Good Ideas for Interactive Orals in the Literature Course (Part 1)

April 9, 2018

Thanks to the energy and inventiveness of two teachers at Sir Winston Churchill High School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,  I’m happy to share this post and later, a second, with those of you who might be looking for some productive strategies to address the...

The Richness of IB Global Connections

March 2, 2018

It’s useful for us to remember that the Language A courses are taught in a whole panoply of languages with different critical approaches. Very often, in workshops that include teachers of the Language A programs working in a variety of languages, good ideas...

Coming to Terms with Some Greek Terms (1)

February 12, 2018

Currently, there are some critical terms that many IB students are using in their essays. These terms are often used when writing about narratives such as novels and short stories, though they also occur in drama. Still, some of you might not be using these – although...

Two Sites You Might Usefully Explore

January 31, 2018

Workshops are a two-way street, as we know.  From time to time I pick up very good hints from participants.  I also have used one of these sites when I want to give students a better sense of the writers they are studying.  Neither may be new to you, but perhaps not....

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...