Tuesday, 10th March (Cambridge)

Posted on March 10, 2026 by roycross

1. We used to live just down the road in Berlin from the Olympiastadion. We once attended an incongruous British army-catered Burns Supper there, along with hundreds of other guests, all of us served excellent haggis, neeps and tatties. Here’s Katja Hoyer’s account of her recent visit to the stadium, The Second Life of Nazi Buildings https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/the-second-life-of-nazi-buildings

There’s something very captivating about the symmetry of the structure. The bright spring sun sharpened every line of the stone façade. Historian or not, it’s impossible to arrive here without sensing that this arena was built to impress. The stadium was conceived specifically for the 1936 Summer Olympics, the Games that the Nazi regime used as a showcase for its vision of power and order. The architect Werner March designed a structure that feels both stripped-down and monumental: colonnades, symmetrical axes and muscular forms that project endurance and discipline. Today, the swastikas and other overt insignia of the regime have gone, but the aesthetic language of the 1930s remains.

2. Three from the London Review of Books blog, one from Gaza, one from Mexico and one from the United Kingdom:

Eight Kilos of Gas by Hassan Ayman Herzallah https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/march/eight-kilos-of-gas

(…) at the end of January, my father received a message on his phone: ‘Bring your gas cylinders to the distribution point to receive your share of cooking gas.’ This was cause for celebration. A friend had given us a small amount of gas in November, but we hadn’t had a full cylinder for ten months. My father and I went to hand in our empty cylinder and returned with eight kilos of cooking gas. Other men were carrying cylinders home with children walking beside them as if they were guarding treasure. The whole camp appeared to have woken from a long silence. The cylinder was not large. But we looked at it as something rare, something precious, something that might disappear if we looked away. A brief silence fell. Then my mother stepped forward and touched it, as if to make sure it was real. She said she would cook. It was a long time since we had heard those words from her.

After El Mencho by Forrest Hylton https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/march/after-el-mencho

The CJNG imports more weapons and military hardware, kidnaps and traffics more people, steals more fuel, owns more land and businesses, extorts more from merchants and ranchers, lends more money, launders more money and has a larger presence in the licit economy, both at home and abroad, than any of its rivals. An enemy of the federal government, the CJNG nevertheless has many state and local officials on its payroll, not to mention police officers and soldiers. With El Chapo’s sons and El Mayo imprisoned in the US, and Sinaloa weakened by factional fighting, the CJNG is the most powerful trafficking organisation in the world.

Countercurrents by Selma Dabbagh https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/february/countercurrents

When the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, the destruction was writ large in newspaper headlines and widely condemned. A year later, the Israeli army bombed the old town of Nablus. The Palestinian architect and writer Suad Amiry wrote about it in her memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Her first thought was ‘Oh, God, not the soap factory!’ She then remembered the thirteen people who’d been killed and felt ‘rather ashamed’. And yet since October 2023 five thousand years of cultural buildings and ancient libraries have been bombed into dust in Gaza with hardly a whisper from the international media or cultural institutions.

3. Here’s Richard Watson Todd’s latest outburst on his The Grumpy Old Academic blog, Is honesty the best policy? https://grumpy.hcommons.org/2026/03/05/is-honesty-the-best-policy/

On the one hand, there’s research where the discussion of the findings is a paragon of stating the bloody obvious. From a quick search, I’ve found articles where the main conclusions are “the role of education … in shaping students’ academic and professional futures should not be disregarded” …

4. Timothy Snyder has a regular videocast on his Thinking about … blog, Thinking Live. Here’s a recent edition about the war with Iran, Thinking Live on Iran with Janice Stein: how we got here, and where we might be going https://snyder.substack.com/p/thinking-live-on-iran-with-janice Treat it as an audio-only podcast if you’re on the move?

5. And, finally and bibliophilically, two gift articles from The New York Times: their list of forthcoming fiction books https://tinyurl.com/yrjurymw and their list of new non-fiction books https://tinyurl.com/kjn4we9w

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Thursday, 5th March (Cambridge)

Posted on March 5, 2026 by roycross

1. Belonging Matters, two practical webinars from TeachingEnglish, starting at 09:00 UK time on Friday 13th March, with experts from Southeast Asia which focus on learner well-being and including home languages in the classroom to create a sense of belonging: more info and registration here https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teachers/belonging-matters-webinars

Session 1 with Mai Tuyet Ngo will focus on teacher and learner well-being, drawing on classroom practice to explore how joy, emotional safety and positivity can enhance English learning and will share practical ways teachers can create happier, more connected classrooms.

Session 2 with Donna Lim & Yustinus Calvin Gai Mali will bring together two teacher educators to discuss how multilingual realities shape English teaching in Southeast Asia and explore how teachers can use learners’ home languages as a resource, challenge ‘English-only’ assumptions and promote inclusive, culturally responsive practices.

2. Effective Reading Instruction in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: What the Evidence Shows is a report from the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) https://geeap.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Effective-Reading-Instruction-in-Low-and-Middle-Income-Countries-What-the-Evidence-Shows-EN.pdf PDFs of the whole report and the executive summary below.

The report shows that learning to read is both a moral duty and an economic necessity. Despite its importance, 70% of ten-year-olds in LMICs cannot read a simple text. Drawing on more than 150 studies across 173 languages, the report identifies six core skills—oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and writing—that must be taught explicitly and systematically. It urges policymakers to ground instruction in scientific evidence, support teaching in home languages, and ensure every child becomes a skilled reader.

Effective-Reading-Instruction-in-Low-and-Middle-Income-Countries-What-the-Evidence-Shows-EN SUMMARYDownload
Effective-Reading-Instruction-in-Low-and-Middle-Income-Countries-What-the-Evidence-Shows-ENDownload

3. Here’s a World Bank blog post by Jaime Saavedra, Ezequiel Molina & Cristóbal Cobo, Who is Raising Our Children? Screens, Baby Shark, and the Impact on Early Childhood https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/latinamerica/impact-screen-time-in-early-childhood

Sixteen billion. That’s how many times the popular children’s song Baby Shark has been viewed on YouTube. That’s more than twice the world’s population—and here’s what’s truly striking: 5 of the 10 most-viewed videos in YouTube’s history are content for young children. Not Bad Bunny. Not Taylor Swift. But baby sharks and buses with spinning wheels. These numbers reveal something important: early childhood is being reshaped by screens, long before Instagram or TikTok enter the picture.

Yes, I’ve heard Baby Shark once or twice!

4. Here’s the OECD’s recent Digital Education Outlook 2026, Exploring Effective Uses of Generative AI in Education https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-digital-education-outlook-2026_062a7394-en.html PDFs of the whole thing, 247 pages long, and the executive summary, two pages long, below.

The OECD Digital Education Outlook is the OECD’s flagship publication presenting our latest analysis of emerging digital technologies in education. This 2026 edition synthesises evidence and expert insights to show how generative AI has the potential to transform the quality and effectiveness of learning, as well as the productivity of education systems, provided its associated risks are carefully managed. Its applications include enhancing student learning, supporting teachers’ performance while preserving professional autonomy, and strengthening education systems, as well as institutional and research capacities. For students, generative AI can scale personalised learning through intelligent tutoring systems, including in low infrastructure settings. Generative AI can also support knowledge acquisition by enabling collaborative learning and enhancing creativity. However, evidence shows that overreliance on generative AI tools that provide direct answers can reduce students’ active engagement, improving task performance without corresponding learning gains. When used as a shortcut rather than a learning tool, generative AI can displace cognitive effort and weaken the skills that underpin deep learning.

OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026 SUMMARYDownload
OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026Download

5. And, finally, un peu de flânerie, an essay from The Public Domain Review by Paul Sullivan, The Blinkered Flâneur: Walking with Franz Hessel in 1920s Berlin https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-blinkered-flaneur/

Does the flâneur, that curiously modern figure who wanders metropolitan streets, have a political consciousness? For Franz Hessel – author of ‘Spazieren in Berlin’, “a memorization while strolling” that Walter Benjamin called “thoroughly epic” – the answer seemed to be no. Paul Sullivan explores Hessel’s perambulations through Berlin and the achievements and limitations of his vision.

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Tuesday, 3rd March (Cambridge)

Posted on March 3, 2026 by roycross

1. Green Action ELT’s next event, Backwards into the future? How sustainable is AI in ELT?, is at 14:00 UK time this coming Friday,  6th March: more info and registration here https://green-action-elt.uk/events/

The rise of Large Language Models is transforming education at an unprecedented pace – but are we ready? Is using AI with our learners always ethical? Is it always pedagogically sound? Should we feel compelled to integrate it into our classrooms – or pause to question its role? And if we do choose to use it, what critical questions must guide our decisions? This webinar invites educators to step back and examine the bigger picture. Beyond immediate classroom applications, how do we future-proof ourselves professionally and support our learners not only academically, but developmentally, in an age of generative AI? The genie is out of the bottle – but have we opened Pandora’s box?

2. Ian McKellen played the part of L S Lowry in a recent BBC documentary, L S Lowry: The Unheard Tapes, based on the tape recordings of a very long interview, never written up, conducted with Lowry over many years by Angela Barratt. I’m not sure the film can be watched outside the UK, for rights reasons, but a skilled user of a VPN might manage to watch? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rxvm

The short BBC film from the time, included in this piece for the ‘Culture’ section of the BBC website  by Greg McKevitt, is also good (and definitely available) https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20260220-the-darkness-behind-british-artist-ls-lowrys-famous-city-scenes

3. And while I was checking that Lowry URL, I came across this piece by McKevitt, ‘Catastrophe may overwhelm us all’: How Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech launched the Cold War 80 years ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20260226-the-churchill-speech-that-launched-the-cold-war

In 1946, less than a year after the end of World War Two, Britain’s wartime leader sounded an urgent warning about the Soviet threat to the West. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” In a single sentence, Winston Churchill defined the division between two opposing ways of life: on one side, the capitalist West, on the other side, the communist East. In his speech on 5 March 1946, urging the US to look outwards and resist returning to isolationism, Churchill drew a metaphorical dividing line through Europe, from Germany’s border with northwest Poland to Italy’s border with the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia. It captured a moment suspended between post-war euphoria and the unsettling sense that fresh dangers could lie ahead.

Churchill developed a plan, never implemented, to attack the Soviet Union called Operation Unthinkable; Donald Trump’s ‘plan’ to attack Iran is called Epic Fury.

4. And that last item on Churchill provides the segue to this wonderful radio play, which I’m confident can be listened to outside the UK, Churchill’s Bust, which makes reference to that ‘Iron Curtain’ speech https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002d8v5

When Donald Trump puts the bust of Churchill back in The Oval Office, after several years absence, Winston becomes increasingly disturbed at what he is witnessing. Jon Culshaw and Daniel Weyman star in David Morley’s satirical take on recent events.

5. And, finally and apocalyptically, The Alister Heath Headline Generator from the surprisingly, disarmingly self-aware Daily Telegraph https://stirring-fox-7e1fab.netlify.app/ I prompted the generator with ‘English language teaching’ and it produced the following headline, How English language teaching became the ultimate symbol of Britain’s humiliating global irrelevance.

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Thursday, 26th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 26, 2026 by roycross

1. The International Booker Prize is perhaps a little more genuinely international nowadays, but it still has some way to go, with nine of the thirteen books on this year’s longlist from Europe: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-international-booker-prize-2026-longlist

Cross quibbles apart, it’s an interesting list!

2. Here’s a gift article from The New York Times by Alex Marshall, How a New Yorker Put Poetry on the London Underground https://tinyurl.com/bpavm5k

One evening about 40 years ago, Judith Chernaik was taking part in a reading of “As You Like It” when she had a flash of inspiration that would go on to improve the lives of millions of harried commuters. In Shakespeare’s comedy, the lovesick Orlando hangs odes to a woman called Rosalind onto trees in the forest of Arden. Orlando’s verse is deliberately bad. “From the east to western Ind / No jewel is like Rosalind,” starts one. Still, that scene gave Chernaik a thought: Why not put poems in the Underground, London’s busy subway system? Chernaik, an expatriate New Yorker, said in a recent interview that she couldn’t quite explain the thought. The London subway, after all, “is so different from a pastoral scene.”

3. I do so hope the science that underpins this Guardian article by Andrew Gregory, Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%, study suggests, is sound! https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/11/reading-writing-lower-dementia-risk-study-finds

Sounder, possibly, than The Guardian’s choice of illustration?

4. Another thoughtful piece on teaching and learning from Substack, this one by Joel Kenyon: Stand Still, Narrate and Stop: Small Classroom Changes with Big Impacts https://joel120193.substack.com/p/stand-still-narrate-and-stop-small

I find myself returning to my PGCE years often. They were a trial by fire. A mix of the inspiring and the outright absurd. For example, I was once given a stopwatch in a lesson and was told that I was not allowed to talk for more than 2 minutes. The less time I spoke for, the better. I was told to make lessons interactive, so I purchased (with my own money), lentils, dried peas, and rice. I gave students masks of different bird masks along with tweezers, forceps, or nothing at all. Once, during feedback, I was told the pupils were asking too many questions. The advice was then to give the pupils a plastic coin, and this was the only question they were allowed to ask. All of this was terrible advice.

5. And, finally and magnificently, The Abbey Library of St Gallen https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20260202-inside-switzerlands-extraordinary-medieval-library

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Tuesday, 24th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 24, 2026 by roycross

1. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its fifth year today. It seems that very few people believed that Putin was going to invade Ukraine, not even Volodymyr Zelenskyy https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20/a-war-foretold-cia-mi6-putin-ukraine-plans-russia

(This) is the story of a spectacular intelligence success, but also one of several intelligence failures. First, for the CIA and MI6, who got the invasion scenario right but failed to accurately predict the outcome, assuming a swift Russian takeover was a foregone conclusion. More profoundly, for European services, who refused to believe a full-scale war in Europe was possible in the 21st century. They remembered the dubious intelligence case presented to justify the invasion of Iraq two decades previously and were wary of trusting the Americans on what seemed like a fantastical prediction.

2. The first of two thoughtful pieces on teaching and learning gleaned from Substack, this first one by Michael McCreary on the Engaged Learning Collective blog, A practical guide to modern teaching evaluation https://engagedlearningcollective.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-modern-teaching-evaluation

A new consensus is beginning to emerge on how to evaluate college teaching. Research has consistently shown that traditional methods, which rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching, do not accurately measure teaching effectiveness. An AAUP survey of 9,314 faculty found that less than half believed in the validity of student evaluations, and an influential 2020 paper found that even validated survey instruments can lead to unfair outcomes. And yet, the lack of a widely accepted alternative has left many higher ed institutions assessing instruction in ways that are both deeply unpopular and methodologically unsound.

3. The second Substack piece comes from Barbara Oakley, The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail https://barbaraoakley.substack.com/p/the-teaching-method-that-cant-fail

There’s something strange going on in education. We have more research than ever on how the brain actually learns. And yet, in country after country, the teaching methods being promoted are the ones that research says work least well for beginners. How is that possible?

4. A good twenty-minute listen from Engelsberg Ideas, When Edo became Tokyo by Christopher Harding https://audioboom.com/posts/8862642-when-edo-became-tokyo You can read the piece if you’d prefer here https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/when-edo-became-tokyo/

A first wave of excitable western tourists began pouring into Japan 150 years ago. Among them was the English explorer Isabella Bird, who, in the late 1870s, journeyed through a country going through a profound and fascinating period of change. Nowhere was it more pronounced than in a city torn between a glorious past and an uncertain future. It even had two names, depending on whether a person preferred to look backwards or forwards. The old name was Edo; the new one, ‘Tokyo’: ‘Eastern Capital’. Following a brief and chaotic civil war in 1868-9, a new generation of modernising leaders had thrown open Japan’s doors to the world, and the country had embarked upon one of history’s most ambitious processes of national renewal.

5. And, finally, a little more Thai cooking, 6 Salty Sauces in Thai Cooking  https://hot-thai-kitchen.com/salty-sauces/

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Thursday, 19th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 19, 2026 by roycross

1. To start us off today, a recent post by Daisy Christodoulou on her blog, No More Marking, Does a university education help you earn more? Maybe, but not in the way that you think https://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/does-a-university-education-help

Over the last couple of weeks in the UK, there’s been a lot of controversy about student loans. Graduates have been posting their student loan balance statements on social media showing some punitive interest rates. That has spilled over into a wider debate about the economic value of university itself. If it is so expensive, is it worth it economically?

2. Here’s the latest Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025 PDF below.

The CPI ranks 182 countries and territories worldwide by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. The results are given on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). While 31 countries have significantly reduced their corruption levels since 2012, the rest are failing to tackle the problem – they have stayed stagnant or got worse during the same period. The global average has fallen to a new low of 42, while more than two-thirds of countries score below 50. And people are paying the price, as corruption leads to under-funded hospitals, unbuilt flood defences and blights the hopes and dreams of young people.

Corruption Perceptions Index 2025Download

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3. This NATESOL webinar with Michelle Worgan at 16:00 UK time next Thursday, 26th February, is worth attending for the title alone, Teaching the Quiet Ones. More info and registration here https://www.natesol.org/event-details/teaching-the-quiet-ones-michelle-worgan

Introverted and shy learners often struggle in communicative classrooms, where extroverted norms dominate. Without intentional support, these students may disengage, losing confidence in their language-learning abilities. This session explores how educators can redefine connections with quieter learners by adapting classroom dynamics to be more inclusive. After identifying the barriers our quieter students may face, we’ll explore practical strategies for ensuring they are not just included but are able to thrive in the young (and not so young) learner classroom.

Are you listening, Tony Picot? You still haven’t let me have your postal address so I can send you your Iqbal Ahmed book raffle prize!

4. Two pieces for Persuasion by Quico Toro:

The Japanese Love Their Prime Minister: This Is Huge https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-japanese-love-their-prime-minister

‘An apolitical nation is genuinely excited about its new leader.’ So were we, weren’t we, many of us?

10 Observations About Tokyo: notes on the world’s most successful failing society https://www.persuasion.community/p/10-observations-about-tokyo

5. And, finally and mouth-wateringly, How to make the perfect chicken massaman from Felicity Cloake https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/feb/15/perfect-massaman-recipe-felicity-cloake Lots of good links to videos of Thai cooks cooking!

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Tuesday, 17th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 17, 2026 by roycross

An AI focus for the first three of today’s offerings, possibly a bit doomy and gloomy …

1. You can read or listen to this alarmist (realist?) piece for Fortune by Jake Angelo, Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months for all white-collar work to be automated by AI

https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/when-will-ai-kill-white-collar-office-jobs-18-months-microsoft-mustafa-suleyman/

For the back half of the 20th century (what Fortune founder Henry Luce called “The American Century”), MBA and law degree programs were a ticket to a great office job and a path to the American Dream. The 21st century is asking the question: What happens when all those office jobs get automated?

2. Here’s the executive summary of a report from the UK Government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) on Frontier AI Trends (‘Frontier’ here has nothing to do with passports and immigration!) https://www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-trends-report PDF of full report below.

The UK Al Security Institute (AISI) has conducted evaluations of frontier Al systems since November 2023 across domains critical to national security and public safety. This report presents our first public analysis of the trends we’ve observed. It seeks to provide accessible, data-driven insights into the frontier of Al capabilities and promote a shared understanding among governments, industry, and the public. Al capabilities are improving rapidly across all tested domains. Performance in some areas is doubling every eight months, and expert baselines are being surpassed rapidly. In the cyber domain, Al models can now complete apprentice-level tasks 50% of the time on average, compared to just over 10% of the time in early 2024. In 2025, we tested the first model that could successfully complete expert-level tasks typically requiring over 10 years of experience for a human practitioner.

And here’s a post from the AISI blog on AI and the future of work: Measuring AI-driven productivity gains for workplace tasks https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/ai-and-the-future-of-work-measuring-ai-driven-productivity-gains-for-workplace-tasks

Frontier AI Trends Report – UK AISI 2025 – compressedDownload

3. Courtesy of Rishi Sunak (who looks an ever better prime minister as time passes) on LinkedIn, The 2026 Stanford Emerging Technology Review from Stanford University, ‘reporting on key technology areas and their policy implications’ https://setr.stanford.edu/ PDFs of a) introduction and summary only; b) the whole (big) thing below; c) Claude’s review of what the report has to say about language learning & teaching and translation. I asked Claude because I couldn’t see very much from a quick skim myself and wanted to be fair.

The Stanford Emerging Technology Review helps America’s public and private sectors better understand transformational technologies so that the United States can seize opportunities, mitigate risks, and ensure its innovation ecosystem continues to thrive. The product of a major new Stanford education initiative, its clear explanation of pivotal tech domains, recent developments within them, and what to look out for in the future makes it an indispensable guide to tomorrow’s world. Indispensable for as long as tomorrow lasts, I guess!

The Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2026 SUMMARYDownload
Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2026Download
Claude’s review of The Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2026Download

4. Three webinars from TeachingEnglish starting at 12:00 UK time this Friday, 20th February, on Teaching for equality: more info and registration here https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teachers/teaching-equality-webinars

Join us on 20 February for three interactive sessions designed to help you promote equality through your English language teaching. Explore practical strategies to bridge the divide in tech-challenged classrooms, overcome barriers in under-resourced settings and equip your learners to succeed, whatever their circumstances.

5. And, finally, some untranslatable Japanese https://www.word-connection.com/blogs/translating-the-untranslatable My favourite? Tsundoku!

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Thursday, 12th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 12, 2026 by roycross

1. The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service has a very good reputation for its analysis, especially (and not surprisingly) regarding Russia. Here’s their 2026 report, International Security and Estonia https://raport.valisluureamet.ee/2026/en/ PDFs of both the whole report and the summary only below.

There is, however, no cause for panic. In the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s assessment, Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year. We are likely to reach a similar assessment next year because Estonia and Europe have taken steps that compel the Kremlin to calculate very carefully what, if anything, it can risk attempting. Even if no such intention exists today, our task is to ensure that this remains the case tomorrow and in the future. Russia’s military reform will enhance the capabilities of its armed forces in the years ahead. To counter this, Estonia and NATO must continue investing in defence. Russia’s calculations of the balance of power must always work to our advantage. It is firm and steady preparedness that truly deters Russia. By maintaining it, we demonstrate to Russia the qualities it fears most – that we are free, resolute and resilient, and that we make our own choices without coercion or pressure from anyone.

International Security & Estonia 2026 foreword and summaryDownload
International Security & Estonia 2026Download

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2. From the BBC via the Free Resources Rijeka correspondent, ‘Hullo, hillo, holla’: The 600-year-old origins of the word ‘hello’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20260113-hello-hiya-aloha-what-our-greetings-reveal

In print, this ubiquitous, friendly greeting has a surprisingly short history. Two centuries ago, on 18 January 1826, “hello” made what is thought to be its earliest recorded appearance on the page, in a Connecticut newspaper called The Norwich Courier. Hidden among the column inches, it was a modest in-ink debut for a word that would go on to greet much of the modern world.

3. Here’s an updated version of the very accessible LinkedIn course, AI Trends, that I first mentioned two months ago; you’ll not be surprised to discover that it’s changed quite a lot in the meantime! https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ai-trends/gemini-in-chrome-ai-assisted-browsing-changes-how-you-work

AI has shifted swiftly from the realm of science fiction to everyday use. But of the multitude of tools and technologies now available, which ones are best suited to your workflows and organization? In this ongoing series, industry experts guide you through the AI products and concepts that are out there – and how to identify what is most likely to benefit your organization.

4. Alexandra Mihai’s latest post on her blog, The Educationalist, addresses Slow learning and has the usual useful list of resources at the end of the piece https://educationalist.substack.com/p/slow-learning

Our lives are so fast paced, flooded with stimuli and requests for immediate input. Should our classrooms also look and feel like that? Is this helping the learning? If we’re honest, we have to agree it’s not. But we’re also often running on autopilot, joining our students (or drawing them?) in a hamster wheel that just keeps turning. So today I want us to contemplate the idea of slow learning. How would this look like? What do we need to put it in practice? How would it benefit our students, and how do we get them in the mindset for it?

5. And, finally, a story from The New York Times about the fruit you either love or hate (and should never mix with whisky, as I once did in Chiang Mai, with dire consequences), the durian, Farmers Made a Fortune on This Fruit. Now It Is Piling Up. https://tinyurl.com/2j8dmeks

Malaysian durian farmers saw immense profits over the last decade as China snapped up their produce. But tastes have shifted.

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Tuesday, 10th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 10, 2026 by roycross

1. First up today, one of those blog posts that I get the gist of, if not the detail: a persuasive but slightly strange blog post throughout which the author, Nik Bear Brown (is that a real name or a pseudonym?), talks about himself in the third person, The Cognitive Commons: How a Paper Quilling Frog Video Reveals the Future of Personalized Learning https://nikbearbrown.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-commons

Since he posted, Nik has been told that his estimate of traditional professional production costs to make his frog video of between $10,000 and $50,000 was a significant underestimate and a more likely costing would be somewhere between $75,000 and $150,000. Nik estimated his own production costs for the video, made by a team of one (Nik) in a matter of hours, at $200!

On December 10, 2025, a YouTube Short appeared that would have been impossible to create five years earlier. Not because the technology didn’t exist, but because the cost would have been prohibitive. The video features five intricately detailed frogs, rendered in a paper quilling aesthetic—each speckled amphibian built from thousands of curled paper strips, sitting on a log surrounded by fantastical mushrooms and flowers. They eat bugs (”Yum yum!”), jump into a pool (”Glug glug!”), and eventually thrive together in an extended narrative resolution that transforms a simple counting song into a story about belonging. The video has garnered over 248,000 views. It’s visually stunning. It’s pedagogically sound, built on neuroscience research showing how such songs activate multiple brain regions simultaneously – the parietal lobe’s numerical circuits, the prefrontal cortex’s executive functions, the motor cortex’s embodied cognition pathways. It teaches backward counting, phonemic awareness, rhythm entrainment, and emotional intelligence through narrative structure.

2. Two recent pieces from the LRB blog for you to compare and contrast:

a) In Tehran by Raha Nik-Andish https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/january/in-tehran

b) In South Minneapolis by Amna A. Akbar https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/february/in-south-minneapolis

Which of the two pieces does this extract come from?

Across from us stood riot police in full gear, twenty or thirty of them, along with armed plainclothes agents. I looked at the protesters around me. Most of them were very young, perhaps twenty years old: girls and boys dressed in dark clothes, their faces covered by masks. ‘Don’t go into side alleys,’ people warned. ‘You’ll get trapped.’ The police fired tear gas. The chants continued. ‘They’re shooting!’ someone shouted. We all ran. A young woman asked me to look at the back of her neck. She had been hit by pellets. The sound of gunfire intensified. I could see flashes in the darkness and didn’t understand what they were.

3. Here’s a recording of a recent Cambridge University webinar, Why is Greenland so important? https://youtu.be/OvGmdZHXC2o

Greenland sits at the frontline of global change. Its vast ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate, with profound consequences for global sea level and for the communities who live alongside it. Beneath the ice, Greenland’s rocky landscape preserves a rich record of Earth’s geological history and contains critical mineral resources essential to the global energy transition. At the same time, the peoples of Greenland and the wider Arctic are among the first to experience these rapid environmental changes.

And here’s an earlier webinar from the same Cambridge team, Melting Ice and Rising Seas https://youtu.be/l3eLsUt5aUk

4. The February issue of Humanising Language Teaching (HLT) has just come out with its usual rich selection from all round the world, including Oman, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Canada & Serbia – even the UK! https://www.hltmag.co.uk/feb26/

If you’ve got good eyesight, you’ll notice here https://www.hltmag.co.uk/feb26/using-ai that if you’d like to attend what looks like a very interesting event at 14:00 UK time on Saturday 21st February, Using AI in the Humanistic Language Classroom, you need to send an e-mail to info@pilgrims.co.uk.

5. And, finally and (for me at least) very depressingly, from Der Spiegel, The New Religion of Beauty by Carola Padtberg https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/injections-makeup-stress-the-new-religion-of-beauty-a-37cdcea5-d847-44f2-aa49-847e10c2c1d0

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Thursday, 5th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 5, 2026 by roycross

I missed a post on Tuesday, as I was clearing out my parents’ house up in Yorkshire. Amongst (many!) other things, I found my father’s medal for the Under 12 100 yards from 1939 in the drawer of his desk and my mother’s copy of the ‘Champion Book for Girls’ from 1944 – photos of both attached.

100 yards medalDownload
Champion Book for GirlsDownload

[file x 2]

Congratulations to Tony Picot, who won the raffle for a copy of Iqbal Ahmed’s latest book, The Snows of Kashmir, which I’m collecting from Iqbal next week. Let me know your address, Tony!

1. The Macmillan Global Teachers’ Festival starts next Monday, 9th February https://www.macmillanenglish.com/global-teachers-festival-2026

From 9th to 20th February 2026, join us for two weeks of inspiration and innovation designed to transform your teaching. This year’s programme brings 20 talks from 24 leading voices from around the world to explore the most relevant topics in education today: AI in the classroom, inclusive learning, creative project-based approaches, and strategies to boost learner confidence and engagement. Discover fresh ideas, practical tools, and a vibrant community of educators at the ultimate online event for English language teachers. Don’t miss your chance to learn, connect, and get inspired!

2. Language teacher associations as innovative and collectively autonomous spaces in changing times: a global study by Terry Lamb & Sylvia Velikova https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17501229.2025.2571847 (PDF below as well.)

The findings (of the article) demonstrate an enduring pattern of the professional identity of LTAs as dynamic, multidimensional, interlingual spaces for their members’ collaborative learning, fostering critical collective autonomy and innovation with the strong potential to find the spaces for manoeuvre to develop value-based practices locally and globally. These dimensions also imply that, whatever their internal and external challenges, LTAs will continue to play a central role in advocating for languages and sustaining language teacher agency amidst wider global changes.

Language teacher associations as innovative and collectively autonomous spaces in changing times a global studyDownload

3. The International House London Teacher Portal is now completely free https://teacherportal.ihlondon.com/

Build your career and be part of a global community of like-minded teachers. The Teacher Portal is a free platform for English language teachers worldwide. We provide classroom-ready lesson plans, webinars, one-to-one teacher support, videos of real teaching and self-study CPD courses, all designed by expert teachers at International House London.

4. Nayr Ibrahim’s talk at TEDxBodø, How I embraced my imperfect multilingual life https://youtu.be/ZnaKcA345ug

“Chá de Cidreira” – one phrase that evokes childhood hugs, mom’s worry, and home, but vanishes into sterile translations abroad. Nayr celebrates imperfect multilingualism as a rich, promiscuous tapestry of languages, identities, and domains that shape belonging (and exclusion), urging us to build bridges for those mixing tongues to thrive in new worlds.

5. And, finally, draw a horse and see it race against other people’s horses https://gradient.horse/ Even I managed!

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