Tubes (or valves, as they were known in the UK) had one big quality advantaqe - noise level. A valve amplifer could produce dead silence: tranny amplifiers, even the best, had a faint but audible slushy hiss.

The dollar derives from 'taler', an abbreviation of the name of the place in Germany where silver was mined in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare plays on the words 'dolour' and 'dollar' in The Tempest.

This is so true. The bloodthirsty savages join the legal profession and become lawyers.

It was indeed a nice semantics lesson! As an English teacher I really appreciate learning advanced meanings and lexical shift, so this is a little gem for me.

"instantiate"? This horrible word doesn't mean what the writer thinks it does: it means "represent as or by an instance" (OED).

Manpower aplenty - but IT skills are at a premium in Jakarta, and my outfit can't even think about paying the salary a qualified network manager can command in the business sector. My school has a rudimentary setup: Internet access and shared printers is as far as it goes. Our IT department consists of one cheerful but unqualified guy who spends all his time firefighting basic problems. We're typical of our sector, and better than many. Indonesia's long years of IT stagnation and lack of investment in infrastructure and training have come home to roost.

Lucky you! If you have the financial, manpower and technological resources, more power to your digital elbow. But don't make the assumption that all schools are like yours. Mine is in Indonesia.

My kids may be in different ability streams, taking an optional subject, attending remedial classes, in a school sport team, on a community service project, on a field trip, in principal's detention, in the school clinic, etc. etc. Running a class and checking attendance in today's schools is a bit like trying to herd cats.

Critical thinking is the victim of a broader malaise. Ranking institutions in glorified league tables, rating schools by examination results, valuing qualifications in terms of future earning potential, forcing higher education in the UK to become a consumer-funded commodity, are the roots of the rot in education.

Good points. And there's another dimension, that hasn't been picked up in this discussion yet - modality of learning. Second-language learners may be visual, kinetic or audile types (or combinations of these, though there's usually a dominant mode), and successful learning depends on a teacher recognizing a mode and adopting an appropriate methodology. I've also observed that some learners have an affinity for one language (or language group), and experience difficulty getting to grips with other language groups. Another thing I've noticed is that, until the age of nine or ten, youngsters may have a separate 'language' for each of the people close to them. This is often seen in marriages where the parents have different mother-tongues and a child attends a playgroup or nursery school in a third language. Acquiring a language by analysis and conscious learning strategies usually kicks in around eleven or twelve.