1. First up today, here’s a cornucopia of recordings from the TeachingEnglish celebration of World Teacher’s Day last week, with speakers from all around the world https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/world-teachers-day-2023

Scroll down to the bottom of the individual pages for each day for all the recordings and for the handouts on each session. By way of way in, how about trying one of the following? (I’ve given links to the YouTube versions as they have subtitles.)

Hafsah Aminu and Rasheedat Sadiq on Planning lessons for the 21st century learner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPLM7z3qOCc

Jorge Chacon on Increasing student autonomy inside and outside the classroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EWXuw7kY_E

Andy Keedwell on Bending the rules: developing learner awareness of how language really works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49-6g0nENek

Cecilia Nobre on Using video-based observations for self-directed development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG098ikUiXI

2. I was shocked to learn the other day that Susan Holden, an ELT publishing great, had died this summer. Here’s Melanie Butler’s obituary in the EL Gazette https://www.elgazette.com/remembering-susan-holden/ and here’s a range of very powerful testimony to Susan’s influence gathered together in this month’s edition of HLT https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct23/remembering-susan-holden-rip PDF of HLT tributes below.

3. I also had no idea that Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talk from 2006, Do schools kill creativity?,  remains the most watched of all time, had died a whole three years ago. Here’s the NYT obituary that I stumbled across over the weekend https://tinyurl.com/mr2kzhas and here’s two excerpts from it, the first of which is the moral of a great (true) story about a  primary school nativity play, which starts four minutes into his talk (link below):

“Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. But by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.”

“There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they’re allowed to. Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads.”

If you’re not one of the nearly 76 million who’ve already watched it, do watch his first TED talk, Do schools kill creativity? https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity And if you have seen it, watch it again, as I just did with great enjoyment!

Here’s Sir Ken’s other two TED talks:

Bring on the learning revolution! https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_learning_revolution

How to escape education’s death valley https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley

4. The Common Reader is Henry Oliver’s unashamedly opinionated blog https://commonreader.substack.com/ Here’s three sample posts:

Samuel Johnson, opsimath https://commonreader.substack.com/p/samuel-johnson-opsimath-755

Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century https://commonreader.substack.com/p/auden-was-the-best-poet-of-the-twentieth-90d

Philip Larkin. Poet of the almost. https://commonreader.substack.com/p/philip-larkin-poet-of-the-almost

5. And, finally, here’s another NYT gift article, this one on Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week: https://tinyurl.com/6nsua8sr