Organize your teaching: 8 tips for using browser bookmarks to keep track of web-based resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach.

Overview, with tips and global solutions: here.

Solution for keeping track of websites: learn to use bookmarks well. Here are 8 tips and tricks.

Homework in Foreign Language Teaching: what kind of homework are language teachers assigning, and why?

In preparing for an inset on homework in my school, I began looking for advice on best practices for homework in the foreign language classroom. This sort of literature is pretty hard to find. I also realised I don't really know all that much about the homework my colleagues in the Foreign Languages department of my school are assigning, so I decided to ask them. Here is the survey I sent. The results will help us as a department to share tips, reflect on our own practice, and align our homework with the philosophy of the school.

Barry Kosky's Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin at the Zurich Opera house. A review in the form of notes.

Curtain rises, beginning: the two women are frozen, they are a photograph. They then begin moving when the music changes, they are now a memory. They are dressed in black, and there is a haze on the stage. They are singing of the past. Complacent, quaint, but ever so forlorn. The two women, sung by Liliana Nikiteanu and Margerita Nekrasova, sing beautifully a sad song with folk twang. The lower voice is so earthy it sounds – how do I describe this – like a woolen muff has been dipped in wine and squeezed into sound. They sing of men – men who are deceitful in life, but who become somehow saintly in their passing. My mother says my grandmother did the same hagiographic nattering about a husband she couldn't bear until he died, whereupon he could do no wrong. Ahh, the passage of time.

Organize your teaching: computer tips for teachers looking to keep track of their resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach. What do I mean by resources? 

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 3: the mystery of the choir)

In the past two articles I wrote on Bach's Johannespassion, I referred to the dual role of the choir (Part 1 and Part 2).

"The pain that accompanies the joy, borne of Christ's suffering, becomes our own pain, the people's pain, the choir's pain, as the choir plays the part of Christ's followers and indeed all humankind." 

"The choir itself has two roles -- to sing to God as Christians, and to reenact the passion as a mob, as Jews." 

"I find the structure of the work fascinating in the way it moves back and forth between different characters, arias, recitative and the chimerical choir."

The choir of this oratorio sings three kinds of music:

Schubert's Winterreise with Michael Volle (Helmut Deutsch accompanying) at the Zurich opera house: review and notes

I was lucky enough last night to hear Michael Volle sing Schubert's Winterreise at the Zurich opera house. Lucky because I can afford the too expensive ticket of 60 CHF. Lucky because I lucked into a seat in the first row, and to boot was on the left-hand side, with an excellent view of Helmut Deutsch's fingers at the keyboard. I've always enjoyed concerts more when my view was better, and this vicinity to the performers was a rare luxury. Lucky finally because I live in a city where Lieder are performed fairly regularly and to a very high standard. I remember spending a week in New York and finding no performances of Lieder anywhere, and now I have steady access to it, and am grateful.

So far in Zurich at the opera house I've heard:

• Pavol Breslik sing Die schöne Müllerin (well cast, well sung, strangely tense, with a fabulous encore performance of "Der Erlkönig"). Better than his recent Lensky in Barry Kosky's Onegin.
• Waltraud Meier sing various Lieder, the finest of which was her Schönberg (the great "Lied der Waldtaube" from the Gurrelieder), the poorest of which was her botched encore singing of "Der Erlkönig". I find connecting to her sung emoting to be difficult, but the Schönberg was the absolute best fit for her voice (far better than her uneven Brahms).
• and now Michael Volle, easily the biggest voice I've ever heard sing Lieder, sung bigger than Hans Hotter. Fittingly for music this intense, there was no encore, not even of "Der Erlkönig."

What is it like to have a modern Wagnerian baritone sing little Schubert, what with Schubert's almost embarrassingly intimate and twisted pain? That was my question going in, and my focus throughout. I am sad to say that Herr Volle waited until the very last song (the mercilessly desolate "Leiermann," which he sang spectacularly well) to show his mastery of delicate singing -- delicacy produced by a change in tone, a fresh rendering of the text, a greater nuance with dynamics, a capacity to haunt without resorting to force. Delicacy: overdo it and the singing is mannered and enervated. But to sing Schubert straightforward or too boldly is to repaint Van Gogh as if he were Van Dyck. You cannot use the voice of the hunter to sing the whimpering of the hunted. 

The Netherparts: How low country can you go?

For Easter, I visited the Netherlands. As I get older I care less and less about manufacturing experiences out of travel, am less often alone when I travel, and am despite my deadened aesthetic sensitivities more confident with age that I am seeing a place on my terms while still somehow submitting to it. So it was with the Netherlands, and here are my notes.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam was that it is overrun with Brits, and perhaps the best way to illustrate the Dutch character is in comparison to its neighbors. If Brexit was an impulse for people who complain about too many Poles living in their midst, then perhaps Amsterdam needs a counter-gesture (Brittenuit?) to close its airports to the flights leaving every three minutes from England's airports. Or maybe they, the locals, simply don't give a Dam.

The British there travel in packs, either in groups of twenty twenty-somethings or as pleasant families; their is no other deployment visible of Brits in Amsterdam. You don't see tour buses full of retirees, or romantic couples, or thirty+ sports tourists, for example. You either get prams, or Instagram (strollers or rollers?). It is not as if the twenty-somethings you see are on their best behavior. The only favor they would appear to do the city, besides filling its coffers with cash and its canals with upchuck, is that in comparison they make the Dutch seem so poised. Placing a British twenty-something tourist in Amsterdam, all dolled up and blinged out, next to a Dutch twenty-something local is like putting a donkey next to a thoroughbred, except that the donkey speaks a language you mostly recognize, and the thoroughbred speaks ... well, more on what the Dutch speak later.