I was going to write about this since many people have been following the UK elections, but in searching for a good clear explanation, I found that Wil’s World of Words had beaten me to it.
So as he says, a hung Parliament is when, after an election, no one political party gains a majority of the votes (in the UK’s case it was 326). We call the Parliament hung because it is as if you have picked them up off their feet and hung them on the wall, or …Continue

The Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills was told by Parliament that its annual report makes no sense. Specifically, the report uses too much jargon and ambiguity to hide the fact that the Department has no idea what to do. Others One piece of bureaucratese was singled out as being completely incomprehensible, even to the Department itself:
“An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology. The capital investment strategy will continue to renew …Continue

Sorry this blog has been dead for the past month. Mr. Computer died and no one knew what was wrong with it. It seems to be working now, but I still don’t have a clear diagnosis of what the problem is/was. If any readers are tech-savvy and have suggestions about why a laptop will refuse to switch on, or switch on and then shutoff spontaneously, I’d be eternally grateful.
On to news. As you may have heard, Harvard lost $8 billion in the first quarter of this financial year. That’s 22% …Continue

I’ve been planning a conversation lesson around the 2008 US presidential election and I thought I would share some resources I found.
With any conversation class, you want to make sure you have lots of background information. When dealing with something as complicated as the US election for president, the class is going to have a lot of questions. So you either need to read up and bring materials to look up anything you didn’t memorize. Or you need resources that the students can read and research themselves.
Here is some great …Continue

This week (Sept. 27th to Oct 4th) is National Banned Book week in the US. This week is dedicated to celebrating freedom of speech by reminding people of what happens when books are banned. Societies and communities that refuse to let people read suffer from stagnation. Unless we are exposed to ideas from all sources we can never learn to think critically, to develop innovations, or to be exposed to a wide range of perspectives.
Living in a former Soviet country where banning literature that didn’t meet state standards of ideology, …Continue

Since the Summer Olympic Games have opened in Beijing, I wanted to share some Olympics vocab in English. It’s a fun topic and almost everyone watches or at least keeps track of what’s going on. So take a chance to practice your English with native speakers by talking about the Olympics or follow the news in English. Here are some descriptions of key terms by sport to help you out.

Archery is a sport played with a bow and arrow. The participants or archers try to hit the target by …Continue

A British professor faced with horrible spelling by students, suggests if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. In other words, professors should accept incorrect spellings as variants
He notably cites among the most common misspellings he sees:ignor for ignore, occured for occurred, thier for their, truely for truly, speach for speech, twelth for twelfth and teh for the (Just kidding about the last one!)
There are acceptable variants in language–particular when it comes to foreign words: Koran or Qu’ran, Kazakhstani or Kazakhstany or Qazaqstany. And professors should probably allow either American …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

I just read a fascinating article about an ESL company in China, Crazy English run by a guy called Li Yang. His classrooms veer toward stadiums full of thousands of people. His techniques involve making people shout. For example, during a “class” with medical professionals who will work in the Olympics clinics during the Olympic games, he had them repeat, shouting, “I would like to take your temperature” word by word. Repeating it over and over, shouting. He claims that the technique builds confidence, energy and motivation and he links …Continue

InsideHigherEd reports on an academic who briefly worked in an elite escort/prostitution ring to supplement her meager salary as a professor. Rhona Reiss, who got her PhD in 2000 from the University of North Texas, was teaching at Towson University and also working as interim department chair of Occupational Therapy at Howard University in 2001. Despite her 35 years of experience, her salary wasn’t enough to cover her debts from her doctoral programs, raising her son and the illness of a parent. So she began to work for the now …Continue

Barak Obama, leading candidate for President of the US, announced today his plan to fund all universities directly from the government budget. In a speech in Pennsylvania, which holds its primaries in 3 weeks, he said:
Education should be available to everyone at every level regardless of ability to pay. The only way to lift the poor from disadvantage is through education. Education means better jobs and higher salaries and more self-respect.
He went on to cite the problem of how prestigious universities often set extremely high tuition costs which most …Continue

International education was mentioned a few times in the recent Democratic candidates’ debate. Primarily education came up in discussions of immigration issues. For example, there are plans to build a border fence between the US and Mexico which would but down the middle of the University of Texas, Brownsville. The campus has territory on both sides of the border. Senator Hilary Clinton condemned the plan, calling it absurd.
Another controversial immigration bill which would make it easier for undocumented college students to gain legal residence was endorsed by Senator Barack Obama. …Continue

After the recent shooting at NIU there have been a number of reactions as students, professors and administrators try to decide how to prevent such a tragedy from occurring on their campus and how to properly respect victims of the shooting. Insider Higher Ed reports on one of the sillier reactions. Arkansas Tech has banned performance of a play about Presidential assassinsAssassins is a Sondheim musical about various historical figures who have tried to assassinate Presidents throughout history. The President of Arkansas Tech put out a statement that read in …Continue

Today, during an introductory lecture in oceanography, a man stepped onto the stage of the lecture hall from behind the screen and began firing with a shotgun and then a pistol. After firing around 20 shots, the gunman took his own life. 7 are reported dead and 16 others wounded, all of them students. The gunman was apparently “a 27-year-old graduate student in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,” who used to be a sociology student at NIU, according to the Chicago Tribune. The graphic Tribune story …Continue

The case of a professor who used a racial slur in a class at Brandeis has become a mess and from the attention it is getting may become a precedent on free speech and academic rights.
According to a report on Inside HigherEd, the professor, Donald Hindley who has tenure in the Political Science department, has yet to receive due notification of what exactly he said that qualifies as “racial harassment and/or discrimination.” A students reported to the school newspaper that he used the terms ‘wetback’ (a slur to refer to …Continue