We all have our sources of motivation and our sources of inspiration. One author who I secretely get many of my teaching and research ideas from is William James (another is Leo van Lier, especially his 1996 book ‘Interaction in the language curriculum : awareness, autonomy and authenticity’). Born in 1842 and a renowned psychologist and philosopher, it is often uncanny how he worked out many of the most vexing problems of the mind, based largely on intuition and without all of the tools and methodologies developed much later. James’s work has a lot to say about how people learn, and by extension about education. His ‘Talks to Teachers’ are a good example of this. I have even found his work relevant when doing my PhD research on tasks in second language acquisition, a topic far removed from the original focus of his work. When looking at the role of attention in second language learning for example and discussing limited-capacity theories, I found this: The number of things we may attend to is altogether indefinite, depending on the power of the individual intellect, on the form of the apprehension, and on what the things are. When apprehended conceptually as a connected system, their number may be very large. But however numerous the things, they can only be known in a single pulse of consciousness for which they form one complex ‘object’, so that properly speaking there is before the mind at no time a plurality of ideas, properly so called. (1890, p. 262) . Here, James has relevance well over a hundred years after he wrote this. Another example, more practical, is his axiom ‘no reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression’ by which he means that education cannot be successful unless it engages learners, unless it involves or provokes reaction, a mental, personal, genuine response, and unless it involves expression. He goes on to talk about the need to make learners do things and to engage in an active way with whatever subject they are studying. Does this start to sound a bit like task-based language teaching? There are many more examples, and I encourage you to look beyond the sometimes slightly dense and stilted (it is 19th century writing!) language and have a read through, at least, ‘talks for teachers’, as a source of inspiration and ideas.