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Cows and Pockets: 10 Chinese Idioms for AAPI Heritage Month

Posted on May 01, 2023

The Chinese idiom "Nine cows and one strand of hair" means . . ? (Image by Amber Kipp on Unsplash.)

Pop quiz: What does the Chinese idiom "Nine cows and one strand of hair" mean? If you don't yet know, you're not alone—non-English cultures can sometimes get short shrift in U.S. schools, but that is slowly beginning to change.

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Amina Saïd's Border-Defying Poetry

Posted on April 17, 2023

Tunisian poet Amina Saïd.

This National Poetry Month, consider the powerful poetry of Amina Saïd, who takes on essential questions about life and fate, vision and blindness, death and memory. Marilyn Hacker's lucid translation will help students connect with these universal elements, as well as with the vivid sensory details, in Saïd's series “Clairvoyant in the City of the Blind,” which appeared in an issue of Words Without Borders featuring women authors from Tunisia.

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"None of Your Business" on Mango Street: Linking Global Women's Voices

Posted on March 22, 2023

Left: Cover art for first edition of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Right: Three people holding Russian New Year's gifts and wearing costumes. "We'll give the children the New Year." By Vadim Kasimov, 2013.

A modern classic of Latinx migration literature, a contemporary Russian story about parental alcoholism: what could they possibly have in common?

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7 Complex Female Characters in International Literature

Posted on March 15, 2023

“A woman could fall in love for a cheap word. That's women for you!" the street vendor Damao asserts in Ye Mi’s short story, “Love’s Labor.” Damao makes lots of confident pronouncements about women, but they are mostly proven false—the woman in the story is much too complex to conform to aphorisms. (And Teaching Idea 3 has relevant classroom activities.)

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