Whilst Nature Was Busy Making Cabbages: The Woman in White
Of all the places to find a euphemism for baffling passivity! This is from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White: A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any...
View ArticleGamify It #1: Coureurs des Bois/Voyageurs
This post is just an idea for a mass-game type exercise for a large EFL camp, riffing on Canadian history and specifically the fur trade.
View ArticleThe Second-Hand Textbook
Ah, cheaters… they shall ever be with us. True story, this, and recent, too—from the course I taught in winter semester, which finished in late January. Names have been omitted for obvious reasons,...
View ArticleGrade Grubbing: An Update
So, something I would have thought impossible happened, and I thought it would be worth noting for posterity: grade grubbing has dropped to almost zero in my classes. There are a few reasons why this...
View ArticleShow Me Your Work
This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.”...
View ArticleA Positive Change
There’s an exercise I do in my writing class. It’s actually designed to give students practice working with modals like “should,” and “must” and “might” and “can.” One of the places where we use these...
View ArticleThomas Kane’s “Learning Losses”
Since 2022—if not earlier—Thomas Kane has been banging a drum for more schooling as a remedy to what he’s calling “learning losses.” He was still banging that drum in 2023, and still is these days,...
View ArticleTEFL Alice is Missing
At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is...
View ArticleClassroom RPG Resource
For those interested in RPGs in the classroom, incidentally, here’s an interesting resource full of all kinds of role-playing games. Click on the image to visit the page. The PDF version of the book is...
View ArticleNight Forest
Today, another report of a game I’ve used in an EFL class. This time, it’s Heart of the Deernicorn’s Night Forest. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, here’s a short (~6 minutes) example video: It’s a...
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