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As anyone who’s read Romeo and Juliet  can imagine, being an English teacher sometimes includes talking about sex with large groups of...

Learn everything you need to know to ace the new digital SAT! This 6-week series includes two hours of SAT English and two hours of SAT...

In my last blog, I shared my disappointment that the English modules on the new digital SAT are less difficult than the test they...

Learn everything you need to know to ace the new digital SAT! This 6-week series includes two hours of SAT English and two hours of SAT...

At the end of January, I accepted a part-time job teaching two English classes at a small private religious school in addition to my...

One of my ninth grade students recently tried the first English module on the new digital SAT for the first time. It took him almost...

When I tell people that I’m an English teacher, they often confess that they were bad at spelling or punctuation. I never quite know what...

I recently joined the Camps with Friends online directory. It provides access to a network of camps and enrichment activities for...

Experts have been imploring parents to reduce their children’s screen time since the 1970s, when a limited number of children’s programs...

The American educational system has often had a conflicted relationship with English grammar, possibly arising from the conflict between...

The personal essay is probably the most dreaded part of any college application because writing about oneself is exceptionally difficult....

There are between 170,000 and 470,000 words in English, depending on which dictionary you consult. This number does not include slang,...

I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction, and regularly teach books like Parable of the Sower, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984 because they offer...

Last week, I discussed Professor Linda Flowers’ theory about the difference between writer-based writing and reader-based writing....

When I was a graduate student in Vanderbilt University’s English department, we usually taught one composition class every semester in...

Concrete thinking is the ability to reason through problems based on evidence from the five senses. Children begin to develop this...

Deductive reasoning, or the ability to draw an accurate conclusion based on at least two facts, is a critical thinking skill that many...

History is the study of events that took place in the past. Historiography is the study of how history is written. The current crusade...

Gloom-and-doom headlines about how low American children’s reading scores have sunk dishearten me. Many of my students view reading as an...

I grew up reading many of the same books that my mother had read as a child. In fact, I read her copies of Heidi, Bambi, Little Women,...