Have you ever looked up on a dark night and tried even to estimate how many distant twinkling objects are visible to the naked eye? Well, there were so many stars shining in the firmament of American popular music of the early to mid-twentieth century that it’s impossible ever to hope to count them all. Most of the time here at Sometimes a Song I k…

Join us for a conversation with Kyla Burns and Thomas Griffin from JHS and Aaron Meyer from Summit as they share valuable insights on how to effectively communicate with ESOL families during parent-teacher conferences. Learn practical tips for building rapport, overcoming language barriers, and fostering meaningful partnerships to support student s…

In my entry on our Word of the Week, decide, I had occasion to talk a little baseball, and to mention the most decisive home run in Major League history. After all, you can’t get more decisive than hitting a walk-off tie-breaking home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Seven, which is what Bill Mazeroski did in 1960. Maz is still with us…

Note: Due to a technical glitch with Substack, this post did not go out as scheduled. Our apologies! Our Poem of the Week is a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s second most quotable play — second to Hamlet, though you could make a case for Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. Brutus is a friend of Caesar, and an ally of Cicero and w…

The year was 1858, the place was Philadelphia, and a young minister, Dudley Atkins Tyng, was delivering a sermon before five thousand men. It was a meeting of the recently formed Young Men’s Christian Association, back in the days when every word in that title meant a great deal. The Reverend Tyng, an Episcopalian, had been drummed out of his paris…

The most famous judicial decision in Scripture was both a matter of judgment and of detective work. You’ll remember the two women who came before King Solomon, each claiming to be the mother of a little baby. The true mother claimed that the other woman had had a child who died when she smothered it by accident at night, and before daybreak this ca…

This week at Sometimes a Song we will be listening to an American jazz standard. In fact, “Body and Soul” may be the most-recorded jazz tune of all time. It has been performed by singers and musicians as various as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Billie Holliday, Perry Como, Guy Lombardo, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, …

For our Friday podcasts this fall, Dr. Esolen will continue to read all of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn aloud, chapter by chapter! And now Huck, who has stolen back the money the “Duke” and the “Dauphin” have swindled out of the three orphan girls, is working out a plan to get that money back to them, to expose the deadbeats as the frauds they are…

I mentioned a couple of days ago, in discussing our Word of the Week, soul, that you might give up your life for something you believe in, or for the people you love most in the world, but giving up your soul is another matter. And in our Film of the Week, All My Sons, the main character, Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson), has made that terrible trad…

Looking for a way to improve your teaching skills in the classroom when it comes to supporting our English Learners? Morgan Vana and Evan Hammons from Timber Ridge Elementary discuss some of the ways they have enhanced their practice. Guest(s) - Morgan Vana and Evan Hammans Thanks for listening!! If you are a Johnston Teacher and want more informat…

The author of our Hymn of the Week, or at least of the first stanza, was quite a player in the politics and the English church of his day. His name was Richard Baxter, a man who seemed capable of putting everybody off, not because he was boorish or aggressive (he wasn’t), but because he would not go along to the bitter end with one or another form …

“And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” says the sacred author, “and man became a living soul.” For me that is one of the most profound verses in all of Scripture, and one of the most mysterious. It cannot simply be that ha-adam was lifeless and inert before that breath, and then he got to move around. Michelangelo, I think, dramat…

Sometimes a Song is little but lovely like our selection for this week, “How High the Moon.” What it comes down to are two verses and a refrain with slight variation, and a brief but wistful and tuneful melody. That’s all, but wow! what a musical punch this little song packs. Written by a not-so-famous lyricist (Nancy Hamilton, better known for her…

What does it require to be someone in a position of high authority? How do you get the best from the men you lead? In Paradise Lost, as we saw yesterday, Satan enjoys the lordliness of it all, but it’s an odd kind of leadership that sweeps your followers straight into hell. Yet the true leader cannot be a merely nominal one, either. He must be both…

Sometimes a a happy song is written by a not particularly kind or likable guy. How is that? I haven’t been able to find out much biographical information about the composer of today’s selection, “Side by Side.” Harry Woods came from a musical family. His mother was a concert pianist, and although her son was born with a serious deformation of one o…

We have a chat about what ELPA21 is, what it means to our students, and how we can use the data from this assessment to support our ELs. Guest - Melissa Grinstead Thanks for listening!! If you are a Johnston Teacher and want more information on our programming, please go to the student services webpage and click on the ESOL tab. This webpage is lin…

Our first episode takes a glance at some of the recent history of ESOL programming at Johnston Community Schools along with some of the future goals. Guest - Melissa Grinstead Thanks for listening!! If you are a Johnston Teacher and want more information on our programming, please go to the student services webpage and click on the ESOL tab. This w…

Chapters 17-19, Teaching english & Chapter 6, Unlocking

Let's begin from the very beginning. There are so many acronyms related to ESOL. You have probably heard such words as ESL, ESOL, ELL, EL, L1, L2, and LEP. What do they all mean?