Some of your students may be bilingual and some may have taken a course in Spanish, Latin, or Japanese. But are any of them fluent in Kinesics? Kinesics is the study of body language as a form of communication. People engaged in a conversation may exchange 200 words per minute, but more than half of their communication is nonverbal. We often use gestures, postures and eye contact without thinking twice about them, but these behaviors can communicate...

When we read a billboard, its message is usually larger than life and quite clear. Is it possible to read people's thoughts and feelings just by looking at them? Well, we can get pretty close if we learn to identify the silent signals they send. We send signals all the time and may not even be aware of it. Gestures we use and faces we make send signals. The volume, speed and inflections of our voices communicate in ways that we may not intend. (Learning...

Thanks to a bully in gym class, unpopular Nate suffers a broken finger -- the middle one, splinted to flip off the world. It won't be the last time a middle finger is raised on this day. Dreamer Claire envisions herself sitting in an artsy café, filling a journal, but fate has other plans. One cheerleader dates a closeted basketball star; another questions just how, as a "big girl," she fits in. A group of boys scam drivers for beer money without...