There’s a funny thing about the music of Glenn Miller, at least in the way I experience it. Whenever I hear one of his pieces, it’s my favorite. So of course today I’m giving you my favorite Glenn Miller song, “In the Mood.” But when I someday write about, let’s say, his signature song, “Moonlight Serenade,” I’m likely to claim that one as my favor…

When I was discussing our Word of the Week, mood, I had occasion to recall Plato’s powerful and illuminating metaphor for the soul, as a charioteer with his brace of horses, one wayward and sulky, representing the appetite, and the other noble and almost rational, representing what in English we don’t really have a single word for — courage, aspira…

At the end of the week which we began with the word “blackbird,” it likely won’t surprise too many of you to learn that Sometimes a Song is … a certain Paul McCartney recording from The White Album. I might have asked Tony to postpone blackbird until spring … but he’d already written his essay for the week! So here we are, not “in the dead of night…

For today I’ll set aside our Word of the Week, blackbird, because after all it’s Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), and that brings my mind to New Orleans (pronounced NAW-lins by the natives), with its boisterous musical creativity, and this our Hymn of the Week, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It’s one of those songs that we Americans seem always to have…

Time for a comedy for our Film of the Week, and one of my father’s favorites, too! The week’s touchstone, birthday, puts me in mind of the zaniness that families with little kids so often get used to, when if you’d told them beforehand that that’s what they’d have to deal with, they might have run away from the altar as fast as they could. Oh, I’m …

Our Word of the Week, birthday, has me thinking about childhood again, and all the more since a lot of old birthday pictures have been showing up on our screen. There’s one of old friends of ours, from almost thirty years ago, when Davey was invited to a party for a little boy who was his age, in a family where there were eight kids at the time, fo…

I have to admit that I asked Tony to choose “melancholy” for our Word of the Week because while we were watching an old film noir called “Johnny Eager” recently, I heard a very old tune in the soundtrack, a much-loved and oft-performed song called “My Melancholy Baby.” The melody has been haunting me all week, and haunting is the right word, becaus…

Chapters 17-19, Teaching english & Chapter 6, Unlocking

Let's begin from the very beginning. There are so many acronyms related to ESOL. You have probably heard such words as ESL, ESOL, ELL, EL, L1, L2, and LEP. What do they all mean?