It’s been quiet over here… a little too quiet sometimes. Silence can mean different things to different people: in Finland, silence is almost sacred. In Canada, we tend to say that silence is golden, but we run from its intimacy when it does grace us. Online, it can mean anything, but mostly it’s interpreted as abandon. A silence blog or website is an abandoned and neglected one. If I can choose, I’d interpret the silence on these pages as…

Awhile back, I was talking with one of my students from the Finnish Language Group Program about how English in Finland gets to be so comfortable, that it’s easy to get stuck just speaking English.

We all know the hero story: a problem, a struggle, and either a tragedy or a success in the end. This is the story on which we base many of our important life moments, whether we realize it or not. The hero defeats or is defeated… but what about the struggle? How many of us are so deterred by struggling that we don’t end up trying at all?