“The most admirable of reforms cannot but fall short in practice if teachers of sufficient quality are not available in sufficient quantity…Generally speaking, the more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teacher’s task becomes; and the better our teaching methods, the more difficult they are to apply.”
Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (1970)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
House cleaning continues at Mark’s Text Terminal. Over 12 years of storing material inevitable redundancies occur, as do good intentions never realized–i.e. material planned, even begun, but never executed. For the next week or so, I’ll post materials that might be useful to you, readers and colleagues. In so doing, I’ll drive to separate the precious metals from the dross and the wheat from the chaff–and try not to waste your time with dross and chaff (shall I continue to beat these overworked metaphors?).
Somewhere along the line, most college students, I hope, encounter Richard Lederer’s famous (or infamous, I suppose, depending on one’s sense of humor) “The World According to Student Bloopers.” If you can use it, here is a typescript of that hilarious compendium.
Should you find typos in this document, they can be easily corrected by consulting Professor Lederer’s original under the middle of the three hyperlinks (“The World…”) above.
“attribution: The ways in which an individual understands the sources of success, difficulty, or failure. Often, people with learning disabilities attribute their successes and failures to factors they do not control, such as luck, the nature of the task, or their own inadequacies. By contrast, successful learners tend to attribute failure or success to their own level of effort and perseverance, and see themselves as having control over the outcomes of their work.
Attribution theory provides an approach to understand the difficulties with motivation experience by some people with learning problems, and also suggests that direct guidance in changing attribution styles may be helpful to those with learning disorders.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Triumphal Arch: Originating in Rome by the 2nd century B.C., these freestanding monumental gateways were erected to commemorate victorious generals. Sometimes serving as city gates, these arches were often merely decorative and richly adorned with sculptural elements. The two main types include one with a single archway and another flanked with smaller arches to the sides. The triumphal arch form was popularized anew during the Italian Renaissance.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: A novel (1940) by Carson McCullers (1917-1967) of the ‘Southern grotesque’ school. It features a deaf-mute, to whom the other main characters wrongly attribute the faculty of inner serenity that they lack. The title is from the poem ‘The Lonely Hunter’ (1896) by Fiona Macleod (pen-name of William Sharp; 1855-1905):
My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.
A rather pale film version (1968) was directed by Robert Ellis Miller.
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak of expensive vices.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
This list of oddball place names never failed to bring laughter to my classroom when I taught an advisory at a middle school in the North Bronx.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“indirect object: An object whose semantic role is characteristically that of a recipient, e.g. to your sister in He blew a kiss to your sister; also, in most accounts, your sister in He blew your sister a kiss. Distinguished as an element in a ditransitive construction from a direct object.
The relation between sentences such as these has been described in terms of dative movement. It is in part because that relation is possible that to your sister can be distinguished, as an object, from directional phrases such as to the seaside as in He sent his family to the seaside.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it.”
Geological Sketches (1866)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Ad Hominem To the man: appealing to the sentiments or prejudices of the hearer of listener rather than to his or her reason or intelligence; disparaging a person’s character rather than his or her sentiments; personal rather than substantive or ideological.
‘The boss knows all about the so-called fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem. ‘It may be a fallacy,’ he said, ‘ but it is shore-God useful. If you use the right kind of argumentum, you can always scare the hominem into a laundry bill he didn’t expect.’ Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
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