Teaching is a purposeful profession that brings deep satisfaction through shaping lives and building communities. At the same time, it involves daily challenges, managing time, meeting diverse needs, protecting your well-being, and working with colleagues. Thriving in this complexity requires more than subject knowledge. It calls for intentional strategies that help you stay focused, balanced, and collaborative. In this chapter, you will explore practical skills in self-management, organisation, prioritisation, classroom routines, and communication. These strategies will help you build confidence and create a calm, supportive environment where both you and your student can succeed.

Although recent scholarship emphasizes William Burroughs’s impact on rock musicians, his significance for performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson has not been explicated. She absorbed Burroughs’ works when asked to appear at the Nova Convention, a celebration of the writer in New York City in 1978. Based on archival research, this article reveals that “The Language of the Future,” Anderson’s Nova piece, was inspired by Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded for its rendering of electronic miscommunication and technological collapse. Anderson credited Burroughs for stimulating a new direction in her career. After meeting him at Nova, she adopted an androgynous performance persona, composed an homage song entitled “Language Is a Virus” as the central theme of United States (a six-hour multimedia presentation that cemented her reputation), and toured with Burroughs and poet John Giorno. The relationship was never personally close but remained intellectually significant until Burroughs’ death.

Scholars once divided British Romanticism into two generations (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake; Byron, Shelley, Keats), seeing the 1800s as a transitional period with little significant work. However, this view has changed with the rediscovery of women poets, working-class authors, and Black and Brown writers highlight Romanticism’s connection to global warfare, imperialism, slavery, and the expansion of communication technologies and print media. This chapter examines problems of communication in the works of William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith, using their writing to reconsider Romantic temporality. It explores how both poets engage with time’s contradictions – its rapidity and slowness – driven by commercial and geological changes. By analyzing their differing approaches to temporal irregularity, the chapter argues that Romanticism reflects not only rapid changes (revolutions, industrialization, media) but also slower, more subtle transformations. This view of time, including geological slowness, offers Romantic poets a way to explore time and history, presenting Romanticism itself as a poetic expression of the tension between speed and slowness.

Language is the primary mode of communication for humans. However, nonverbal communication, such as gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions, also play a crucial role. In some cases, these nonverbal forms are even more important than spoken language. For example, pointing is a social behavior observed from early infancy and is documented not only in humans but also in other primates like chimpanzees. This chapter explores how Artificial Intelligence can offer a unique perspective on pointing.

The chapter is centered around a cross-cultural approach of pointing development in the human species, in a socio-constructivist frame that insists on the cultural situatedness of meanings. Based on a few studies of infants’ pointing gestures, in relation with language development, the chapter goes back over potential issues and challenges in cross-cultural psychology and proposes some empirical and epistemological perspectives for future research. More specifically, the chapter highlights the multiple dimensions of the researchers’ responsibility when comparing early communicative development across cultures, referring for example to the notions of positionality and reflexivity. This contribution may guide the analysis of pointing throughout child development and help deconstruct the assumption of a universal expression of this gesture across cultures.

Before we can talk about how we learn, use, and lose language, we need to define what it is, and what it isn’t. Over the centuries, many people have attempted to describe language. In this chapter was ask: what is language? This is a simple enough question although the answer is much more complicated, and intriguing, than it seems at first. The question of “what is language?” isn’t something we can just sum up in a single pithy sentence. Language is a system of communication, but it’s so much more than that. Language is multi-faceted. It involves signs and symbols, smaller and bigger segments, dialects and accents, and also writing and signing. This chapter serves as a primer to introduce us to the basic underlying principles of language sceince, so we can now talk the talk.

An introduction to the general properties of communication and the differences between language and communcation. Includes discussion of medium of communication, purpose, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, etc.

In this chapter we look at the issue of sending messages over very large distances using electromagnetic radiation. An interstellar spacecraft is likely to have a small, low-power transmitter. Diffraction will reduce the intensity received at the Earth to tiny amounts, making the signal hard to detect even with large receivers. This limits the achievable data rates significantly. We see how to compute the power of the received signal, how to modulate messages into electromagnetic radiation, and how to use signal redundancy – error-correction coding – to reduce information loss due to noise. The received power may be so low that reception occurs in the regime of individual photon counting; we examine how many bits of information photons can carry. We will also examine the choice of wavelength – in particular optical vs radio – and the relative merits of placing receivers on the Earth compared to in space.