Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

Website Wednesday

I used to teach ESL (English as a Second Language) and ABR (Adult Basic Reading.) In fact, one year my ABR student was named "Student of the Year" for which I was very pleased and one year in ABR, I was named "Teacher of the Year" for which I was very shocked. ESL is much easier to teach that ABR, at least for me, because my ESL students were educated Asian women who just needed to learn the idiomatic and other language customs of English. However, ABR was so much different. Here, I was working with men and women who were functionally illiterate, trying to finally learn reading and comprehension skills but in a time frame which in most cases was just too late since other time commitments and faulty learning habits had intervened.

ESL was like teaching in a private school. We just sat around and they learned (I hope) from casual conversation. I had only two forest fires to handle in all the time I was with them: one was helping to get enrichment for the obviously immensely gifted 5-year old of one of the women (she brought in music he had composed, his drawings, his writings - it was astounding; but his K grade teacher was not responsive) and the other was lessening the tension between the majority of Korean women and the two brave Japanese women who joined us (do not believe the scars of WWII have not been inherited by younger generations.)

But the majority of time was spent explaining idiom, like the time one woman told us the story about her husband and his boyfriend. Other Korean women joined me as I explained to her that was probably not the best way to describe their social relationship.

Which brings me to my website picks:

I started with:

http://www.takeourword.com/

when I was checking out the idiom "costing an arm and a leg" but I stayed because this is a great site for explanations of idioms. It hasn't been updated since 2010; probably because the blog accompanying the site was hacked sometime in the last decade (bummer!) However, if you enjoy words and phrases and their origins you can't go wrong here. This is definitely a site dedicated to reading, a lot of reading for clicking links to words will take you to the section of the page where the word is but it won't be highlighted. But, hey, reading is good for you!

But my travels had only just begun with Take Our Word because after I got to their post-hacking blog (last updated in 2009), I clicked on Interesting Links and was taken to:

http://marthabarnette.com/ 

where a click on A Way with Words took me to a current radio show with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett: (Talk about taking a web trip!)

 http://www.waywordradio.org/

And finally, I was home. This site has zillions of links you can click and then listen to Martha and Grant talk about words. They are both so listenable. Plus, if you also like to hear and read, each episode site has a page of accompanying information with even more links.

As you can see, my search for a website pick this week was more of a journey than a fast choice. But you can't go wrong clicking any of these sites; but you will be missing a lot if you don't listen to Martha and Grant's radio programs. Enjoy.