Ask me to tell you what my favorite song is and I will not be able to give you an answer. And that includes hymns. I have probably got fifty “favorite” hymns, maybe more. And those are just my very favorites, among hundreds of hymns I love. So after waiting for nearly three years for Tony to write about the word, “music,” I found myself lost in an …

As you may have surmised from my essay for our Word of the Week, music, I think there’s a real mystery in why we sing, and how and when and what we sing. Let’s step back and think about it. Suppose you ask a friend who does a lot of driving, “What’s the best way to get to New York from here?” You expect straight information. “Take Route 7 west, the…

Sometimes a Song’s origin can be traced back a long, long way. For today, during our week of the “season,” I immediately thought of a “modern” folk song with a lyric from the antiquities. Of course the lyrics, the poetry, we have in English from the King James Version of the Bible, dating to 1611, the time when Shakespeare was coming to the end of …

I must confess to an intellectual sin. I delight in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. I know I’m not supposed to do this. As a college professor, I have a duty to pretend to others that I derive real satisfaction from poems whose sentences cannot be parsed, from sculptures that look like green blobs from a bad space-alien movie, from spattered canv…

For a lot of people before the advent of modern medicine, and for many people still, our Word of the Week, season, didn’t suggest blooms on the cherry trees, or corn as high as an elephant’s thigh, or leaves in scarlet and gold, or Jack Frost sending down the wonders of the snowflake, no two alike. Or I should say that it did suggest those things, …

I’ve made no secret here at Sometimes a Song of my being a huge Frank Sinatra fan. “The Voice,” as he was called, spent a lifetime working on his music, which was never haphazard, despite the apparent ease of his vocals. Always, he sought out the best songs by the best songwriters and set by the best arrangers in the business. (And when he grew old…

In the discussion for our Word of the Week, prodigal, I brought up a scene from today’s Film of the Week, Jesus of Nazareth. If you remember, it’s when Jesus is having supper at the house of Matthew, the tax collector, and that’s presented as a scandal not only for those Pharisees who hated Jesus, but for the apostles too, especially Peter, who det…

The first time I ever heard the hymn, “Turn Back, O Man,” I didn’t really hear it as a hymn at all. It was as a torch song — though I then didn’t know what a torch song was, either — in a production of Godspell. If memory serves, I think it’s the Mary Magdalene character who sings it. I do wish I could remember where that production was. There used…

How many collectors do you know? Are you a collector, yourself? I think that most people become collectors eventually, whether intentionally or otherwise. My husband, as a boy, collected fossils. He roamed the woods and hillsides near his home in Northeastern Pennsylvania all the time, and along the way he found treasures among the rocks and rubble…

Chapters 17-19, Teaching english & Chapter 6, Unlocking

Let's begin from the very beginning. There are so many acronyms related to ESOL. You have probably heard such words as ESL, ESOL, ELL, EL, L1, L2, and LEP. What do they all mean?