“Education is not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the acquisition of wealth. It is an initiation into life of spirit, a training of the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.”
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900-1990)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Hispanic Heritage Month begins today, so for the next five Fridays, I’ll post readings and comprehension worksheets in its honor. To kick off the month, here are an Intellectual Devotional reading on Pele, the legendary Brazilian soccer star, and a comprehension worksheet to complement it. This should be relatively high interest material, particularly for kids from Latin America who follow soccer–as so many of the students I serve 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.
“It is counterproductive, if not unethical, to teach toward one specific target of learning and grade learners on another.”
Excerpted from: Hillocks, George. Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12: Supporting Claims with Relevant Evidence and Clear Reasoning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2011.
The other day I used this this short word root exercise on the Greek root lip/o in one of my first classes for the year. It means, as its definitions show, fat, which explains how liposuction got its name. It occurred to me that it might be a useful do-now worksheet for science teachers, so here it is.
If you find typos in this document, 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.
“Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.”
H.L. Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
You might find these five homophone worksheets on the nouns counsel and council useful. As the header indicates, counsel can also be used as both a transitive and an intransitive verb; indeed, these worksheets to call upon students to use counsel as a verb.
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.
Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett I: Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women
“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole. Beckett’s probably a clever fellow, but here he has elaborated a slavish and rather incoherent imitation of Joyce, most eccentric in language and full of disgustingly affected passages—also indecent: the book is damned—and you wouldn’t sell the book even on its title.”
Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett II: Molloy and Malone Dies
“I couldn’t read either book—that is, my eye refused to sit on the page and absorb meanings, or whatever substitutes for meaning in this kind of thing…. This doesn’t make sense and it isn’t funny…. I suspect that the real fault in these novels, if I cared to read them carefully, would be simply dullness. There’s no sense considering them for publication here; the bad taste of the American public does not yet coincide with the bad taste of the French avant-garde.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
School started this week, and I’d hoped to get something big and splashy up for this Friday. Indeed, I’m working on a revision this Weekly Text, from August 28, 2015, on Daniel Willingham’s First Demonstration of Memory, but I’m not quite done with it. However, circumstances intruded, so I have very little to offer this week. Next Friday begins National Hispanic Heritage Month for 2017, so I’ll be posting, as last year, four readings and comprehension worksheets in observance of its four week span.
Because I work in a business-themed high school in the Financial District in New York City, I found it necessary to develop these two context clues worksheets on the words wholesale and retail relatively early on in my tenure here. They’re used as adjectives and adverbs in these exercises. Should you choose to engineer these worksheets further, these words can be used as verbs and nouns as well.
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.
“A second program of research addressing multimedia learning has been conducted by Richard Mayer and his colleagues and is summarized in Mayer (2001). A caveat relative to this research is that multimedia are construed very narrowly in this research to mean ‘the presentation of material using both words and pictures’ (p. 2) and do not study information technologies specifically. Furthermore, the preponderance of his research has been conducted with young adults. Nevertheless, we include his work because: (a) it is informed by and contributes to a theory of multimedia learning, drawing upon Paivio’s (1986) dual coding theory, Baddeley’s (1992) working memory theory, and Mayer’s (1996) theory of meaningful learning; (b) it attends to the issue of individual differences; and (c) it may productively inform the work of learning scientists studying new literacies.
This program of research has yielded seven principles regarding the effective integration of words and pictures:
1. Multimedia principle–Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
2. Spatial contiguity principles–Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are present near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
3. Temporal contiguity principle–Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
4. Coherence principle–Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
5. Modality principle–Students learn better when an animation is accompanied by spoken text, rather than printed text.
6. Redundancy principle–Students learn better from an animation accompanied with spoken text rather than an animation accompanied with spoken text and printed text, and
7. Individual difference principle–Design effects positively correlate with users’ domain knowledge and spatial ability.
Learning scientists should study whether these principles still hold in the contexts they find most compelling: real-life settings in which learning is taking place through interactions with others and with technological artifacts.”
Excerpted from: Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Barbara G. Ladewski, “Literacy and the Learning Sciences,” in in The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, ed. Robert Keith Sawyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 306.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Here is a short exercise on the Greek word root rhin/o. For those of you who don’t watch “South Park” (home of “Tom’s Rhinoplasty”!), this root means nose. This is another root that shows up in words used extensively in the healthcare professions. If you have students expressing interest in working in healthcare, this is a root they ought to know.
If you find typos in this document, 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.
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