The first Text for the New Year is this complete lesson plan on the latin word root bell-. It means war. Here is the context clues worksheet on the noun conflict with which I begin this lesson. Finally, this vocabulary-building worksheet on this root is the mainstay of this lesson.
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.
Here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Fragment.” Suffice it to say that this is the first of many of these.
I’ve put up a couple of these before, and traffic to them is consistent. For this one, here is the Cultural Literacy do-now exercise on the idiom “An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure.” From the book itself, here is a PDF of the illustration of the evidence with the questions students will consider in analysis and contemplation as they resolve the crime. Finally, here is teacher’s answer key to this case.
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.
Today is the Winter Solstice, so the days now begin to lengthen. Spring is on the horizon.
This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the word factor that I developed on the fly (which shows, I fear) three years ago. The purpose of the lesson is to help students understand this complicated, polysemous word so that could use it in all the settings where it becomes, well, a factor.
For reasons I don’t entirely recall, I conceived of this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun axiom as the do-now, or opener of this lesson. I suspect I sought merely to introduce another concept from mathematics for the sake of consistency. The first worksheet for this lesson is three context clues worksheets on factor: in the first instance students will identify it as a noun, in the second as a verb, and in the third and final worksheet, it is once again used as a noun. To support this activity, here is a learning support in the form of definitions of factor in the order it appears on the context clues worksheets; this can be distributed to students as appropriate, or to your class linguist. Because I wasn’t sure how long any of this would take (the institute class for which it was written was a little over an hour long), I threw in this reading and comprehension worksheet on factorials as a complement. Parenthetically, I’ll just say that I think this lesson is incomplete; in fact, before I could consider it complete, I would want to run it by a math teacher or two.
And that’s it. This is the final Weekly Text from Mark’s Text Terminal for 2018. I plan to spend the next week doing just about anything but looking at a computer screen.
Happy Holidays to you and yours!
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Reference, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, context clues, cultural literacy, diction/grammar/style/usage, learning supports, numeracy, questioning/inquiry, readings/research
It’s a snow day in Springfield: I salute the administration at the city level for its good sense. Snow days in New York were rare indeed. I recall with some bitterness, actually, making my way to and from the North Bronx to Lower Manhattan in some pretty messy, aggressive storms.
Several years ago, after reading Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s book They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2010), I got stuck on the idea of teaching argumentation at the high school level. Accordingly, I worked up this unit plan for teaching argumentation. Unfortunately, in this school in which I was serving there was no meaningful support for this kind of work. So this unit, by my standards, is still in its preliminary stages of development. Still, the basic outlines are there for teaching the material Mr. Graff and Ms. Birkenstein so ably present in their book. Indeed, I’ve already posted a lesson from this unit on Mark’s Text Terminal.
This week’s Text is the fourth lesson plan from this unit argumentation (you can find the other three by searching Mark’s Text Terminal for “argumentation”). Like the other three I’ve published, the work for this lesson is further practice on using rhetorical forms to frame arguments. I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the Latin phrase exempli gratia, which, as you probably know, means “for example” and turns up most commonly in English prose as the abbreviation e.g. Finally, here is the worksheet for trying out various rhetorical figures in arguments.
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.
[Nota bene, please, that I originally posted much of this material in a Weekly Text from August 28, 2015, which would have made it one of the earliest publications on this blog. This lesson continues to evolve, so I have decided to publish it once more with a couple of supplementary materials. If you have used this in your classroom, and plan to use it again, you may want to check back here every so often to see if I’ve added documents. I’ve also given this post a new title so that it is easy to search and locate on Mark’s Text Terminal.]
Is there a way we can assist our students in remembering what we teach them in the classroom? More broadly, can we help students become stronger, more effective, and therefore more satisfied learners, particularly in terms of retention (de rigeur now for hyper-tested students), by showing them how memory actually functions? The answer, or part of the answer at least, thanks to Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is yes. Professor Willingham writes a column called “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” for The American Educator, which is an excellent quarterly journal of research into pedagogical practice and educational policy issues published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). I’m amazed at the consistently cogent and useful scholarly research the AFT presents in this first-rate publication.
Anyway, in the winter 2008-2009 issue, Professor Willingham published his column under the title–clicking on this hyperlink will download of PDF of the article–“What Will Improve a Student’s Memory?” This is a cognitive science experiment in three parts that demonstrates the role of thought and memory in the learning process. So far, I’ve developed for use in teaching a lesson adapted from Professor Willingham’s First Demonstration of Memory, will help you and your students conduct the first of these three experiments, then sort out its immediate results. Through this clever and concrete demonstration, students will learn that thinking is the parent of memory–as Professor Willingham emphasizes. I like to start the year with this lesson; in fact, I teach it on the first day of school, before discussing classroom norms and expectations, as a way of setting the tone (i.e. your learning comes first) for the year.
To get to the instructional material in the PDF, you’ll need download the article by clicking on the link above, then scroll down through the document to page 26, “Demonstration of the Three Principles.” You’ll use Demonstration 1: once you’ve read through the procedure for the demonstration. Nonetheless, here is the unit plan for all three lessons that rationalize the use of these three demonstrations of memory with students. Eventually, I’ll write the other two lessons for demonstrations two and three, and post those here as well.
To the documents for this lesson: here is the lesson plan for the First Demonstration. Although the PDF posted above includes the procedures for all three demonstrations, this is the typescript of the teaching procedure for the First Demonstration (this text is also included in the lesson plan). This structured and numbered worksheet might hasten the process of delivering this lesson, particularly for struggling students. Over time, working with a large and homogenous group or students, I developed two supports for concluding the work on this lesson. Students will need to determine, as part of this exercise, which kinds of words they remembered. This first version of the support give students the words in the order in which they were read, and asks them to find the words they remembered by searching the list. That requires focus and the ability to sort out information; some students I have served over the years struggled with this part of the activity. So I designed a second version of the support with the words read arranged by type in columns in a table, and therefore a bit less challenging to sort, interpret, and process.
I find this lesson, taught to a well-focused class generally takes less than the 44 minutes my school has deemed adequate for conveying new information and providing students with an opportunity to use it. After finishing the procedural work, and sorting out the results of that work to assess its meaning (it’s part of the procedure in the article), I like to ask students a few questions. The big question is, of course, Why did you remember the words you rated for pleasantness? Another query I use is What can students and teachers do to work together to study words in a way helps students remember their meaning and use them in their future discourses? (Do your students understand the concept of discourse? It seems to me it’s a word and concept high school students really ought to know.) I also ask questions that prepare students for some of the work we’ll do that is animated by Professor Willingham’s first demonstration: Is there something common to words that can help us understand them as families? which helps to rationalize the use of word root worksheets. Is there a way to learn words by thinking about what they might mean? justifies the use of do-now context clues worksheets. In any case, the really big question this and the other two Demonstrations ask is this: Thinking about the outcome of this thought experiment, what are its implications for classroom practice?
For teachers, the big question really just that: what does this demonstration of memory imply for classroom teaching practice. It’s a conversation that circumstances never afforded me an opportunity to conduct or join, despite using this version of the lesson as a professional development exercise for colleagues on a couple of occasions.
In any case, through this clever and concrete demonstration, students will learn that thinking is the parent of memory–as Professor Willingham emphasizes in his article. I like to start the year with this lesson; in fact, I teach it on the first day of school, before discussing classroom norms and expectations, as a way of setting the tone (i.e. your learning and the means by which it is accomplished are of paramount importance in this classroom) for the year.
Most of the vocabulary building work I’ll publish on Mark’s Text Terminal derives directly from my understanding of the cognitive mechanisms Professor Willingham’s “First Demonstration” exposes. This lesson, if nothing else, may help you persuade resistant students that this is a useful way to learn and master new words and the concepts or things they define.
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 week’s Text (after missing last week) is something I whipped up pretty much on the fly about three years ago when I was assigned an eight-meeting class conducted over eight weeks on math and science literacy. This literacy lesson on the polysemous word bond is, as I look at it now, an odd melange of stuff. Depending on what it is you want kids to understand, there are materials here for one extended lesson–I wrote this for a sixty-one-minute long period–or a couple of different short exercises.
The first document, because I worked in economics and finance-themed high school, is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on bond as a financial instrument. These two context clues worksheets on the verb and noun bond in the sense of attaching or joining follow; logically, I guess, this short reading and comprehension exercise on chemical bonds rounds out this deck. I also, for some reason, made up this learning support with three definitions of bond from Merriam-Webster’s 11th Edition.
Now that I think about it, Bronx County summoned me to jury duty before I had a chance to use this material. The coverage teacher who used it did say students received it relatively 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.
While preparing one or another blog posts for Hispanic Heritage Month 2018, I blithely used the term “colonial mentality:” I assumed this term described a way of thinking that enabled people like Cecil Rhodes or King Leopold II, to cite two more chronologically recent figures, to help themselves to lands, resources, and (usually forced) labor in countries not their own. Indeed, I took it for granted that the colonial mentality was both an integral part of and a justification for the uglier depredations of capitalism.
Maybe a couple of definitions of colonialism will clarify the phenomenon of colonialism, and therefore make the real meaning of the colonial mentality even more stark and tragic than it is. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000), in its definition of colonialism, characterizes it in part thus: “The purposes of colonialism include economic exploitation of the colony’s natural resources, creation of new markets for the colonizer, and extension of the colonizer’s way of life beyond its national borders.”
The Oxford Desk Encyclopedia of World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) uses its entry on colonialism to direct the reader to the book’s entry on imperialism, which goes further than Merriam-Webster in noting that “The Industrial Revolution introduced a new form of imperialism as European countries competed throughout the world both for raw materials and for markets. In the late 19th century imperial ambitions were motivated in part by the need for commercial expansion, the desire for military glory, and diplomatic advantage. Imperialism generally assumed a racial, intellectual, and spiritual superiority on the part of the newcomers.”
Innocently, I assumed that last sentence was the description of the Colonial Mentality I sought. As it turns out, it is the result of the colonizers’ sense of superiority that forms the Colonial Mentality. The term colonial mentality defines the internalized racism and sense of inferiority among the colonized themselves, not, as I took for granted, the entitlement of the colonists and their governments.
Rather than bloviate about tragedy and manifest injustice of this, I’ll supply you with a quick list of links so you can learn about this yourself–or better yet help the students you serve understand it.
There is a broad literature on the Colonial Mentality, and a good place to start is with Brown Skin, White Minds, by a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Anchorage named E.J.R. David. Dr. David was born in the Philippines. Interestingly, a Google search of “Colonial Mentality” turns up a plethora of material on this issue in that former colony of both Spain and–however briefly–the United States. Dr. David and his colleague at New York University, Sumie Okazaki, have devised a Colonial Mentality Scale for measuring the depth of internalized colonialism. Dr. David’s article on “A Colonial Mentality Model of Depression for Filipino-Americans” goes some distance toward explaining the impact of the Colonial Mentality on the mental health of Filipino-Americans.
Nzuki Nnam at Dominican University has addressed the Colonial Mentality in Africa in a book by that name. This article from Henry Johnson LR in Medium also addresses the Colonial Mentality in Africa. This post from a blogger who identifies as Young African Pioneer, with a bit of editing and adaptation for reading level and ability, might be just the text to explain aid high school students in developing their own understanding of internalized oppression.
In India, an entire discourse has developed around the issue of the Colonial Mentality and its effect on hindering India’s overall development. A blogger named Yogesh1646 addresses the issue in this post. A writer named Anil Chawla argues that the Indian Polity has a Colonial Mindset. And there are a wide variety of unnamed bloggers (for a variety of reasons I won’t repost anonymous articles) writing on this issue–one need only search “colonial mentality in India” to arrive at a wide array of commentary–including a number of YouTube videos–on the issue of the colonial mentality on the Subcontinent.
In fact, if you search the term colonial mentality on Google, the search engine will return 4,940,000 results in 0.52 seconds. This is clearly an issue of importance to people around the globe.
So it probably ought to be an issue of importance for teachers, particularly those of us working in schools with diverse student bodies, and especially if that diversity includes recently arrived immigrants. Between the very real issue of the psychological damage colonialism inflicted, we here in the United States are dealing with a presidential administration that appears to have fostered a culture, within its offices, of belligerent racism. Calling nations from which the most recently minted United States citizens arrived “s**tholes” can only, it seems to me, exacerbate the colonial mentality.
Which doesn’t help to develop conscious and engaged citizens in a democratic republic like ours. Indeed, ridiculing new citizens who arrived from former European colonies seems to me the sine qua non of recipes for alienation. The answer to this is education.
So watch these pages for a instructional materials related to the colonial mentality and its effect. This blog post is the seed for a unit on colonialism, racism, and the individual citizen.
Things have been very hectic at Mark’s Text Terminal lately as I prepare to move this entire operation to Massachusetts. Still, the Weekly Text is a mainstay here; even during this transition, I will at the very least post something every Friday.
For this week’s Text, I offer a complete lesson plan on commonly used prepositions. This is from the sixth of my units on the parts of speech; by this time, students have become relatively proficient users of language, so I begin increasingly using, as the do-now exercises with which I begin lessons, Everyday Edit worksheets, which the good people at Education World give away on their site. For this lesson I use this Everyday Edit on Anne Sullivan, the extraordinary pedagogue who educated Helen Keller. If this lesson goes into a second day, here is another Everyday Edit on James Forten, Free Black Man.
The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on commonly used prepositions. The worksheet requires for its completion this learning support on commonly used prepositions. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.
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 week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Latin word roots mal and male. They mean, of course, bad, evil, ill, and wrong. This post, like all the material published here between September 15 and October 15, is in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. This material may stretch the boundaries of the letter of the month’s intent; on the other hand, the Latin language is, like it or not, a key part of Hispanic Heritage.
Over the years I’ve worked with many native Spanish speakers. My original impulse in writing word root worksheets, particularly those dealing with Latin roots, arose from the idea that helping students develop their own understanding of the Latin language as a bridge to English would hasten their journey to bilingualism. Ideally, students will retain their Spanish language skills while building their English vocabularies and understand the way these roots show up across the spectrum of Romance languages–often in the exact same words.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective sinister to hint at the meaning of the roots mal and male, thereby pointing them in the right direction. This scaffolded worksheet is the mainstay of the lesson.
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 week’s Text is a lesson plan introducing personal pronouns. I use this Everyday Edit worksheet on Pocahontas to begin the lesson; should the lesson go into a second day due to unforeseen circumstances I keep this Cultural Literacy worksheet on satire nearby to start the conclusion of the lesson on that second day. This is the scaffolded worksheet that is the center of the lesson, and here is teacher’s copy of same.
That’s it for this week. Tomorrow begins Hispanic Heritage Month 2018, which runs through October 15. Mark’s Text Terminal will regularly feature, as in years past, materials related to Hispanic Heritage and History for the next four or so weeks.
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.
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