Wordplay...

One of the reasons that I love the English language so much is that it's so complicated. Just when you think that you have a rule worked out for something, you find the exception. It makes things more interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn't make it particularly easy to explain rules of English to a group of 8 year-olds.

This morning, we were looking at pre-fixes. The task was to look through a dictionary, in groups of two, and find words that begin with ad- or al-. Then, the aim was to decide whether the ad- or al- in that word was a prefix or not. To help in this difficult objective, we explained the meaning of each of these pre-fixes; ad means 'moving towards' and al means 'in a state of...' In itself, those are pretty abstract concepts. Now try applying them to every word that uses those pre-fixes. Now try explaining your reasoning to a bunch of children aged 8. Then get them to work some out for themselves. I'm quickly learning that this teaching lark is a lot harder than it first seems. Trying to motivate children to do things is hard enough. Trying to get them to do things that they don't understand is practically impossible.

Out of school, I've been living wild. Monday night was the craziest. I went to the pub with Matt Ashworth, Tim next door and Rob Littler. We took a game of Scrabble with us. That's my idea of a great night out. The pub, with a word game. It seems that we weren't alone in this; the man at the table next to us had got a cryptic crossword that he was puzzling over. I won't bore you with a play-by-play of our contest, but I will tell you that it was very close; all decided in the last three words played. I'll also tell you that I was victorious. I remain unbeaten on my home turf of Leeds, and I intend to make sure that this remains the case...