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An alternative-certification program that recruits math teachers believes educators could learn a thing or two about classroom management from stand-up comics.

To help its teachers develop that knack, Math for America is offering its New York City fellows after-school improv comedy classes taught by Rachel Hamilton, an alum of Second City, the Chicago-based troupe that launched the careers of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Amy Poehler, among others.

"The drive behind all of our PD, whether it's the driest high-level math presentation or improv comedy, is to emphasize how this is going to be applied in the classroom so that your students are successful in the classroom and in the workforce,' Umphrey said.

To support these students’ acquisition of a second language, researchers have identified two instructional approaches. First, proponents of the structural approach argue that drill and practice is the best way to learn grammar and vocabulary.

Second, the cognitive approach emphasizes how the learner interacts with language. An effort is made to make language acquisition a more active process. Instruction is based on activating prior knowledge and allowing the learner to build the cognitive skills required to understand, process, and interact with a language. Effective opportunities to learn a second language with the cognitive approach can be divided into three stages: a) comprehensible input, b) interaction, and c) comprehensible output (Plass and Jones, 2005).