Our use of the mother tongue is full of the same ‘creative’ strategies that poets use when they are shaping a poem. When we tell jokes we are often playing with puns and the shape and form of words: when we use idioms we are often invoking a metaphor or simile that has become part of the language. The names of products, or the nicknames we use for people we like and dislike often play with the sound of words – alliteration and internal rhymes, the connotation of words, or multiple meanings. So one reason that creative activities in the language classroom are worthwhile, is because they mirror the strategies we use in our mother tongue.
Another, perhaps even more important reason, is that an effective creative writing strategy brings the whole learner into the classroom: experiences, feelings, memories, beliefs. Of cour
I was asked yesterday what a good ICT school looks like. The question threw me momentarily, and the fact that it threw me threw me as well: a sort of meta-throwing. Then I realised why: I don’t think you can tell whether a school is good at ICT just by looking. All that looking does is help you make some working assumptions which you can then, one hopes, test out.It’s true that many people, even now, think that a school is doing good ICT if there are lots of computers on. But you have to dig much deeper than that.First, can everyone in the school answer the question “why?”. Why is there all this technology in the school, what’s it supposed to achieve, what, in short, is the point? Do the headteacher and the senior leadership know what they hope to achieve with it?Second, is the ICT making a difference in terms of students’ learning and achievement — not just in terms of ICT itself but across the board?Third, is it making a difference in terms of teachers’ workload?
The Standards [Common Core] ensure that the curriculum schools offer is relevant for the real world, providing our students the knowledge, training and skills necessary to succeed in college and in a global economy.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state led initiative intended to level set the learning expectations of students, grades K-12. The desired end result is a curriculum that transcends state boundaries and fully aligns with today’s college entrance requirements and work expectations.
For the second consecutive year, a Louisiana Tech University forestry student has taken first place in the undergraduate category of Soil Survey Horizons’ 2011 Student Article Contest.
Daniel Cooke, a junior forestry major from Ruston, coauthored his winning article titled, “Topography and Parent Material Effects on Forest Productivity on a North-Central Louisiana Site” with Dr. William Patterson, assistant professor of forestry in Louisiana Tech’s College of Applied and Natural Sciences. The article compared soil properties and processes for sites on a hilltop and the hillslope for Wafer Creek Ranch – a 500 acre forested tract west of Ruston owned by Dr. Johnny Armstrong and managed in cooperation with The Nature Conservancy.
“I am thankful to Soil Horizons for holding this contest, and giving students the opportunity to actively participate in their chosen field of study,” said Cooke. “I am also very thankful to Dr. William Patterson
As much as it is nice to welcome students to our school every Monday, it can be very sad on Fridays when we say farewell to our students at the weekly graduation ceremony. Recently we said a very sad goodbye to a very special student — Ligia Pinto Rosso from Brazil.
Ligia is an English teacher and a published poet back in Brazil and came to Oxford for one month to brush up on her English skills and to completely immerse herself in British culture. She took part in almost all of the social activities and visited many of the places where her literary influences wrote some very famous novels including Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings. She also took part in weekend excursions to Bath Stonehenge, London, and the historical seaside town of Portsmouth.
