Earlier this week, Yahoo closed all its Geocities sites. Last night, as I deleted dozens of now-dead links from Web English Teacher, I couldn’t help reflecting on what had been lost.
Geocities was a great resource for its time. (”For its time” –  just 10 years ago!) When it was launched, teachers were starting to see [...]

Earlier I blogged about a writing task inspired by a visit to the post office. Last week I used it, and it went well. The kids had fun writing about programs like Monk, House and NCIS, among others.
But as I read their short paragraphs , I couldn’t help noticing how wordy they were. I did [...]

The  Valley Girl expression Whatever may have run its course. It was trendy in the 80s, along with gnarly and gag me with a spoon. Those locutions faded, but whatever remained.
In a recent poll, however, whatever was rated the single most annoying expression for all geographic areas, income and education levels, races, ages, and genders [...]

I was planning an inservice on writing for the faculty at my school. I had a double whammy against me: inservice is never popular, and inservice about writing, even less so. The time had come for the hardest part: an email to the faculty telling them what was coming and asking for their input.
I spent [...]