What is pink? a rose is pink
By a fountain’s brink.
What is red? a poppy’s red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro’.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
What is green? the grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? Why, an orange,
Just an orange!
Trees
The oak is called king of trees,
The aspen quivers in the breeze,
The poplar grows up straight and tall,
The peach tree spreads along the wall,
The sycamore gives pleasant shade,
The willow droops in watery glade,
The fir tree useful timber gives,
The beech amid the forest lives.
Read-Aloud Poems, 120 of the world’s best-loved poems for parents and child to share, Edited by Glorya Hale
My English Phrases List - April - 2025
zip up
I was trying to zip up my coat when some material jammed in the zipper. - Beyond Phrasal Verbs for ESL Learners, Mastering English Phrasal Verbs in Context, by Thmoas A. Celentano
drop off
On the way to work I dropped my daughter off at school.
The postman dropped off a package at our house.
pick up
The train picked up the passengers at 3 pm.
bring up
The sad truth is that most of us have been brought up to eat certain foods and we stick to them all our lives.
Whether we find a joke funny or not largely depends on where we have been brought up.
brain drain
A U.S. brain drain could be Canada’s brain gain
My English Words List - April - 2025
magnolia
noun
gazebo
noun
a gazebo on the mansion’s south lawn
blast
noun
the trumpet’s blast
The driver gave a long blast on his horn.
the blast of the factory whistle
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
verb
The rock has been blasted away.
He blasted his rival with a pistol.
inset
noun
The floor is decorated with an inset of marble tiles.
verb
inset a map in a larger map
contiguous
adjective
the 48 contiguous states of the U.S.
contiguous row houses
Substring extraction. Get a contiguous subsequence of characters. - Algorithms, 4th Edition, Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.
debut
noun
the writer’s debut novel
in honor of their daughter’s debut
my debut as a pianist
verb
The network debuts a new sitcom tonight.
compliment
noun
Boys in the Midwest grow up without a word of praise, their parents fearful that a compliment might make them vain … — Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance, 1991
verb
complimented the pianist on his performance
turf
noun
a lawn made by laying turfs
Synthetic turf was installed in the playing field instead of grass.
playing fields with artificial turfs
patron
noun
She is a well-known patron of the arts.
charcoal
noun
propane
noun
The assistance goes directly to utilities to pay gas or electricity bills, or to a provider of fuel oil, propane or wood. — Kirsti Marohn, Twin Cities, 4 Apr. 2025
adjunct
adjective
an adjunct professor
limestone
noun
“I’m OK, this head is like limestone. It’s hard as a rock,” Ford joked. - Man, 18, charged after collision involving Ontario Premier Doug Ford
hilarious
adjective
Let’s get rid of these. They haven’t done anything hilarious enough to post on TikTok. - Waterloo Region Record, Rhymes with Oranges, April 10, 2025
scum
noun
Boil the chicken and use a spoon to remove any scum that floats to the surface.
Bathrooms Soap scum and mildew are some of the worst (and grossest) things to get rid of.
— NBC News, 18 Dec. 2017
Rinse to wash away germs, mold, water spots, and soap scum.
— Caitlin Sole, Better Homes & Gardens, 11 Aug. 2023
verb
Lieberman is the scummiest scumbag who ever scummed. — Jim Newell, Slate Magazine, 18 May 2017
plum
noun
a bowl of peaches and plums
prune
noun
Dried plums are also called “prunes.”
verb
prune the branches
push-pull
adjective
This kind of angry and defensive push-pull in scientific inquiry is nothing new. - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones
airy-fairy
adjective
There was no place for gods or metaphysics or any other kind of airy-fairy theories here. - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones
reconcile
verb
reconcile differences
It can be difficult to reconcile your ideals with reality.
condo
noun
Condo towers stand behind the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo.
Sikh
noun
clog
verb
The sink was clogged by dirt and grease.
When lights fuse, furniture gets rickety, pipes get clogged, or vacuum cleaners fail to operate, some woman assume that their husbands will somehow put things right.
serotonin
noun
Rotating shift workers tend to have lower levels of the feel-good hormone serotonin, leading to disturbed sleep patterns, suggests new research. - CBC News
The Months
January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December.
My English Phrases List - March - 2025
carry on
Sorry to interrupt, please carry on (with what you were saying).
Carry on with your work.
get on
despite his new job’s low pay, he was still getting on
The bus driver asks the boy, “Are you getting on?”
student teacher
a student who is engaged in practice teaching
Now, the student teacher helps structure online lessons. — jsonline.com, 7 Apr. 2020
swear in
Carney sworn in as prime minister with a reworked cabinet filled with new faces
My English Words List - March - 2025
foodie
noun
The restaurant is very popular among foodies.
morphine
noun
Opioids such as heroin, morphine and methadone were the most common drugs connected to fatalities, being implicated in 937 deaths. — Stephen Castle, New York Times, 10 Jan. 2025
morphology
noun
a: a study and description of word formation (such as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language
b: the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language.
flout
verb
In 1971, John Wheeler pointed out to his graduate student Jacob Bekenstein that black holes seem to flout the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
linchpin
noun
Because bees are a linchpin to the industry that feeds us. — National Geographic, 30 July 2019
excise
noun
an excise imposed on a number of goods
Excise taxes are taxes imposed by both the federal and provincial governments on alcohol,
tobacco, gasoline and vehicle air conditioning. Canada has some of the highest rates of taxes on
cigarettes and alcohol in the world. - CANADA’S TAXATION SYSTEM
equinox
noun
March equinox
The spring equinox arrives on March 20, and you’ll be immediately bitten by the adventure bug. — Nina Kahn, StyleCaster, 24 Feb. 2025
harmonize
verb
A group of singers were harmonizing on the street corner.
HST is Harmonized Sales Tax
levy
verb
levy a tax
They levied a tax on imports.
loophole
noun
Kurt Gödel never defined the constitutional loophole he’d found.
She took advantage of a loophole in the tax law.
shamrock
noun
a plant of folk legend with leaves composed of three leaflets that is associated with St. Patrick and Ireland
clover
noun
fiscal
noun
Sales were up in the last fiscal year.
jot
verb
jot this down
He paused to jot a few notes on a slip of paper.
carryover
noun
superstitions that are carryovers from ancient times
This is a friendly reminder that this week’s pizza order is a carry-over from the snow day we had on February 13th!
carrousel
noun
backcountry
noun
he took a month’s supplies and headed out to the backcountry
push-pull
adjective
a push-pull circuit
refuel
verb
The airplane landed to refuel.
reconciliation
noun
Signing the trade agreement was praised as an act of reconciliation between the two countries.
hackle
noun
The ways young children play can also raise animals’ hackles. — Alla Katsnelson, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2020
songbird
noun
By the end of June, many songbirds have stopped singing, making the birds much harder to spot. — Loren Holmes, Anchorage Daily News, 10 May 2018
skyrocket
verb
prices are skyrocketing
the crisis has caused oil prices to skyrocket
grin
verb
grinning from ear to ear
She continued to tease her brother, grinning wickedly.
grinned at the kids’ fooling around in the pool
noun
a happy grin
I wanted to wipe the grin off his face.
frown
verb
frowned in anger
critics frown on the idea
noun
a frowny face
gerund
noun
In the sentence “Learning can be fun,” “learning” is a gerund.
psychedelic
adjective
Ibogaine is a psychedelic drug from the bark of the iboga tree, a shrub native to Central Africa that is used in traditional healing ceremonies and initiation rituals. - Ibogaine: The last trip?, CBC News
mitigate
verb
mitigate a patient’s suffering
Myanmar
geographical name
Myanmar, one of Asia’s poorest nations, has largely been shut off from the world by its military government during four years of civil war. - CNN 10, March 31, 2025
rubble
noun
one of many devastating scenes across the crippled city of Mandalay damage stretches across entire neighborhoods homes and historic buildings reduced to rubble. Buddhist monasteries places of peace and reflection now piles of debris. - CNN 10, March 31, 2025
bodybuilding
noun
She’s been doing competitive bodybuilding for a few years now.
The power of believing that you can improve - Carol Dweck - TEDxNorrkoping
The power of yet.
I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn’t pass a course, they got the grade “Not Yet.” And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I’m nothing, I’m nowhere. But if you get the grade “Not Yet“, you understand that you’re on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.
“Not Yet” also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, “I love a challenge,” or, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative.” They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.
So what do they do next? I’ll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There’s hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don’t engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it.
How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who don’t know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, “We have already raised a generation of young workers who can’t get through the day without an award.”
So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet?
Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don’t do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.
There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems.
Just the words “yet” or “not yet,” we’re finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students’ mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter.
Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students.
So let’s talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they’ve done so poorly for so long that many people think it’s inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth-grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth-grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year, to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.
This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that’s when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That’s when they’re getting smarter.
I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, “Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that’s why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I’ve wasted most of my life.”
Let’s not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with “yet”.
Thank you.
My English Phrases List - February - 2025
think through
phrasal verb
I need time to think this through.
We have thought through the matter and have come to a decision.
lash out
I was only teasing him and suddenly he lashed out (at me) and hit me in the face.
turn to
I have always been able to turn to my parents when I’ve had a problem.
winner takes all
Ride hailing isn’t a winner-takes-all marketplace.
tie the knot
to perform a marriage ceremony
to get married
rat out
How could you rat me out to a teacher?
Someone ratted us out to the police.
You can’t rat out your teammates.
I can’t believe you ratted me out like that to Mom and Dad—I’m never telling you anything ever again!
wake-up call
US President Donald Trump said DeepSeek should be a “wake-up call for our industries”. - The GuardianWeekly
catfish effect
DeepSeek’s “catfish effect” persists, now centering on the prices of AI large models.
keep in touch
We keep in touch via video chat.
My English Words List - February - 2025
cello
noun
Yo-Yo Ma is probably the best-known classical musician and Cello player in the world - but he’s also famous for his kindness, generosity, and commitment to using music to bring joy to others. - Kid Musicians, by Robin Stevenson.
gazelle
noun
tokamak
noun
In the earyly 1950s, the Soviet theoretician I. E. Tamm and A. D. Sakharov refined Thomason and Blackman’s analysis by including magnetic coils in addition to the toroidal geometry in a device they named the Tokamak. The Tokomak uses the electric current resulting from the plasma flow to generate a helical magnetic field to produce stability in the plasma. This was so successful that in 1968 the USSR announced the production of the first quasistationary thermonuclear fusion reaction at Novosibirsk. - Nuclear Power, A very short introduction, by Maxwell Irvine
chip
noun
banana chips
potato chip
chocolate chips
I had a sandwich and a bag of potato chips for lunch.
biscotto
noun
hustle
noun
- informal : a dishonest plan for getting money : scam
Not only is Bitcoin an ecological disaster, it’s a hustle, a ponzi scheme, a gift to criminals, and just stupid. There are so many useful ways to spend energy. - James Gosling
hindsight
noun
and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
fentanyl
noun
Trump has demanded that Canada, Mexico and China curb the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. — Courtenay Brown, Axios, 1 Feb. 2025
cannabis
noun
Recreational cannabis is now legal in 24 states and three more could legalize some form of marijuana sales this year. — Will Yakowicz, Forbes, 3 Jan. 2025
marijuana
noun
anti-marijuana legislation
upend
verb
The security inspector upended my bag and dumped everything out.
A giant wave upended the surfers.
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
mean
adjective
When someone is mean, they are not nice or kind.
How could you be so mean?
nemesis
noun
Nemesis! Thank you. That was bugging me.
Oświęcim
Oświęcim was the site of the World War II Nazi concentration camp usually called Auschwitz.
culinary
adjective
culinary recipes
culinary schools
They serve a variety of culinary delights.
The notorious LVB was obsessively particular about making his own coffee. Unlike many composers of his day, he was a commoner and had the culinary skills for the task. It starts with grinding precisely 60 coffee beans — no more, no less. He would even count the beans out to be certain, and if he made a mistake in his count, he would start over. He did it even if he had visitors watching him. As the youngest, and without a noble title, young Beethoven was given kitchen duties, serving in the galley as a scullion.