Tag Archives: end of semester

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Tuesday, 29 November 2011

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Education, ESL/EFL, Teaching

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No, Virginia, there is no extra credit.

Ah, the glamorous life of an English teacher.

On deck this week are the first exams for my ESL developmental writing students. These are the students who have placed just below college-level writing because English is not their native language and they need just a little bit of catching up. Because an entrance exam placed them in this course, they need to take an exit exam to pass on to freshman composition.

This week, I will be giving the first exit exam to my two sections of this course. If they pass, they can register for English 101 in the Spring. If they don’t pass this week, they’ll have one more chance during finals week, which runs up to December 23rd for us this year. Continue reading →

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Friday, 13 May 2011

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Historical Linguistics, Teaching, Vocabulary

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“It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This is an ex-semester!”

Well, almost (I know, I keep teasing you!) The title is, of course, a rip off of Monty Python’s brilliant Parrot Sketch. After reading essays for five hours (and a couple more hours to go), it’s about the height of intellectual activity that I can handle at the moment, so the best I could do for Friday’s Word of the Week is to find different ways of saying done! Finished! Over! Ended! Completed! With the submission of final grades over the weekend, I shall be putting the semester to rest, sending it up the river, kicking it to the curb, and, my personal favorite, putting the kibosh on it.

As far as I can tell, no one really knows the true origin of the phrase to put the kibosh on something. The most popular theories put its origins with Yiddish, Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, and Turkish. It is generally accepted, at least, that it first appeared in print in London newspapers in 1834 and spread from there. Continue reading →

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Monday, 2 May 2011

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Linkage

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This…is Link-o-Rama!

I hope Epitaph Records will forgive me for stealing and slightly altering the title of their 1998-2005 compilation of punk songs. My punishment should be to have an annoying song stuck in my head all day long. Instead, I’ll probably wimp out and listen to The Hives.

By Monday evening, I will be finished with instruction for the Spring semester. Perhaps when you are reading this, I will already be dancing on the table sedately celebrating the end of lesson planning for another term. I will still be grading papers and tests and figuring final course grades over the next week and a half, however, and by the end of it all, there will be no doubt about it. There will be dancing. On the table. With no photographic evidence of such.

While I’m working on a longer post for later this week, here are the links to some really interesting things I’ve seen around the Web in the last week or so. Continue reading →