When middle school literature teacher Kathy Zimbaldi first pitched the idea of Vocabulary.com to her principal at St. Vincent de Paul School in Houston, TX, she was pretty sure the tool would bring meaningful word learning to the literature curriculum. What she didn't realize? It would also help her hack Summer Reading...and land her students a David-beats-Goliath feel good monthly leaderboard win. Continue reading...
With the school year starting up, it's the best time to map out how best to make vocabulary mastery an integral part of your curriculum. Continue reading...
Flair is a talent for something, like what the pro-wrestler Nature Boy Ric Flair had back in the day. Flare is on a candle or the shape of bell-bottoms that kids rocked back in the heyday of wrastlin'. Continue reading...
To entitle means to give someone a rank or right, like if your perfect attendance entitles you to free ice cream at lunch. A title is the name of something, like the title of a song you wrote about ice cream. Continue reading...
For the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, I delve into the many stories surrounding the origins of the word gringo, an epithet used by Latin Americans for foreign speakers, typically American Anglophones. Though a great deal of vivid folklore surrounds the word, its actual etymology is just as interesting. Continue reading...
The Internet may be the new newspaper, but it's also become the new dictionary, and the two are inextricably linked: when news breaks, people rush online to find out what it means, and whether it's a noun or a verb. Continue reading...
In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers considers how interest influences student learning. She focuses on a timely legal question sure to interest students and engage them in debate: whether Facebook "likes" count as free speech. Continue reading...
Last week, the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year honors went to the Twitter-friendly hashtag. But another techie term emerged in a less prestigious category, Least Likely to Succeed. Finishing in a virtual tie with the much-maligned acronym YOLO was phablet, a blend of phone and tablet coined for new devices that are not quite smartphones and not quite tablet computers. Continue reading...
As the recession worsens, we're all learning far more than we ever wanted to know about the ins and outs of the banking industry, ground zero of the financial meltdown. And we're learning new lingo too: the news these days brings word of good banks, bad banks, zombie banks, and even banksters. Continue reading...