“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.
“Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.”
H.L. Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett I: Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women
“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole. Beckett’s probably a clever fellow, but here he has elaborated a slavish and rather incoherent imitation of Joyce, most eccentric in language and full of disgustingly affected passages—also indecent: the book is damned—and you wouldn’t sell the book even on its title.”
Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett II: Molloy and Malone Dies
“I couldn’t read either book—that is, my eye refused to sit on the page and absorb meanings, or whatever substitutes for meaning in this kind of thing…. This doesn’t make sense and it isn’t funny…. I suspect that the real fault in these novels, if I cared to read them carefully, would be simply dullness. There’s no sense considering them for publication here; the bad taste of the American public does not yet coincide with the bad taste of the French avant-garde.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“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
“Genius without education is like silver in the mine.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Drawing connections to students’ personal lives, embedding the introduction of new concepts and skills within meaningful tasks, and emphasizing the instrumental value of mastering a skill or or doing well in a subject area enhances value. For example, teachers can bring in speakers and experts from the local community to more authentically draw connections with life outside of school. A second way to enhance value is by incorporating topics that students find interesting (e.g. space travel, dinosaurs). Finally, value may be enhanced by having students work on questions and use practices similar to those used by members of the discipline (e.g. scientists and mathematicians).”
Phyllis C. Blumenfeld, Toni M. Kempler, and Joseph S. Krajcik, “Motivation and Cognitive Engagement in Learning Environments,” in The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, ed. Robert Keith Sawyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 477.
“Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“It’s a shame you never knew her before she went to pot. You know a funny thing, she never could write dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do it from my stuff… She never could forgive learning that and she was afraid people would notice it, where she’d learned it, so she had to attack me. It’s a funny racket, really. But I swear she was damned nice before she got ambitious.”
Ernest Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa, 1935
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
“Abasement, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000
“The whole object of education is…to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.”
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
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