I’ve posted a lot of learning supports on Mark’s Text Terminal, but here is a teaching support in the form of an outline of principles on designing cognitive apprenticeship environments.
For the record, this was lifted from Allen M. Collins article “Cognitive Apprenticeship,” which I read in R. Keith Sawyer’s (ed.) book The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
“Murray Cohn has, for twenty-three years, run Brandeis according to his own lights. He believes in cleanliness and order—and the halls of Brandeis are clean and orderly. He believes in homework, especially writing—and the students do it, even if they don’t do enough. He believes in publicly praising achievement—and the schools bulletin boards offer congratulations to attendance leaders and the like. What Cohn and other administrators like him impart to their schools is nothing quantifiable; it is an ethos.”
James Traub, as quote in The Great School Debate: Which Way for American Education (1985)
“Semiotics: An argument for the construction of meaning through structures of symbols that began with early-20th-century linguistics. In it the ‘signifier’ (a written or spoken word) and the ‘signified’ (the actual object of concept referred to) together form a ‘sign.’ It became useful for examining other cultural products as codes, including art. Magritte’s The Uses of Words I takes a semiotic approach to art-making. By painting the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe) under the image of a pipe, he questioned pictorial representation. It is not actually a pipe, merely its image. The broader impact of semiotics has been in postmodern art and criticism in studies of the power of cultural signs that are examined, reexamined, and deconstructed.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Angles: A Germanic people first heard of on the Baltic coasts of Jutland. On the evidence of their pottery found at a number of late Roman settlements in England, they were probably present as Foederati in the later c4 AD. In c5 they took part in the Anglo-Saxon migrations across the North Sea to settle the eastern parts of England after the breakdown of Roman rule. The archaeological evidence is treated under Anglo-Saxons since by this period the distinction between the two peoples had all but disappeared. Their names survives in East Anglia and England.”
Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.
“Synecdoche: (Greek ‘taking up together’) A figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole, and thus something else is understood within the thing mentioned. For example: in ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, ‘bread’ stands for the meals taken each day. In these lines from Thomas Campbell’s Ye Mariners of England, ‘oak’ represents the warships as well as the material from which they are made:
‘With thunders from her native oak,
She quells the flood below.’
Synecdoche is common in everyday speech. In “Chelsea won the match”, Chelsea stands for the Chelsea football team. See also ANTONOMASIA; METALEPSIS; METONYMY.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Admit for Confess. To admit is to concede something affirmed. An unaccused offender cannot admit his guilt.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
If it looks to you like I’m cleaning house at Mark’s Text Terminal, you’re right, I am. To that end, here is a lesson plan on function as a science word. You might find these definitions of function as as a verb and a noun helpful. Here is the the first worksheet for this lesson, and here is the second.
This work, as I’ve mentioned in the four other posts in which I’ve posted other lessons from this unit, was something I was tasked with producing several years ago to help struggling students build vocabulary in math and science. It was part of a very busy semester; I did not finish writing the final three lessons of this eight-lesson unit (it was for an eight-week, one meeting weekly seminar class), so this is the fifth of five lessons. As I review the material, it’s fairly obvious that I produced it on the fly, then never returned to improve it.
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.
“Bierce, Ambrose [Gwinett] (1843-1914?) American journalist, short-story writer, and poet. Emerging from a sternly religious Ohio family, Bierce fought with distinction in the Civil War, then settled in San Francisco, where he became writer-editor of the San Francisco News-Letter and made his reputation as a scathing satirist who could make or break a writer with his acid comments. He began publishing stories of his own and, with his friends Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, formed an important literary circle. Following marriage to a wealthy miner’s daughter, Bierce took his bride to England, where they stayed for four years. There Bierce published Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874), Back in San Francisco with a freshly polished wit, he began to write his famous column “The Prattler” (1887-1906). a mixture of literary gossip, epigrams, and stories. Later, as Washington correspondent for the Hearst newspapers, he also wrote for Cosmopolitan and prepared his collected works (12 vols, 1909-12). Divorced in 1904, he broke completely with his family and gradually lost touch with his friends. In 1913, he disappeared into Mexico. His fate remains unknown.
Bierce’s fame rests on three volumes: In the Midst of Life, Can Such Things Be (1893), and The Devil’s Dictionary (1911; first published as The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906). He had a peculiar knack for establishing an atmosphere of horror. His wit was sardonic, cruel, and brilliant; his style crisp and incisive. He was a clever epigrammist and a forerunner of such American realists as Stephen Crane. His contemporaries felt in him a force of genius that was never fully realized.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Justice, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“Impeachment: (ME, deriv. Lat., to catch) In England, special arraignment, usually before parliament or some other high tribunal, of a person charged with offenses against the state. Customarily, impeachment was made in the Commons and the trial occurred in the Lords. The first impeachment was that of Lord Latimer in 1376; others were those of Francis Bacon, the Lord High Chancellor in 1621, the Earl of Stafford in 1641, Archbishop Laud in 1645 and Warren Hastings in 1788. Lord Melville was the last person to be impeached in 1805. In the USA, impeachment is initiated by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate. The most famous impeachment was that of President Andrew Johnson for dismissing his Secretary of War in May 1868.
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
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