1. Here, courtesy of The Lexical Lab newsletter, is the BBC’s history of its own involvement in English teaching, Do You Speak English? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026tw0 Even I’m too young to remember Walter and Connie, the first ‘English by television’ programme, but here’s two examples from YouTube:

Walter & Connie By The Seaside https://youtu.be/lhfcU9deYx8?feature=shared

Walter and Connie At Home https://youtu.be/kzLI2eIt85U

2. I’m doing a bit of work at present on ‘The Future of TESOL’, which I hope to be able to share in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, here’s some shorter-term predictions from the EdTEch Hub team, What will 2025 bring to the EdTech sector? Special predictions from EdTech Hub experts https://edtechhub.org/2025/01/31/what-will-2025-bring-to-the-edtech-sector-special-predictions-from-edtech-hub-experts/

3. Here, courtesy of the Carbon Brief newsletter, is the UK Met Office’s review of the UK’s climate in 2024, https://www.carbonbrief.org/met-office-a-review-of-the-uks-climate-in-2024/

I used to think the Föhn wind was (only) a Bavarian thing – the good burgers of Munich certainly talked about it a lot!- but it seems that lots of places, including Scotland, experience it.

4. Here’s Alexandra Mihai’s latest post on her blog, The Educationalist Learning across boundaries. On embedding interdisciplinarity in education https://educationalist.substack.com/p/learning-across-boundaries-on-embedding

Why do we need interdisciplinarity? It’s simple: the world is not neatly divided into disciplines. Every day we encounter problems that require knowledge and skills pertaining to different disciplinary areas. But our education is built around disciplinary silos that seldom interact. Or at least we are not being taught how and when they can interact. This artificial separation – and often oversimplification – though useful from a purely pedagogical perspective, does impact the way we learn to think about the world around us.

5. And, finally, Karl Muller and the fatal lemon https://beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/karl-muller-and-the-fatal-lemon/

When can a lemon have fatal consequences? If it proves you are, in fact, a wartime spy …