I guess this is old, but I just found it. Cracks me up

If they’d just left out the 1, which you know the lawyers made them put in this ad would have been fine.

This great essay which has been making the rounds of the ELT blogging world, about why training is important reminded me of my poor first students who had to suffer my strange decision to teach them grammar and verb tenses and nothing more.

This old post popped up in my dashboard as unpublished. I could have sworn I posted this last year, and sorry if this is a repeat, but it’s a fun look at grammar nazis.
I mentioned Soup Nazis in an earlier post on slang. This video below is based on the idea of a Grammar Nazi, someone who is very strict about proper grammar and corrects other people.
It’s a somewhat clever idea but a bit insensitive as well so be forewarned.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Just an idea that was brewing in my mind. Spending so much time trying to adapt materials to different levels and pull pedagogical use out of them, sometimes makes you a bit crazy. Or at least you realize that it would be just as easy to come up with terrible and offensive questions and activities.
So here are a few Christmas lessons you probably shouldn’t use with your students.

Listening: The Kinks “Father Christmas”
Discuss: Have you ever beaten up a department store Santa Claus?
Would you like a machine gun for Christmas? Why …Continue

Dear students,
If you are going to cheat on the exam that I wrote and will grade, I do commend you on choosing the make-up exam. I wasn’t there to supervise it personally so I have no evidence that you cheated. Furthermore you had many chances to cheat since I didn’t know students would be given a make-up exam so the test you took was the exact same test all your other classmates took, and the same one we discussed the last day of class. Lots of chances to get right …Continue

A touchscreen dictionary for a portable system like the Nintendo DS sounds like a really good idea. Unless you packaged it like this:

Seriously which is worse? The choice of name or the image? I really hope no one asks me if they can use this in class because I will have to keep a straight face and I fear that will be impossible!
via English Raven Blog

Had my first class with my vocational school kids.
Suprise #1: It’s way the heck out of town.
Surprise #2: the person who came with me didn’t actually know where it was so we drove around nowhere, Kazakhstan for almost an hour and a half.
Surprise #3: I thought I had 4 groups of kids for 45 minutes each. Turns out I have the same group of kids for 3 hours straight! Needless to say we burned through everything I had planned and then some. Seriously, the main reason I …Continue

Stephen Colbert on the for-profit university investigations.

The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Another fun vocab building lesson plan, the School Slang Lesson Plan teaches American school traditions and socialization while also introducing kids to teenage slang and terminology like freshman, sophomore, detention, midterm, prom and jock. A lot of your students have been exposed to American teenage movies, and they will love to discuss exactly what all the slang they’ve heard means.
Also this lesson uses pictures to teach idioms which is a great tool to help kids remember new vocab and phrases. Because idioms don’t translate literally, and sometimes metaphors don’t …Continue

Passing Gas is Kazakhstan’s Property
This is why you should always proofread when you translate and look for translations of whole phrases instead of individual words. I don’t know if they were talking about transporting gas or maybe flaring gas, but passing gas means farting. But don’t feel bad if you fart; other countries are doing it too.

In a recent post, I talked about mondegreens and silly lyrics in pop music. Last night while watching Mama Mia, I came across another pop song that serves as a fabulous teaching tool because it illustrates a very common error for ESL students.
ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money” has the lines:
Money, Money, MoneyMust be funnyIn a rich man’s world

I think they mean that it must be fun in a rich man’s world. It’s a common mistake to assume that fun is the adjective form of fun. There’s also the problem …Continue

In my post on terms for mistakes in English, I left out a whole category: Mondegreens or misheard lyrics (Mondegreens actually refer to mishearing and misunderstanding any phrase). The name comes from the American writer, Sylvia Wright who recalled how when her mother used to read her the 17th century ballad “The Bonnie Earl O’ Murray.”, she thought one line was: “And Lady Mondegreen.” In fact it was, “And laid him on the green.”
One of the most popular mondegreens is the hearing “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” from …Continue

China has been taking great strides preparing for the Summer Olympics which open today. (In fact, why am I blogging when I should have the TV on, waiting for the Opening Ceremonies?) They’ve been cleaning the streets and the air, training the population on how to be polite to tourists and visitors, and teaching service professionals English. Even the private sector is showing great initiative in trying to make visitors welcome and also make a buck. So we should give this restaurateur an A for effort. In order to …Continue