“self-correction: A student’s ability to detect and correct errors. The term is often used while students read aloud and hear themselves make errors but correct it. Some reading tests consider a self-correction to be an error, which can result in a misleading oral reading score.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Diatribe (noun): And abusive, often prolonged attack or denunciation; acrimonious harangue or critique.
‘Without polemic, dialectic, or diatribe, she has conveyed more clearly than anyone I’ve ever read before what it was like to be a girl in the 50’s, when one had a chance to grow up quietly and gradually.’ Susan Bolotin, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Many well-known adolescent difficulties are not intrinsic to the teenage years but are related to the mismatch between adolescents’ developmental needs and the kinds of experiences most junior high and high schools provide. When students need close affiliation, they experience large depersonalized schools; when they need to develop autonomy, they experience few opportunities for choice and punitive approaches to discipline; when they need expansive cognitive challenges and opportunities to demonstrate their competence, they experience work focused largely on the memorization of facts…”.
Excerpted from: Kohn, Alfie. What Does It Mean to be Well Educated? Boston: Beacon Press, 2007
“Mosan: Term referring to art produced in the 12th and early 13th centuries in the valley of the Meuse River, which rises in northeastern France and flows through the Low Countries.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Liberal Arts: In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Biblical authority for fixing the number at seven comes from Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” Such applied subjects as law and medicine were excluded from the from the liberal arts on the grounds that they were concerned with purely practical matters. In modern times, the liberal arts include languages, sciences, philosophy, history, and related subjects. The term is a translation of the Latin artes liberales, so called because their pursuit was the privilege of freemen who were called liberi.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet and feel what they have to offer–words, mere words–must look shabby by comparison.
Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium is words. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who we are and what we are. Then we can step back and gain distance on what we’ve said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day’s end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then they can brood on what they’ve said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the possibility of new beginnings. In this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don’t permit.”
Excerpted from: Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
This week’s Text is a word-builder from the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. My understanding of linguistics is amateurish at best. Nonetheless, I would assess this document as of mid-level linguistic work, so it might not be appropriate for classroom use. It might be broken into pieces for teaching the inventory of prefixes and suffixes this document contains. Or, it might be handy to keep on one’s desk to keep all of this straight in one’s mind.
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.
“Guidelines for Bureaucrats:
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Critique (noun): A critical appraisal or commentary, especially of a literary work; an acute review or evaluation, generally with respect to an understood standard or interested public; report. Verb: critique.
‘The New Yorker recently observed, in a memorial note about the late Wolcott Gibbs, that if his written editorial opinions ‘could be released to the world (as they most assuredly can’t be), they would make probably a funnier and sounder critique of creative writing in the late twenties and early thirties than has ever been assembled.’ John Fischer, in Writing in America”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
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