“Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.”
Robert M. Hutchins on Academic Freedom as Quoted in Time magazine.
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“Learning without thought is time lost.”
Confucius
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
It’s another cool, beautiful morning here in my borough; the morning light appears autumnal. Here is a glossary of key vocabulary for English Language Arts. I hope it is useful to your practice.
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.
“Employ your time by improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored so hard for.”
Socrates (469-399 B.C.)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Over the years, I have become convinced of the utility of teaching the parts of speech in order to build literacy in general, and in particular to assist students in developing their own understanding of how to write grammatically complete, syntactically meaningful, and stylish sentences. To that end, I have developed units for each of the parts of speech, and these constitute an almost-year-long cycle of English Language Arts instruction.
So, this weeks text is the first lesson of the first unit of this cycle, on nouns. This lesson calls upon students to use this teacher-authored reading passage to identify all the nouns in it; as you will see, this is a three-part scaffold that asks students to read, then apply their understanding of nouns, first in modified cloze exercises, then in writing sentences from subject to period. The lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy do-now exercise on syntax. You might also find useful this singular and plural nouns formation review
You’ll notice that the plan for this lesson doesn’t list the standards met. Because of the way I manage my work flow, I list all the standards on the overarching unit plan. (That way if I must print a lesson plan to appease a bureaucrat, I don’t burn too much ink.) For that reason, I have posted typescript copies of the Common Core Standards I use in my practice in the About Weekly Texts page that is above the banner photo on the home page for this site. They are in the penultimate paragraph there.
22 September 2016, Post Scriptum: I have just updated the singular and plural nouns formation review worksheet linked to above.
15 July 2022, Post Scriptum: I have revised the work for this lesson. The reading and worksheet now contains a reading from The Fight (Boston, MacMillan, 1975), Norman Mailer’s account of the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974; it follows then that the teacher’s copy of the worksheet received an update as well.
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.
“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Recently, while perusing an old Moleskine notebook, I came upon a note instructing me to “see Pattern Learning article from Facebook for possible blog entry–see article in email.” Given my often less-than-stellar organizing skills, I wasn’t surprised to find no such email about this in any of my folders that have to do with professional development or this blog.
Any teacher who has taken the time to think about it–which means most teachers, I guess (and hope)–understand that in the hierarchy of an educator’s responsibilities, assisting students in developing their capacity for pattern recognition ought to be near the top. Indeed, all the domains in which elementary and secondary teachers operate offer them openings to train students in they vital cognitive skill. For math and language teachers, this may well be item one on their agendas.
In any case, I went looking on Facebook for this article on pattern learning and language acquisition. I also found, for you math teachers out there, this nice little squib, replete with rudimentary lesson plans on understanding patterns as the foundation of early math skills. To take this one step further, possibly to the precipice of irrelevance, there is also this very timely article from The New York Times on “learning to see data”. (However, should the arts and crafts of crocheting, knitting and weaving interest you, you’ll find a plethora of articles on them under a “pattern recognition” search on Facebook.)
Simply put, learning to recognize patterns is the first step to language acquisition and early math skills. If students are to succeed at the secondary level of schooling, then at the elementary level they must acquire the cognitive instinct of pattern recognition. For those of us working at any level with early catastrophe kids, this means that from the first day we stand in front of our charges, we must begin the process of teaching pattern recognition. Indeed, at the secondary level, we haven’t a moment to lose in inculcating pattern recognition; the sooner we begin this process, the better for our students.
Over the years I have worked to develop materials that foster and reinforce pattern recognition. One instrument I use for this, which I am now relatively confident is an effective way to foster and reinforce pattern recognition–and build vocabulary at the same time–is the word root worksheet. To persist with this just a couple of steps further, here are a word root do-now exercise for ornith/o and a full word root worksheet for the Latin root aqua.
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.
“As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Here’s the late, great, Stephen Jay Gould writing on the Stanford-Binet test of intelligence:
“Alfred Binet was commissioned by the minister of public education in France to devise a way of identifying students in primary school whose difficulties in normal classrooms suggested some need for special education. Binet specifically denied the test—later called an intelligence quotient (or IQ) when the German psychologist W. Stern scored the results by dividing ‘mental age’ (as ascertained on the test) by chronological age—could be measuring an internal biological property worthy of the name “general intelligence.” First of all, Binet believed that the complex and multifarious property called intelligence could not, in principle, be captured by a single number capable of ranking children in a linear hierarchy. He wrote in 1905:
‘The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured and linear surfaces are measured.’
Moreover, Binet feared that if teachers read the IQ number as an inflexible inborn quality, rather than (as he intended) a guide for identifying students in need of help, they would use the scores as a cynical excuse for expunging, rather than aiding, troublesome students. Binet wrote of such teachers: “The seem to reason in the following way: ‘Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,’ and without the true critical spirit they designate all who are unruly, or disinterested in the school.” Binet also feared the powerful bias that has since been labeled “self-fulfilling prophecy” of the Pygmalion effect: if teachers are told that a student is inherently uneducable based on misinterpretation of low IQ scores, they will treat the student as unable, thereby encouraging poor performance by their inadequate nurture, rather than the student’s inherent nature. Invoking the case then wracking France, Binet wrote:
‘It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists did who, when Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwriting sign or a traitor or a spy.’
Binet felt that this test could be used to identify mild forms of retardation or learning disability. Yet even for such specific and serious difficulties, Binet firmly rejected the idea that his test could identify causes of educational problems, particularly their potential basis in biological inheritance. He only wished to identify with special needs, so that help could be provided:
‘Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded…..We shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital [retardation]….We do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.'”
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
Most teachers, I imagine, already see and are starting to plan for the beginning of the school year, a month or less away for most of us. I’ve just returned from a week on the North Shore and Cape Ann; I too see the end of the summer break on the horizon, and I’m starting to work towards it. In the next couple of weeks I’ll post a couple of comprehensive lesson plans I’m working on that are both peculiar to my present posting and useful (I hope!) to social studies teachers everywhere.
For this week’s Text, however, I offer a learning support on using semicolons in declarative sentences. I hope you find it useful.
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, Independent Practice, Reference
Tagged learning supports, punctuation
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