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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,...

In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, school superintendent Thomas Gradgrind praises a boy named Bitzer for defining a horse as a “Quadruped. ...

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports that American eighth graders have scored an all-time low in history and...

I currently have several students who can sit through an hour-long writing class without writing one word. One boy, when asked to list...

When I coach students in essay writing for AP History and English exams, I tell them to imagine that their readers are really sorry that...

The Advanced Placement English tests--AP Literature and AP Language and Composition--both ask students to write a synthesis essay, a...

I used to tutor “Anand,” an Indian American boy. He’s in college now, but back when he was in second grade, he taught me a valuable...

Many of my elementary school tutoring students also see other tutors. They play musical instruments and participate in organized sports....

Wit. Badinage. Banter. No one expects humor on tests like SAT, AP Literature, or AP Language and Composition because they are big serious...

One of my students, “Sara,” is studying for her AP Language and Composition exam in May, so I wanted to start having her write practice...