“In science ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’”
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes “Evolution as Fact and Theory” (1983)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“(Aristarchus of Samothrace, flourished 156 BC) The greatest critic of antiquity and head of the Alexandrian library. Aristarchus’ labors were chiefly directed to the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. He divided them up into twenty-four books each, marking every doubtful line with an obelus and every one he considered especially beautiful with an asterisk. He succeeded his teacher, Aristophanes of Byzantium, at the library in Alexandria.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged readings/research
“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 J. Piaget, who argued that learning entails an understanding of a phenomenon’s characteristics and how they are logically linked. N. 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.
“To me the sole hope of human salvation lied in teaching.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“A film (1976) directed by Alan J. Pakula about the uncovering of the Watergate scandal, based on a book (1974) of the same title by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played respectively by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman). The president of the title is Richard M. Nixon, and the title refers to the attempts of the president and others in the White House to cover up the scandal. The title plays on a line from the nursery rhyme:
‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Al the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Several years ago, one of the assistant principals in this school loaned me a couple of books by the great professor of education, David Labaree. I read both The Trouble with Ed Schools (that link takes you to a review of the book by the esteemed sociologist Nathan Glazer) and How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning; I thought both were excellent.
As I go through old folders in the Text Terminal archives, I found a note reminding me to post this article on the five-paragraph essay by Professor Labaree. It meets his usual standard of excellence in his publications, and has much to say, I think, about the obsession with the five-paragraph essay.
[In the school in which I serve, the administration, acting on the instructions of bureaucrats further up the policy chain, has basically, by default, allowed students unfettered and unregulated access to their smart phones. It goes without saying, I assume, that this approach has made teaching and learning all but impossible in this institution. Moreover, it has created serious discipline problems that have led to bitter power struggles between faculty and students, screaming matches in hallways and classrooms, an overburdened deans’ office, and a generally ridiculous and often completely unproductive learning environment. Not that my work is necessarily about me, but I think it’s at least worth mentioning that this situation has rendered a travesty my efforts at helping students become stronger, more proficient readers and writers, and therefore more capable students overall.]
“As Mark Twain said, ‘The two most important days in life are the day you are born and the day you discover the reason why.’
Purpose, however, hinges on self-regulation, the ability to resist impulses in the service of long-term goals. Unfortunately, an entire generation is coming of age absorbed in Facebook and other media that undermine self-regulation, says Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus at California State University and a coauthor of The Distracted Brain. Fully grown adults are no less immune to the dings and pings of feedback that make smartphones so compelling. ‘You may want big ideas, but if your attention is jerked away constantly, they won’t come. There’s no time to process anything on a deeper level,’ Rosen says. Not, he adds, is there time for creative daydreaming, because the brain is often overstimulated.
Rosen has found that young adult students can maintain focus on important work only for two to four minutes on average before checking emails, texts, and social media (older adults are not much better)–and it can take up to 20 minutes to get back on task. The more hours students spend media-multitasking, the lower their grade point average. Even a single check-in on Facebook during focus sessions predicted a lower grade.”
Pincott, Jena. “10 Life Skills.” Psychology Today, May/June 2018.
“The Kitab Alf Laylah wa-Laylah—‘The Book of the Thousand and One Nights’—has inspired countless films, musicals, and novels. The original tales are breathtakingly inventive, vulgar, and discursive, full of cliff-hanger action, scented with sex, royalty, and magic. Western scholars have been arguing over their origin, composition, and textual tradition for some 300 years, a debate animated by the schism between an eighteenth-century French translation of a Syrian manuscript and a later English translation of an Egyptian one. It seems clear that there is an ancient Persian, Indian, and Mesopotamian collection of stories at the core of ‘the Nights,’ which came together as a coherent whole in Arabic in ninth-century Baghdad, was then embroidered by Iraqi storytellers, and further embellished by tales added from the streets, cafes, and imaginations of the medieval cities of Egypt, North Africa, and Syria.
Long known as ‘The Thousand Nights,’ the collection did not become ‘A Thousand and One’ until the twelfth century. Curiously, too, many of the celebrated adventures such as ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ and ‘Aladdin and his Lamp’ were added at the very last ‘textual’ moment by the first French translator (Antoine Galland), sourced from a Maronite story-teller in Aleppo.”
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.
“Encomium, n. A kind of intellectual fog, through which the virtues of its object are seen magnified by many diameters.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“Looking words up in a dictionary will be of limited use—not useless, but, but we must acknowledge that it will be just one context in which to understand the word’s meaning, and it’s possible that the student will misunderstand the definition. Explicit instruction of new words is more likely to be successful the way teachers usually implement it, with multiple examples and with the requirement that students use each word in different contexts. There is a good evidence that students do learn vocabulary this way.
In addition to consistent vocabulary instruction, teachers can make it more likely that students will learn words they encounter in context. They can give students pointers that will help them use context for figure out an unfamiliar word. For example, students can learn to use the clues in the sentence about the unknown word’s part of speech, to use the setting described in the text to constrain the word’s meaning, and to use the tone of the text to help constrain meaning.”
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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