Music is a fantastic way to become fluent in the rhythm and flow of language, especially those songs with good grammar or interesting idiomatic usage of language. Which leads me to a new song on the radio by Julia Brennan called “Inner Demons.” It’s a song for today’s stress and difficulty in life and I […]
Tag Archives: language
Winter Poetry
As I have worked with many international students in my writing classroom, one of the complaints I often get is that they don’t have enough vocabulary to write meaningful sentences. It is certainly difficult to express complex thoughts with simple vocabulary; there is no doubt of that. Nonetheless, given care, beautiful images can be expressed […]
Ask Mrs. C – Class Petition Question
The semester is getting ready to begin in colleges across the country. In Southern California, students will be having difficulty getting their classes, and they will be petitioning to add classes during the first week of school. Consider the following question asked by more than one frustrated student the first week of school and my […]
Effort Never Wasted
Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted. ~Eleanor Roosevelt If you are reading this blog entry, you are hopefully enjoying the newly designed Coleman’s Classroom. What do you think? Pretty, isn’t it? As you navigate the pages, you might think it was effortless. Wow, would you be wrong! To create this site, I […]
New Year’s Resolution
Happy New Year! According to my quick internet search over 45% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions every year. Unfortunately, most don’t fulfil them very long! Perhaps this occurs because we don’t really understand what the word resolution means? I’m going to take a deeper look at resolution and its other derivatives in today’s post. […]
Start Anew Idioms
5 Useful Idioms for 2017 Wipe the slate clean (or start with a clean slate) History: Back in the days before tablets and the internet, in the 14th century students wrote in class on slate boards (preview to the chalk board, preview to the white board, preview to today’s technology!) with chalk. At the end […]