English

George Bernard Shaw is credited with the quote. Too often in our personal and professional lives, miscommunication happens. Miscommunications often lead to frustration. It is easy for individuals to have the illusion that they have communicated and set clear expectations, while the reality is much different. 

It’s easy to talk about things when times are good or when both people see eye to eye. But in a healthy relationship you can also talk about difficult stuff without insulting or hurting each other. You might not always agree, but you talk through your differences while feeling safe, respected, and heard. That means telling someone what you want and feel and also listening and respecting what they say, too.

Healthy communication is NOT manipulative, mean-spirited, disrespectful, or one-sided. It’s not about getting your way - it’s about both of you being there for each other.

Essential questions are broad, thematic explorations that serve as a useful lens for looking at multiple texts. The purpose of essential questions is “to bring multiple texts together into conversation with each other. Pick fiction and nonfiction pieces that concern similar topics.

Giving an introduction, Expressing confusion ,Asking for permission, Asking for clarification, Handling an emergency, Describing experiences, Expressing an opinion, Preparing for an interview

Work intensively on English language fluency and accuracy 

Work with the written word to the spoken word with increased confidence and fluency 

Embracing the tones, the colours, and the passion of the language! 

The task of a leader is to inspire others to achieve great results. It sounds simple, but leaders today are operating in an incredibly demanding environment. The difference between competent communication and inspiring communication can be the difference between poor performance and outstanding results. 

To be inspiring, is not the same as being a great orator. To be inspiring, you have to learn how to be a better listener, you had fundamentally to understand what was in the hearts and minds of the people in your audience, and you had to speak with passion and authenticity. 

You could stumble and stutter over your words, but if people saw you speaking of the things you truly believed, and felt that you truly understood them and respected their views, you are far more likely to make the vital connection that would attract them to your vision. 

OUT has gone the command and control style of leadership, and IN has come a new, more empathetic, emotionally intelligent style of leadership where communication becomes one of the top two skills that you need to succeed.

Great leaders ensure that the right conversations are taking place right across their businesses, for they understand it is those conversations that drive change and ensure progress.  Leaders have to learn how to engage people in and through conversations.

The task of a leader is to inspire others to achieve great results. It sounds simple, but leaders today are operating in an incredibly demanding environment. The difference between competent communication and inspiring communication can be the difference between poor performance and outstanding results. 

Linguistics: the science of language. 

Students benefit from developing their abilities to discuss language as a topic of study. Talking about language is interesting and significant for people of all ages, perhaps especially for high school students who are growing into their adult identities and who are exposed to many new social situations. Language is fascinating to study as its own phenomenon, and it, in many ways, marries the Humanities and the Sciences 

Not the study of a single language, or many languages, but a study of what makes language work; what a language is, how it differs from animal communication systems, how to differentiate a language from a dialect, how new languages develop from old languages, how culture and language interact, the history of language families, theories of language, how to make a computer program ‘understand’ or, better, to react sensibly to language input (this is computational linguistics). And some other specialized research topics 

What defines a human?  What is the essence of what we are? 

Perhaps it is the ability, and the desire, to ask questions like that.

Something makes humans different: makes us so all-dominating, so all-consuming, that in the eyeblink of time in which our species has been around—a mere 300,000 years, out of the 4.6 billion that Earth has existed—we have engineered a planetary shift bigger than anything seen in eons, we have done so knowingly, and we still, despite all we know, refuse to stop.

What is it that gives us this power? Fire? Tools? Weapons? Or the thing that is each of these, and all of them at once: language?  Language is both our most effective tool and our most powerful weapon.  If you want to see how powerful this weapon is, look around. A simple conversation can be a skirmish: setting out positions, pushing back and forth, testing the ground.  

Language has been used dishonestly to fight political and cultural wars, and language has been used by winners as an opportunity to rewrite the speech patterns—and thus the ways of seeing—of the losers. Since the words we use reflect our worldview, controlling language helps control the picture that we see of the world. 

Most obviously, it is seen in the daily struggle to use words to pin down an opponent. Define the terms that others must use, and you already have the upper hand. It is an effective way of diminishing the worldview of your opponents, or simply miring them in argument or denial. 

If in an argument you’re feeling more aggressive—or simply losing the argument—you might get out the big guns. Your opponent may become a “snowflake” or a “social justice warrior,” a “hater” or a “fascist.”  People are not arguing about issues—about ideas, proposals, feelings, approaches—they are trading in which insult is most likely to stick. In the age of easy-click social media outrage, these kinds of linguistic skirmishes have a depressing, routine familiarity 

Dishonest use of language is one way of using words as a weapon. Another is designing, and enforcing, linguistic—and thus, cultural—orthodoxy.  Language. It is a tool for good, and for not-so-good…it is a sharp tool…sharp in ways we aren’t even conscious of.  

We see writing and reading—“literacy,” as we call it—as one of the basic necessities of life. Few people throughout history have been able to read or write, but across the world now, literacy is promoted as an unquestionable good. We measure its progress obsessively and work to extend its reach. But the ability to read and write is also the ability to abstract. It means that you and I agree on what meaning a  term conveys. But how do I know that my “abstraction” is the same as yours? I don’t. In doing so, I struggle to convey the depth and meaning of my real, embodied human experience in terms which, at best, are weirdly abstracted from actual life. 

Words are not real. In a culture that increasingly deals with abstracts, it is a dangerous form of forgetting.