Over in Facebookland, a friend of mine recently posted a link to an expat’s blog post. In it, the writer expressed her fear of losing her native language while living abroad and not using it the way she used to. My friend and many other expats shared her concerns. And while I can relate to […]
My students always struggle with apostrophe use. Indeed, it’s probably the number one writing — error? problem? nonstandard usage? — I see in my students’ writing. My guess is that apostrophe usage is on the way out. I suspect a hundred years from now, English writers will not use apostrophes. And that’s okay. I’m not […]
Ah, yes, the English. While not giving anything away about themselves, they always manage to stay perfectly polite, with impeccable manners, stiff upper lip, shame about the weather, tally-ho, pip pip. Jolly good. Only it’s a trap!
Whatever they say about stereotypes, I have found this one to be true: The weather in England sucks. Nobody comes to England for the weather. Lots of people stay despite the weather, and are quietly resigned to it. Me, I am quietly raging.
I’m so glad I came across Kate Fox’s book – being able to formulate and understand rules helps me a lot generally, and in this case I can finally put some things into words that have vaguely puzzled me for a while now. Yes, many things about the English are weird. So finally making sense of […]
I don’t want to be a writer but I can’t stop writing. That’s a lie. Let me start over…
A state law calling for English-only in the public schools. A national movement of “Americanization.” Educators and administrators working to erase the home culture of their students. Sounds like today, right? Nope. Think 1900s Laredo, Texas and enter Jovita Idar and Leonor Villegas de Magnón who said, “Fuck that, our children deserve better.”
If there is any lesson I’ve learned in my 4 years of teaching overseas, it’s that nothing compares to first hand advice. I can only speak for my experiences in China, Vietnam, and South Korea, but that hardly covers the multitude of options available to people or the variety of different jobs and cultures in […]
For the second installment on my teaching overseas series (you can find the first one on the pros and cons of such employment here), I’d like to tell you how to get a job. It’s both remarkably simple and remarkably complicated.
I’m going to have to have to hit the ground running with this review in terms of describing its author, Bill Bryson. Bryson is a writer you either know or you don’t, and you either love or you don’t. He’s written nonfiction books galore, and his favorite topic is travel, although culture, science, and language […]