This essay is based on a June 2014 interview with Bernard Spolsky, in which he discussed his life with educational linguistics. A self-described "accidental professor," Spolsky directed the first study of Navajo sociolinguistics, established educational linguistics as a field of study and practice, co-created a national language policy…

The experience of 9/11 prompted a transformation in one secondary teacher's approach to teaching controversial subjects based on the relevance to today's students. Soon after that fateful day, this teacher found a purpose and rationale for developing a very demanding curriculum on 9/11, and relates how his teaching unit has evolved by expanding…

Human life begins in the middle, in the midst, and sometimes in the darkness. Or even in the woods. In the woods--you're in the middle and if you are always in the middle there is no home, or refuge or cave--a sure space that you have access to. It means then that the best we can do is to somehow try to strengthen our armor on the Socratic…

Presents an interview with a Holocaust survivor as a means of showing how the interviewing process can support and personalize well-written historical fiction for children. (TB)

Daniel Bell, author and Harvard sociologist, is interviewed. Among the topics discussed are his view of society, his books, ideology, universities and higher education--including Harvard's core curriculum project and the 1968 student revolt at Columbia University, and Israel and the Jewish experience. (JMD)

Gerda Weissmann Klein was 15 years old in September 1939 when Germany invaded the city of Bielitz (present-day Bielsko), Poland. In her memoir, "All But My Life," she recounts the horror of losing family and friends, of life in concentration camps, of the death march and of liberation in 1945 by an American soldier named Kurt Klein, who…

An analysis of a televised interview, in Israel, of an actress playing a role in a play is presented as an illustration of politeness marking in modern Israeli Hebrew. The interviewer is well-known as an educated Ashkenazi Jew, the actress a singer well-known for her vocal portrayal of Sephardic Jews, and in this case playing an exaggeratedly…