About

Hi, Kids!

In 2007, when I was living in China and teaching thousands of students, I was called upon to write three lessons a week for the local newspaper, the Shenzhen Daily. Sometimes they reduced my assignment to twice a week, and sometimes increased it to four, but anyway in the past 14 years I have written nearly 2,000 articles!

With some of my thousands of students in China

And now I'm sharing them all with you--for FREE!

The first articles I wrote were about a variety of subjects: idioms, slang, figures of speech, common mistakes, clichés, grammar, jokes, literature, and so on. I wrote around 260 such articles from my starting date in August of 2007 until May of 2009, nearly two years.

Since then, I've written:

• around 320 lessons on well-known English proverbs (from May 2009 to December 2011)
• around 465 dialogues between students about subjects often studied in college (from December 2011 to April 2015)
• around 280 short biographies of great scientists, inventors, mathematicians, musicians, artists, philosophers, writers, and historical figures (from April 2015 to January 2017)
• around 60 articles on holidays around the world (from February to June 2017)
• around 200 profiles of countries of the world (from June 2017 to November 2018)
• around 270 examinations of wars and battles and their historic significance (from November 2018 to October 2020)
• and, currently, around 100 retellings (so far) of stories from famous fairy tales, dramas, short stories, novels, poems, and movies (from October 2020 to the present)

Find a list of topics on the "Topics" page, and the title of every lesson on the "Index" page.

Beginning with the biographies, I started adding vocabulary exercises to the lessons as published, with sometimes as few as five terms, but eventually standardized on 10. For the lessons before that, I have improvised exercises based on the original material.

Also, let me remind you that these lessons were written for a specific audience in a specific time and place--that is, Chinese learners of English whose skills were high enough to allow them to read an English-language newspaper. I have "generalized" these lessons were possible, but vestiges of the original context may remain.

Still, there's something for everybody!