“Aryans: The people of the Rigveda, who invaded Iran and India from the northwest in the later 2nd millenium BC, By one theory they were responsible for the downfall of Indus Civilization. Their language was an early form of Sanskrit, the most easterly of the Indo-European tongues, but the use of their name to describe other Indo-European speakers is to be strongly deprecated.”
Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.
“Aporia: An aporia is a puzzling condition or situation. The rhetorical application of aporia is to pretend to an inability or confess to an actual inability to resolve a problem or answer a question. One might say of a political figure whom one was attacking, ‘I don’t know what he lost first, his ability to tell the truth from a lie or his ability to behave morally.’ The device is often used when the question is being begged. A homely version of it is the often-heard comment ‘How can people be so stupid’ uttered when something the speaker disapproves of has just happened.”
Excerpted from: Trail, George Y. Rhetorical Terms and Concepts: A Contemporary Glossary. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“qualia n. pl. A philosophical term for sensory experiences that have distinctive subjective qualities but lack any meaning or external reference to the objects or events that cause them, such as the painfulness of pinpricks or the redness of red roses. The term is virtually synonymous with sense data. See also sense data, inverted qualia, phi movement, sensation, sensibalia. quale sing.
[From Latin qualis of what kind]
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“The quality of students’ understanding rests on their ability to master and use bodies of knowledge that are valued by their culture. More specifically, it rests on their ability to make productive use of the concepts, theories, narratives, and procedures available in such disparate domains as biology, history, and the arts. Students should be able to understand the humanly constructed nature of this knowledge and to draw on it to solve problems, create products, make decisions, and in the end transform the world around them. Put differently, students should use knowledge to engage in a repertoire of performances valued by the societies in which they live.”
Excerpted from: Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
“Determining the content of curriculum is a thorny problem. Whose favorite ideas are addressed, whose interests are served, whose passions are engaged, who makes curriculum decisions, and how do we ensure that all students are comparably prepared? The history of previous efforts to teach for understanding, as Vito Perrone describes in Chapter One, reveals reveals some recurring features of curriculum designed to foster understanding. One is that curriculum the taught in school relates to the concerns and experiences that occupy students in their regular lives. Perrone argues that in order to make these connections between schoolwork and students’ daily lives, teachers must be primary decision makers about curriculum. Teachers must select the substance and adjust the shape of curriculum to meet the needs of their particular students. Another basic criterion for curriculum designed to promote understanding is that it does not simply impart information. Rather the curriculum must involve students in continuing spirals of inquiry that draw them from one set of answers to deeper questions and that reveal connections between the topic at hand and other fundamental ideas, questions, and problems. Yet teachers must balance these needs for curriculum tailored to particular groups of students and for open-ended inquiry with a concern for some degree of standardization, equity, and legitimacy. How should teachers choose and design curriculum that meets these various requirements?
This question occupied the Teaching for Understanding project and its group of university-based researchers and teachers from middle and high schools who taught a range of subject matters–history, mathematics, science, and English.They readily acknowledged Dewey’s idea of organizing curriculum around themes as a fruitful starting place. But the question of which topics to select remained. A list of generative topics for different subject matters would be too cumbersome. Instead of stipulating particular topics, this collaborative group set itself the task of defining criteria to help teachers identify and evaluate generative curricular topics?”
Excerpted from: Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
“rites of passage: The rituals associated with a change of status, for example from youth to adulthood, and from unmarried to married state. In his classic study by the same name, Arnold van Gennep distinguished rites of separation, rites of segregation, and rites of integration. Rituals associated with a change in status were identified as having these three stages. Between each there are clear symbolic demarcations.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Golden Section: (golden mean) A geometrical proportion known at least since Euclid and regarded as a universal law of the harmony of proportions in both art and nature. The common formula is: to divide a finite line so that the shorter part is to the longer part as the longer part is to the whole.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged art/architecture/design, numeracy, philosophy/religion, readings/research
“Just how much unknown stuff can a text have in it before a reader will just declare mental overload! and call it quits? This quantity surely varies depending on the reader’s attitude toward reading and motivation to understand that particular text. Still, studies have measured readers’ tolerance of unfamiliar vocabulary, and have estimated that readers need to know about 98% of the words for comfortable comprehension. That may sound high, but bear in mind that the paragraph you’re now reading has about 75 unique words. So 98% familiarity means that this and every paragraph like it would have one or two words that are unfamiliar to you.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“What classical writer told the story of Jason and the Argonauts? The most complete treatment is the Argonautica by third-century poet Apollonius of Rhodes.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
“Indo-Aryan: Branch, within Indo-European, of Indo-Iranian: first attested by texts in Vedic (Sanskrit) dating from the 2nd millenium BC, and by transcriptions from the first. Also called ‘Indic.’
The modern Indo-Aryan languages are indigenous to most of the north and centre of the Indian subcontinent, with outliers in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and the Maldives. Hindi-Urdu and Bengali are by far the largest; of the remainder, Marathi, in the south of the main area, Gujarati in the south-west, Sindhi to the west, Punjabi in the north-west, Assamese in the east, Oriya in the south-east, and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka all have a current literary standard and are linked to major political units. Others, such as Bhojpuri or Maithili, also have speakers in the tens of millions.
Across the main area, separate languages have arisen largely by divisions within a geographical continuum. Hence internal branches are not definitively established.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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