“Any of the smallest units of meaning or form within a language, or a verbal element that cannot be further reduced and still retain meaning, e.g. the word ‘woman,’ the prefix ‘un-,’ and the inflection ‘-ize.’ Adjective: morphemic; adverb: morphemically.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Generally, a prototype or original pattern or a paradigm or abstract idea of a class of things that represents the typical and essential elements shared by all varieties of that class. In literature, myth, folklore, and religion, the term can be applied to images, themes, symbols, ideas, characters, and situations that appeal to our unconscious racial memory. T.S. Eliot explains this as civilized man’s “pre-logical mentality.” The archetype, or primordial image, touches this “pre-logical mentality.” The psychology of Carl Jung and the comparative anthropology of J.G. Frazer have given the study of archetypal patterns greater usefulness in literary criticism.
Archetypes can be primitive and universal, and consist of general themes like birth, death, coming of age, love, guild, redemption, conflict between free will and destiny, rivalry between members of the family, fertility rites; of characters like the hero rebel, the wanderer, the devil, the buffoon; and of characters like the lion, serpent, or eagle.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Today begins Women’s History Month 2018. Like last month for Black History Month, every post on Mark’s Text Terminal during March will be related to the history of women and their myriad contributions to and achievements in our global civilization. So, you’ll see two posts a day, five days a week here until Saturday, March 31st. We are at a moment in women’s history in which peril and opportunity best describe women’s position in the United States. Peril because the President of the United States is evidently a militant misogynist, and the vice president is a theocrat right out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; opportunity because these politicians have provoked a backlash that, happily, may well be be their undoing.
Clearly, the Me Too Movement is an encouraging development. So too are the courageous women Time magazine has called the “Silence Breakers.” That all of this began because women somehow got the crazy idea that they should be able to attend a business meeting without looking at the exposed genitals of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and his ilk seems ordinary enough to me, but it has been hailed as something of a miracle. Whatever: I thank them for their witness and testimony
That said, these are grim days. Voters in the United States have elected a man who is vain, prideful, ignorant, misogynistic, willing not only to boast to a dimwitted talk-show host (who himself is a a scion of the family that produced two of our least distinguished presidents) about sexually assaulting women on the strength of his “celebrity” status, but has also paid off a porn star to conceal the evidence of philandering from his third wife, who presents problems of her own, not the least of which is her–and her parents–dubious arrival in this country, which goes some length to expose the president’s hypocrisy on immigration.
(Aside: it seems to me, that Protestant Evangelicals who have overlooked Trump’s three marriages, and his payment to Stormy Daniels, and possibly a payment to a Playboy magazine model named Karen McDougal, have a lot of hypocrisy and moral blindness of their own to answer for.)
The overall misogyny of the Republican Party, coupled with its tacit encouragement of the craziest loose cannons in its ranks, has led to attacks on Planned Parenthood both in word and in deed. I’m a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood (and I think you should be too). By any measure to which I am prepared to stipulate, attacks on Planned Parenthood, a provider of healthcare for some of the most impoverished and vulnerable women in our nation, are, in my absolutely humility-free estimation, an attack on women everywhere.
For many years, I have naively considered a number of issues in human affairs essentially settled. For example, after the Enlightenment, I take as a given that the scientific method–you know, the controversial act of backing arguments with evidence to prove them–was the sine qua non of inquiry. Yet now on an almost daily basis, demagogues (and yes, they are mostly if not entirely Republicans) seek to undermine the legitimacy of science and the means by which it establishes facts. Similarly, after the the feminisms of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, I assumed that a woman’s right to control her destiny, particularly in terms of her own reproductive system, was settled.
Yet here we are, in 2018, still listening to garbage like this, uttered by people delightfully unencumbered by decency or shame. I could supply a lot more quotes from low-watt Republicans that diminish and disrespect women, but I’d be here all morning copying and pasting links–not to mention exposing my tender consciousness to some of the most aggressively stupid and vicious rhetoric currently on offer in the American marketplace of “ideas.” So I’ll take a hard pass on that.
So, let’s begin Women’s History Month 2018 with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Zora Neale Hurston, who serves as a perfect conjunction between Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Tomorrow I’ll post a more substantial Weekly Text, as I will on each Friday this month.
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.
American novelist and poet. Reed’s writing reflects his belief that the black American writer should function as a kind of conjurer of what Reed calls ‘neo-hoodoo,’ an attempt to pry the distinct qualities of Afro-American culture loose from Euro-American culture. In a language composed of black dialects, standard English, and hip jargon, he writes angry satires on an American society corrupted by racism and uncontrolled technology. Among his novels are The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Flight to Canada (1976), The Terrible Twos (1982), and Japanese by Spring (1993). His verse collections include Conjure (1972) and Secretary to the Spirits (1975). Other works include Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), occasional writings; Hell Hath No Fury (1980), a play; The Terrible Threes (1990), a collection of short stories; and Airing Dirty Laundry (1993), containing memoirs.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
[Addendum: Ishmael Reed entered my cultural cosmology when I heard the the percussionist and producer Kip Hanrahan’s projects to set Mr. Reed’s poetry to music, the first of which, Conjure (named for one of Mr. Reed’s books of verse) appeared in 1983. I continue to listen to that record regularly, now 35 years later. Two more records from Conjure have appeared, Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon (1988) and a two-disc set, Bad Mouth, released in 2006.]
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, music, poetry, readings/research
“The year 2696 used to be considered the start date for Chinese civilization, for the winter solstice of that year was held to be the beginning of the reign of the Yellow Emperor. Most historians had accepted that that the period of the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors is mythic time, though Huangdi was honored as the man who taught the Chinese to how to build shelters, tame wild animals, build boats and carts, and plant and reap the five cereals, while his wife taught weaving and silk-making, and their chief minister set out how to write, keep laws, and the annual calendar.
If we were all to agree to a new world calendar system, the Chinese Year One would not be such a bad start date, for it calibrates pretty closely with other great memory pegs of world history, such as the construction of the first pyramid (2630 BC), the first era of Stonehenge (3100-2400 BC), and the first recorded king (Enme-Barage-Si of the Sumerian city-state of Ur, c.2600 BC).”
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.
It’s Friday morning, and I want to go into the weekend touting a worthy website that is the brainchild of a New York City teacher named Brett Gardiner Murphy. She has recently published a book called Inside Our Schools and her work is worth a look.
Elsewhere on this blog I have extolled the virtues of The American Educator, a periodical published by the The American Federation of Teachers. This is the union that represents almost 1.6 million teachers, including those of us here in New York City, under the aegis of the United Federation of Teachers. Unlike the Teamsters Newsletter I received when I was a truck driver and warehouseman (worthy enough, but mostly featuring stories like “Elmer Fudd Celebrates One Million Miles of Safe Driving at Yellow Freight Lines”), The American Educator actually exists to present professional educational research that is genuinely useful to teachers.
Ms. Murphy published an article titled “The Profession Speaks: Educator Perspectives on School Reform” in the Winter 2017-2018 issue of The American Educator. She does a very nice job of explaining the absolute necessity of teachers’ involvement in the discourse surrounding school “reform.” I commend and thank her for her efforts, because she has insight into policy issues, an area of discussion that mostly annoys me because of the overall and overweening ignorance (cf. the basic idiocy of Betsy DeVos) of school reformers; I simply haven’t the patience to try to hold discussions with the aggressively ignorant. Ms. Murphy makes the basic point that when it comes to discussions of school reform, educators have no voice.
She aims to change that, as she spells out in her article, with the website Inside Our Schools. Rather than try to characterize the site, I’ll quote Brett Gardiner Murphy from her article in The American Educator:
“Say what you will about how the Internet has shortened students’ attention spans, it has democratized whose point of view can be heard, including our own. I started a website connected to the book, InsideOurSchools.com, where anyone involved in public schools–teachers, parents, and students–can upload their stories through videos, audio recordings, or written reflections. It’s just one of the many ways we can use our voices in the years ahead.”
Enough said. I urge you to take a look at Ms. Gardiner’s site, and consider buying her book to support her efforts. I bid her Godspeed and best wishes for the future. New York City’s schools are lucky to have her.
“Process of developing abstract rules of mental concepts based on sensory experience. Concept formation figures prominently in cognitive development and was a subject of great importance to Jean Piaget, who argued that learning entails an understanding of a phenomenon’s characteristics and how they are logically linked. Noam Chomsky has argued that certain cognitive structures (such as basic grammatical rules) are innate in human beings. Both men held that, as a concept emerges, it becomes subject to testing: a child’s concept of ‘bird,’ for example, will be tested against specific instances of birds. The human capacity for play contributes importantly to this process by allowing for consideration of a wide range of possibilities.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
(As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have long considered the American Federation of Teachers quarterly magazine, American Educator to be a credible and edifying periodical that includes useful research for teachers. Recently, it ran this excellent article on the problem of fake news in the United States. My school’s mindless ban on Wikipedia, I think, represents little more than an unwillingness to recognize the opportunities Wikipedia offers for students to learn how to evaluate evidence judiciously. In this short quote, the authors of the aforementioned article make the case for using Wikipedia for just that purpose.)
“You heard right: Wikipedia. Fact checkers’ first stop was often a site many educators tell students to avoid. What we should be doing instead is teaching students what fact checkers know about Wikipedia and helping them take advantage of the resources of the fifth-most trafficked site on the web.
Students should learn about Wikipedia’s standards of verifiability and how to harvest entries for links to reliable sources. They should investigate Wikipedia’s ‘Talk’ pages (the tab hiding in plain sight next to the ‘Article’ tab), which, on contentious issues like gun control, the status of Kashmir, waterboarding, or climate change are gold mines where students can see knowledge-making in action. And they should practice using Wikipedia as a resource for lateral reading. Fact checkers, short on time, often skipped the main article and headed straight to the references, clicking on a link to a more established venue. Why spend 15 minutes having students, armed with a checklist, evaluate a website on a tree octopus (www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus) when a few seconds on Wikipedia shows it to be ‘an internet hoax created in 1998.’”
McGrew, Sarah, et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American Educator Fall 2017 (4-10). Print.
“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.
“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
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.