enemies in Jordan. But when Rashid’s uncle and his wife agree to host the young man in their small, Houston home, no one thinks […]
As a teacher, it’s sometimes difficult to investigate students’ progress in a productive (holistic) way. Simulations can help by providing a culturally familiar scaffolding that can guide a fluency experience. They are also a lot of fun! While the talk show simulation described below can be done outside […]
We may assume that our conversations are spontaneous, but the truth is speakers fall into patterns. We especially fall into these conversational grooves in situations that we experience over and over. The patterns exist because they are comfortable and allow us to connect with each other along easy […]
At a drama presentation given by Kathleen McGovern at the Chicago TESOL last week, participants created and performed skits that were meant to advocate for a change we’d like to see at the TESOL convention. Many of the groups did skits about the long walking distances. Others advocated […]
Not long ago, I was subbing for a reading class. They were using Read This 3, which starts with a text about ice hotels. The students were to have read it before class, but they hadn’t, and I was on the spot. Having just spent several hours with […]
Two audio articles in one unit explore psychology in different ways.
Last year, Stanford professor and AI researcher Andrew Ng told Harvard Business Review that if a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, it can probably be automated by using artificial intelligence. With this in mind, perhaps we should be thankful […]
English Endeavors 