“The Mayan Calendar’s 52-Year Cycle: The Mayan’s fifty-two-year cycle is created by observing how the combination of their two simultaneous calendars—the 260-day-long Tzolk’in fertility calendars and 365-day-long Haab solar year—fitted into a naturally repeating cycle over a fifty-two year time span.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, numeracy, readings/research
This week’s Text, in Mark’s Text Terminal’s ongoing observance of National Hispanic Heritage Month 2019, is a reading on Augusto Pinochet and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Pinochet–along with Trujillo, the Somoza family, and in general a disturbingly long list of despots–is one of the great villains of Hispanic History. When I was in high school, Pinochet was kind of our version of the bogeyman.
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.
This reading, “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart is something my pal Bob Shepherd at Praxis sent my way. I regret admitting that I haven’t read it in its entirety, but if Bob says it’s worth my time, I am confident it is. This essay, which Mr. Lockhart expanded into a book, is available all over the Internet as a PDF, so, happily, I’m violating no copyright in placing it here on Mark’s Text Terminal.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged numeracy, professional development, readings/research
“(1) Practical application of learning; habitual, customary practice of an art, a science, or a skill. (2) A series of tests prepared by the Educational Testing Service and used by many states for teaching licencing and certification. Praxis I measures basic academic skills of would-be teachers; Praxis II measures their general and subject-specific knowledge and teaching skills; and Praxis III assesses their classroom performance.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development, term of art
“Achaeans: In Homer, the name by which the Greeks of heroic times spoke of themselves. Culturally we would call them Mycenaeans. They have been identified both with the Ahhiyawa, mentioned by the Hittites as one of their western neighbors, and the Akawasha, listed by the Egyptians as Peoples of the Sea. In historical times the name was limited to the Greeks of southwest Thessaly and the northern Peloponnese.
Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.
“The occasional principal. An occasional principal feels called upon to exercise his authority at every turn, and is satisfied with his accomplishment only when teachers fear him. The principal hews exactly to the line. If his curriculum calls for compositions of three paragraphs in the sixth grade, then three it must be or the teacher will receive a demerit mark.
Such principals are rapidly giving place to a new type of educational director who rules by virtue of a scientific understanding of his work, and by personal qualities of leadership, rather than by authority which has been delegated to him. Such a principal deals with facts and with personalities; gives directions, rather than orders; leads, rather than drives; and expects his teachers to think for themselves.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“Systematic living. What is needed by teachers is the application of a bit of system and common sense in their daily lives. Teaching cannot be sedulously followed by young people without sedulously offsetting its inactivity with outside exercise and pleasure. Every teacher should set aside a definite time for exercise, and a definite sum of money of recreation and pleasure. A regular time for a walk, a tennis game, a horseback ride; and a regular monthly allowance for theater, opera, travel, of the entertaining of one’s friends, will take one out into the open air where acquaintance with nature may be renewed, furnish a host of new thrills, and establish new interests and new companionships, which will drive away care, renew one’s mental and physical vigor, and provide a saner perspective for the serious tasks of the days to come.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
“Intelligent living. As a matter of self-protection, to say nothing of the wisdom of living a joyous life, the teacher must look to the problem of keeping an adequate margin of good health. This is largely the problem of proper rest and recreation. It is such a simple truth to say that when one is tired and half sick most any sort of work becomes barren drudgery, and yet this explanation is rarely thought of by the teacher who retires in disgust after a long evening spent in the useless task of correcting papers.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
“Xiuhtecuhtli (Turquoise Lord) * Tecpati-Itzli (Lord of the Obsidian Blade) * Piltzintecuhtli (Our Lord Prince) * Centeotl (Lord of the Maize) * Mictlantecuhtli (Underworld Lord) * Chalchiuhtlicue (Lord of the Jade Skirt) * Tlazoteotl (Our Lady of Two Faces—Lustful Sin and Purification) * Tepeyollotl (Lord of the Heart of the Mountain) * Tlaloc (Lord of Rain and Fertility)
The Aztecs, like most of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica, ran a number of sacred calendars concurrently, which made life more interesting, in terms of working out festivals and celebrations, as well as good, bad, propitious and impossible days, nights and months. Blocks of nine nights fitted into both the 365-day-long solar year (known as Haab), which was divided into twenty groups eighteen-day months, as well as the 260-day-long fertility calendar (known as Tzolkin) composed of twenty groups of thirteen-day months as well as twenty-nine groups of nine nights.
Twenty-nine is of course the unit of a lunar month, while nine months represent the gestation of both a human child and the complete tropical cycle of sowing to reaping for such vital crops as maize. So the Lords of the Night, in some South American cultures, appear also as the Lords of the Nine Months, or the Nine Judges of Hell, and other ninefold manifestations.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, literary oddities
“Miguel Angel Asturias: (1899-1974) Guatemalan novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Asturias spend much of his life in exile because of his public opposition to dictatorial rule. When he was sympathetic to his country’s leadership, he served as ambassador to El Salvador and later to France. He took a law degree in 1923 and then went to London to study economics and Paris to study anthropology, where he encountered French translations of Mayan writings. He proceeded to translate the Mayan text Popol Vuh into Spanish in 1925, developing a deep concern for the Mayan culture that was to weave its myth and history into everything he wrote, though never to the exclusion of this social and political statements. His greatest novel is El senor president (1946; tr El Senor Presidente, 1964), a phantasmagoric satire on Latin American military dictators, based largely on the regime of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, president of Guatemala from 1898 to 1920. Viento Fuerte (1950; tr Strong Wind, 1968), El papa verde (1954; tr The Green Pope, 1971), and Los ojos de los enterrados (1960; tr The Eyes of the Interred, 1973) comprise a trilogy attacking the exploitation by U.S.-owned fruit companies of the Guatemalan banana plantations. Week-end en Guatemala (1956) is a collection of stories about the C.I.A.-directed overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz, whom Asturias had supported. After Arbenz’s ouster, Asturias went into exile, returning to Guatemala in 1966. In 1967 he was appointed ambassador to France, the same year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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