Carol Fertig:

Shakespeare never grows old. He was an outstanding observer of life and created many immortal characters that profess human nature. His characters often capture traits that are universal. He used rich literary devices, compelling plots, and had an enduring wisdom and wit. He also wrote many unforgettable lines that are imbedded in our culture. He continues to be the most-quoted author in the English language.
There are many resources available to help teach about Shakespeare. Here are just a few.

Rebecca Dana:

A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation.
Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and the movement, exhausted by its own rhetoric and disputes within its ranks, sputtered out. It’s back.
Spelling reform is currently enjoying a renaissance in the U.S. and Britain. At a time when young people are inventing their own shorthand for email and text messages, the reformers see a fresh opportunity 2 convert people 2 the cause.
In recent years, the ranks of Britain’s Spelling Society and the American Literacy Council have swelled from a few stalwart members to more than 500, which in this effort is a lot. Reformers are energized: Some are writing to dictionary editors urging them to include simplified spellings in new editions. Others are organizing academic conferences, including one on June 7 in Coventry, England, on “The Cost of Spelling.” The American Literacy Council just allocated $45,000 of its $250,000 private endowment to develop a series of DVDs using simplified spelling to teach English to international students. The Spelling Society has hired its first publicist.

Harry Eyres:

When I left Eton College, aged 17 in 1975, the headmaster Michael McCrum, a remote figure who had had very little impact on our lives over the past five years, presented each of us with a signed copy of the poems of Thomas Gray. At the time it seemed one of the most meaningless of the many arcane rituals and traditions that gave the school its peculiar flavour (the wearing of Victorian undertakers’ dress, the playing of bizarre games involving walls and mud, the private language).
Gray, author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, wasn’t even the best old Etonian poet. But unfortunately Percy Bysshe Shelley was a rebel, an atheist and a proto-socialist advocate of free love – not the sort of man whose poems you hand out to teenagers.
But Gray did write “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”, the poem that distils nostalgia for a carefree adolescence spent rowing and playing cricket near those “distant spires” and “antique towers which crown the watery glade”. The ode ends with the famous lines, “Where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise,” which seem an unlikely advertising slogan for an expensive and exclusive seat of learning.

Janet Kornblum:

The controversial new writing portion of the SAT is actually a better predictor of grades for freshmen college students than the older, more-established, critical reading and mathematics portions, according to preliminary results of two new studies.
The College Board, which administers the SAT, studied test scores from 150,000 freshmen entering 110 colleges in 2006 and then looked at their GPAs at the end of their freshmen year, says Wayne Camara, vice president of research.
“Our study suggests that the writing test is the best single predictor” of freshman grades, he says. The study won’t be finalized until summer, he says.
The University of California drew a similar conclusion from an analysis of its incoming 2006 freshmen and their GPAs, says Sam Agronow, coordinator of admissions research and evaluation at the University of California’s office of the president.

Eugene Kane:

It was a bold headline, befitting the seriousness of the problem: “State black 8th-graders rank worst In nation in writing.”
And it was pretty damning stuff when you consider we’re talking about 14-year-old kids here.
The Journal Sentinel’s front-page headline last Friday pointed an accusing finger squarely at young African-American students in Wisconsin who apparently can’t keep up with their contemporaries. The worst writing students in the nation, that’s what national data found when it came to Wisconsin’s black students, including the distinction of having the lowest average scores and worst gap between black and white students anywhere.
These depressing results were taken from a national study often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card,” which means this is one test we flunked badly. There’s always plenty of blame to go around when things get this dismal. I’m talking teachers, principals, politicians, business leaders, and of course, the parents of all those low-achieving students. But don’t worry about blaming the kids.
They already got theirs in that screaming headline.

2007 NAEP Writing Report. Alan Borsuk’s article.

Donna Garner:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its 2007 eighth-grade writing scores today. These scores have particular significance to Texas because we are engaged in an intense battle over the rewrite of the English / Language Arts / Reading standards.
One side, the Coalition made up of eleven organizations with ties to NCTE and other national organizations, has joined up with the bilingual organizations to impede progress toward changing the way our state teaches students how to read, write, and speak English.
By looking at the NAEP writing results below, it is obvious that Texas needs to change the status quo. Anyone can see that the way English is being taught right now is simply not working.
Those of us who want change are strongly advocating that students need to be taught explicit grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization so that they will have a strong foundation upon which to build good writing skills.
In the new ELAR standards, our side wants to have a separate strand for oral and written conventions so that these skills will be emphasized among our Texas students.

Valerie Strauss:

While designing a new core curriculum at Virginia Commonwealth University to help graduates thrive in the 21st century, Vice Provost Joseph Marolla seized on an old standard to ensure its success: teaching students to write better.
This school year, all freshmen at Virginia’s largest university began taking a two-semester course called Focused Inquiry that replaces English 101 and targets specific skills, writing chief among them.
The same thinking was behind a shake-up at the 50,000-student University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where an initiative was launched this school year, and a new department created, to make writing an essential element of every student’s education.
The push to improve writing is taking hold at many colleges and universities amid a national debate about what higher education in 21st century should look like in the face of government projections that nearly two-thirds of all high-growth, high-wage jobs created in the next decade will require a college degree — a degree only one-third of adults have.
The curriculum debate started at least 200 years ago when Thomas Jefferson grew tired of trying to change the curriculum of the College of William and Mary and founded the University of Virginia to launch the “liberal arts.” It is being played out at schools that are revamping curriculum to meet the demands of business leaders who want workers better trained in problem solving and collaboration and academics dedicated to a broad, intellectually rich education.
“We don’t want college to be a trade school,” Marolla said. “Everybody understands that. But as we’ve moved into the 21st century, we know that college kids have to have certain skills to be able to be successful over their lifetime.”