“Since there is not single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.”
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Here are three context clues worksheets for the words fanatic, fanaticism, and fanatical. I thought these words appropriate in this gruesome political campaign season. If you haven’t dealt with these worksheets before, you may want to consult the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual that will help explain why these read and look the way they do.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Have you read Theodore Sizer’s books? He was among the founders of the Coalition of Essential Schools, which served to put into practice the principles of secondary education he espoused in the first book of the Horace Trilogy (as it has come to be known), Horace’s Compromise. I recently read the second volume of the trilogy, Horace’s School, which my incessant haunting of used bookstores fortuitously supplied me.
I wish it were possible for every high school in the United States to have someone with the late Mr. Sizer’s intellect, passion, talent and decency on its faculty.
In the Horace trilogy, Mr. Sizer uses the fictional and allegorical Horace Smith to spin out a didactic exploration of the state of American high schools. Horace, unsurprisingly, finds that his high school–therefore mine and yours–falls short. Our schools don’t fall short because of low test scores, but because they fail utterly to perceive, let alone work to develop, the innate and unique talent every child possesses and with which they arrive at school. Mr. Sizer patently–and refreshingly, in our currently benighted atmosphere of educational policy–respected children and their parents; his model of the ideal high school exemplifies that respect.
In an educational cosmology where one size fits all, and tests are considered the only reliable lens through which to view educational ability and attainment, Theodore Sizer firmly and thoughtfully dissented. He observes, in an exercise of common sense that in a reasonable world would persuade even the most myopic educational “reformers,” that not all children learn in the same way, possess the same interests, or arrive from the same social or family milieu. His view that our schools ought to recognize, respect and even honor these differences seems basic–and would give us, in Diane Ravitch’s elegant phrase, the schools we deserve. Yet current educational policy pointedly, indeed aggressively, ignores these differences.
In the final analysis, if we are to educate all children, we must recognize the differences in the way they learn, their backgrounds, their individual strengths and weaknesses, and their common humanity. We ignore this at our peril, as the state of our schools presently attests.
Ted Sizer died in October of 2009. His passing impoverishes, alas, our discourse on education and therefore, our schools.
I recently read The List (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) by Robert E. Belknap. Mr. Belknap used this fine quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson (which a small amount of internet research reveals is drawn from Emerson’s Nature) as his epigraph:
“He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.”
Phew, busy week. I’ll keep this short so I can sustain some stamina to get through this afternoon’s round (after being here last evening until almost eight for same) of parent-teacher conferences.
So, here is a learning support for Latinisms and Latin abbreviations that commonly appear in English expository prose. These terms often trip up students, and in any case, I believe strongly that we ought to be teaching, as part of a broader curriculum for teaching writing, the more common of these, like e.g. and i.e., if not viz. and Q.E.D.
But what do you think? Should we bother with this at all? I welcome (i.e. seek, beg for, pursue, wheedle after, crave) your comments.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
I’ve always enjoyed this squib from David Grambs’ The Random House Dictionary for Readers and Writers (New York: Random House, 1990) which appears, alas, to be out of print.
“Timestyle, Time-ese n. The characteristically heady and melodramatically compressed prose style of Time magazine, with particular reference to its zesty verbs, marshaled characterizing adjectives and hyphenated compound words, clever coinages and puns, and above all (formerly) the frequent use of verbs at the beginnings of sentences and hence inverted syntax.
Brain child of joke-making, china-dog-collecting, cordovan-shoe-wearing Briton Hadden more than Time co-founding, beetle-browed, baggy-britched Henry Luce was Timestyle. Wrote Wolcottt Gibbs in a New Yorker profile of Luce: ‘Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it will end, knows God!’ Ended has inversion since Godwent Luce.'” –John B. Bremner, Words on Words
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.”
Plato, Protagoras (380 B.C.)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Next week is another round of parent-teacher conferences, so I am busily preparing for them–amid the usual work adjusting readings for students, developing new materials for them, etc. I’ll keep this week’s text short and basic, and spare you the exposition.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a word root worksheet, so here are two: the first one is Latin word roots mat, matri, and mater which I am confident you know means mother; the second one is for the Latin word roots patr, patri and pater, which means not just father, but also fatherland. If you’re not familiar already with these worksheets, which I use for vocabulary building with the struggling readers I serve, than you might need to consult the Word Root Worksheets Users’ Manual.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Reading Jonathan Mooney and David Cole’s book Learning Outside the Lines offers the special education teacher both a disturbing and an edifying look at special educational theory and practice as students experience them. This is particularly true for these authors, both of whom struggled in special ed classrooms. Their book also tells a distressing story about the hell on earth school can be for students with diverse learning styles. Both Mr. Mooney and Mr. Coles are quite candid about their struggles in their lives at school.
Mr. Mooney, I suspect, is the dominant prose stylist in this book’s composition; he went on to write the entertaining and enlightening travelogue (reviewed elsewhere on this blog), The Short Bus. That said, both of the authors contribute a great deal to this useful and heartfelt manual.
For those of us who seek to assist struggling learners, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that many of our charges don’t appreciate their roles as the objects of our efforts. Who better than our students themselves to aid us, and thereby become the co-subjects of our teaching? Who better understands the needs of a struggling learner than that learner him or herself? This book, which was really written for students, makes a powerful case for the teacher’s role as that of facilitator, and therefore as cooperating agent in the project to raise our students’ (nascent?) awareness of their own way of learning and understanding the content we are obliged to teach them. For me, the strength of this book rests in what it offers people who are not necessarily its intended audience, i.e. teachers. As the book’s graphic design indicates, Messrs. Mooney and Cole wrote it for students who want to learn with their own “…purpose in mind–not your parents’, not your teacher’s, not your school’s.”
Dr, Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in issues of focus, concentration and attention, supplies a thoughtful forward. A self-described “stupid kid,” Dr. Hallowell is a widely published author and served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 21 years. Given these bona fides, and given the fact that Jonathan Mooney and David Coles both graduated near the top of their class at Brown, the thoughtful reader will pause to wonder just what it is people mean when they speak of “stupid kids.”
This insiders’ perspective on education in general and “special education” in particular is simply invaluable. Those of us working in the field will recognize an unhappy aspect of our work: we are trained, whether we care to admit it or not, to recognize learning struggles and differences as disabilities and deficits. Within this epistemological framework, recognizing and assessing potential is by definition a challenge. This is unfortunate indeed, as it is almost inevitably an outlook that will diminish goals and reinforce the status quo.
Until special education teachers (and I confess I am increasingly uncomfortable with the term “special education”) are trained to recognize and nurture potential, and not plan for deficits and disabilities, we condemn ourselves–and more tragically our students–to an endless cycle of tedious remediation and rote work. We will miss the very rich possibility of helping our students develop potential and talents they may not even know they have. We should seek to be discoverers of potential, not describers of deficits.
I bid Jonathan Mooney and David Cole long and productive careers. We teachers need their counsel on how to do our jobs.
“A society that is concerned about the strength and wisdom of its culture pays careful attention to its adolescents.”
Theodore R. Sizer (1932-2009)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
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