Are Memes Relevant to Studying Printed or Digital Texts?

December 4, 2017

The larger version of this question is really, ‘do we need to have a good working knowledge of what memes are in order to usefully expand a sense of our audience, our IB students?  Does such knowledge have some relevance to such new textualities as fan fiction...

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

November 15, 2017

This wonderful title comes from a book about translation recommended a while back by a colleague. It’s a stimulating set of short essays by David Bellos, a distinguished translator, written in a style that makes many of the facets of translation easily...

Making esters

October 25, 2017

We carried out a great lab in school today, making esters. Have you ever done this? What was good about it was that we used a good range of reagents and got some very different results. I set the class up with a range of alcohols and carboxylic acids and told them it...

Combining the creative with the critical

October 9, 2017

Often, IB teachers of the Group A Language and Lit courses regret that there is not much opportunity to do more creative work with their classes. But short exercises can be incorporated into our classes and many of us do that.  Here is one exercise which has not only...

Written by cats and a hamster

October 6, 2017

It’s Extended Essay time in the Northern Hemisphere (perhaps it’s always Extended Essay time everywhere), and I’m sure that all students and supervisors are scrutinizing resources very carefully. How careful do you have to be? I thought I’d...

Searching for the Truth

September 20, 2017

Continuing my thoughts and writing about fake news, fake web pages, teaching search skills, and ultimately, trying to find the Truth of a matter, this post brings together for your consideration two web articles which are not new, but which work well together. The...