“psychosocial stressor: n. Any life event or change, such as divorce, marriage, bereavement, loss or change of a job, or moving house, that causes stress and may be associated with the onset or deterioration of a mental disorder. See also adjustment disorder.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged health, professional development, social-emotional learning
“Small is Beautiful: An influential book (1973) by the German-born British economist E.F. Schumacher (1911-77), subtitled ‘A Study of Economics as if People Mattered.’ Schumacher argues in favor of small-scale institutions and sustainable development, and against capital-intensive, high-tech solutions, especially in the Third World. The title phrase has entered popular usage.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A brief account of or a story about an individual or an incident. The anecdotal digression is a common feature of narrative in prose and verse. In the history of English literature and of literary characters the anecdote has a specific importance. In his Dictionary Samuel Johnson defined the term as “something yet unpublished; secret history”. During the 18th century and interest in “secret” histories increased steadily, and no doubt there is some connection between this and the growing popularity of –ana, table-talk and biography (qq.v) at that time. During the second half of the 18th century there was almost a craze for “secret” histories. In the last thirty years of it over a hundred books of anecdotage were published in England. Isaac Disraeli, father of Benjamin, became one of the best known and most assiduous gleaners of anecdotes. In 1791 he published three volumes titled Curiosities of Literature, consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Historical, and Critical. These he followed with other collections: Calamities of Authors (1812-1813) in two volumes, and Quarrels of Authors (1814) in three volumes. In 1812 John Nichols published the first of nine volumes in a series titled Literary Anecdotes of the 18th Century. Such works remained popular during the Victorian period. Nor is the appetite for collections of anecdotes assuaged. In 1975 there was The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Why do you think these prehistoric people painted animals on the walls of caves? Just for decoration? That doesn’t seem likely, because the caves were so dark. Of course we can’t be sure, but we think they may have been trying to make magic, that they believed that painting pictures of animals on the walls would make those animals appear. Rather like when we say ‘Talk of the devil’ (‘look who’s here’) when someone we’ve been talking about turns up unexpectedly. After all, these animals were their prey, and without them they would starve. So, they may have been trying to invent a magic spell. It would ne nice to think that such things work. But they never have yet.”
Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Narrative, whatever its medium, holds the interest of the audience by raising questions in their minds and delaying the answers…. The questions are broadly of two kinds, have to do with causality (e.g. whodunit?) and temporality (what will happen next?).”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“rapport n.: A sympathetic or harmonious relationship or state of mutual understanding. The word was introduced into psychology by the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), and the French psychologist and neurologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) confined its meaning specifically to the relationship between a hypnotist and a hypnotized subject; then Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) eventually widened its meaning and described it as the prototype (2) of the transference.
[From French rapporter, to bring back, from re-again and apportare, to carry to, from Latin apportare to bring to, from, ad to + portare to bring or carry]”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
While I have posted these materials elsewhere on Mark’s Text Terminal, I have not included (because I just wrote it yesterday) this lesson plan on Vlad the Impaler. He is the model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He also offers a glimpse into the mentality of some of those European knights who went on Crusade in the Holy Land. His biography also offers some insight into the privileges and prerogatives of European nobility in the fifteenth century. And of course, there are his horrifying crimes against humanity, though they would not have been called that at the time (see “privileges and prerogatives of European nobility”).
Anyway, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb impale (it’s only used transitively). This short reading on Vlad is the center of the lesson. Finally, here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies the reading.
And with that: Happy Halloween! Go easy on the candy, eh?
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.
Last year, to my great surprise, this reading on dance marathons and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet became high-interest materials in my classroom in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a teenager, I read They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? By Horace McCoy, so I have always found this cultural phenomenon interesting.
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.
Circumstances have emerged in my new job that have impelled me into one of my favorite tasks as a teacher, namely, creating differentiated instruction. This week, I began work on a course of study for a student who is interested in pursuing a career in the culinary arts. This enterprise begins with the construction of a lexicon of words, adjectives, nouns, and verbs, to be specific.
So, this week’s Text is a trove of initial documents for this endeavor. Here is the lexicon that informs this early phase of this work. You’ll find most of the words in that lexicon on these four worksheets on adjectives, this set of four worksheets on nouns, and these four worksheets on verbs. If you want to make your own worksheets, then you might need these four different worksheet templates that form the basis of all this work.
As with virtually everything on Mark’s Text Terminal, all of these documents are in Microsoft Word; ergo, you may adjust them to your students’ needs. If you’ve ever considered commenting on this blog, may I ask you to do so viz this material? I am really curious if it has utility elsewhere, or (gulp!) merit.
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.
“The principle may not come naturally, but surely we could make the particulars easier. If you were creating an alphabet for English from scratch, you would probably create 44 letters and match each speech sound with one letter. We’d call that one-to-one matching. Written English, alas, was not created from scratch. Our language is a mongrel: Germanic origins, heavily influenced by the Norman invasion and later by the adoption of Greek and Latinate words. That’s a problem because when we borrowed words, we frequently retained the spelling conventions of the original language. The result is that English uses a many-to-many matching. One letter (or letter combination) can signify many sounds, as the letter ‘e’ does: red, flower, bee.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
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