“An arched ceiling of roof constructed of masonry. Simplest is a barrel vault or tunnel vault, which is semicircular in section. Two intersecting barrel vaults of equal size form a groin vault. Rib vaulting employs reinforced ribs at the intersections.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“qualia n. pl. A philosophical term for sensory experiences that have distinctive subjective qualities but lack any meaning or external reference to the objects or events that cause them, such as the painfulness of pinpricks or the redness of red roses. The term is virtually synonymous with sense data. See also sense data, inverted qualia, phi movement, sensation, sensibalia. quale sing.
[From Latin qualis of what kind]
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Sense and Sensibility: A novel by Jane Austen (1775-1817), published in 1811. As in Pride and Prejudice, the title refers to two of the main characters: the sensible, quiet and dignified Elinor Dashwood, and her highly emotional and demonstrative sister, Marianne. ‘Sensibility’ is an 18th-century usage for ‘feeling’ or ‘sentiment.’
Miss Austen being, as you say, ‘without sentiment,’ without poetry, maybe is sensible (more real than true) but she cannot be great. Charlotte Bronte: letter to George Henry Lewes, 18 January 1848.
The film version (1995), directed by Ang Lee and with a screenplay by Emma Thompson (who also plays Elinor), was a surprise commercial hit.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Moon * Mercury * Venus * Sun * Mars * Jupiter * Saturn
The ordering of the seven heavens is one of the mysteries of each culture, especially since it appears to be linked to everything. The Chaldeans created a very influential list, ordering the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. This seems to reflect a very exact ascending order, based on the observed length of time that they circled the earth. The moon, as we know from our months, is 29.5 days, Mercury 88, Venus 224.7, the sun (the length of our year) is 365.25, Mars 687.1, while Jupiter is 12 years and Saturn 29.5.
This remains virtually the pattern we follow today, apart from the reordering of the sun-day as the first not the fourth. This ordering seems to have been achieved in the Hellenistic East, where we know that the Astrologers of Alexandria had created a hierarchy of sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, which ascribed an order of dominant deities to each of the progressive hours of the daylight.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research, science literacy
“The quality of students’ understanding rests on their ability to master and use bodies of knowledge that are valued by their culture. More specifically, it rests on their ability to make productive use of the concepts, theories, narratives, and procedures available in such disparate domains as biology, history, and the arts. Students should be able to understand the humanly constructed nature of this knowledge and to draw on it to solve problems, create products, make decisions, and in the end transform the world around them. Put differently, students should use knowledge to engage in a repertoire of performances valued by the societies in which they live.”
Excerpted from: Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
This morning, after reading a few pages a day for a couple of months, I finally finished Martha Stone Wiske’s (she edited) excellent book Teaching for Understanding: Linking Practice with Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998). Like the National Research Council’s How People Learn, this book is a road map to the kind of deep conceptual teaching I yearn to do.
I grabbed this goal-setting form for writing from the book’s pages, if you can use it.
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.
“Determining the content of curriculum is a thorny problem. Whose favorite ideas are addressed, whose interests are served, whose passions are engaged, who makes curriculum decisions, and how do we ensure that all students are comparably prepared? The history of previous efforts to teach for understanding, as Vito Perrone describes in Chapter One, reveals reveals some recurring features of curriculum designed to foster understanding. One is that curriculum the taught in school relates to the concerns and experiences that occupy students in their regular lives. Perrone argues that in order to make these connections between schoolwork and students’ daily lives, teachers must be primary decision makers about curriculum. Teachers must select the substance and adjust the shape of curriculum to meet the needs of their particular students. Another basic criterion for curriculum designed to promote understanding is that it does not simply impart information. Rather the curriculum must involve students in continuing spirals of inquiry that draw them from one set of answers to deeper questions and that reveal connections between the topic at hand and other fundamental ideas, questions, and problems. Yet teachers must balance these needs for curriculum tailored to particular groups of students and for open-ended inquiry with a concern for some degree of standardization, equity, and legitimacy. How should teachers choose and design curriculum that meets these various requirements?
This question occupied the Teaching for Understanding project and its group of university-based researchers and teachers from middle and high schools who taught a range of subject matters–history, mathematics, science, and English.They readily acknowledged Dewey’s idea of organizing curriculum around themes as a fruitful starting place. But the question of which topics to select remained. A list of generative topics for different subject matters would be too cumbersome. Instead of stipulating particular topics, this collaborative group set itself the task of defining criteria to help teachers identify and evaluate generative curricular topics?”
Excerpted from: Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
“Calvinism: Branch of Protestantism founded on the teaching of the French reformer Jean Chauvin (1509-64), known as Calvin from the Latin form of his name. Calvin gave the first systematic justification of Protestantism in Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) and thus became the intellectual leader of the Reformation. Calvinism is marked by its dogma of predestination, the belief that God has unalterably destined some souls to salvation and others to eternal damnation. Its harsh, logical beliefs inspired English Puritans, French Huguenots and some of the Dutch in their fight against the domination of Catholic Spain. The sect has been established in the Reformed or Presbyterian churches of France, Holland, and Scotland; Calvinist rule was also ruthlessly enforced under Calvin himself in Geneva by the Consistorium. The Calvinist beliefs that labor is a command of God and material success a mark of his favor—contradicting the medieval ideas of the virtue of poverty and the evil of usury—may have contributed to the rise of capitalism.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged readings/research, term of art
“Those who trust us educate us.”
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
I recently started writing a phonics unit based on Denise Eide’s excellent book Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling and Literacy (Minneapolis: Pedia Learning Inc, 2011). In the process of assembling materials for this unit, I typed up this glossary of linguistic terms from the book. It’s probably useful as a learning support for both teachers and students.
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.
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