Ok, before I leave for a faculty meeting, here is a reading on Joe Namath and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. Once students understand who Namath is and was, these documents tend to self-transmute into high-interest materials.
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.
“Badinage (noun): Lighthearted, teasing talk; playful conversation; banter.
‘The movie is blatantly cartoonish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t saying anything. I think we’re meant to believe that its profane badinage and even its most exaggerated racial animosity have a deep, gritty truth in them, and that because it’s a comedy it can go deeper than “serious” movies.’” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here, at the end of an unbelievably dismal, pointless day of work, is a set of five homophone worksheets on the noun canvas and the verb–used both intransitively and transitively–canvass.
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.
“cognate: (Languages, words, etc.) that have developed from a common ancestor. E.g. English beam is cognate with German; likewise English beam is cognate with German Baum ‘tree.’”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
I’m not sure it it’s something high-schoolers need to know, though I’ll confess that I would have liked to have known about the concept of the zero-sum game as an adolescent. There is a Cultural Literacy worksheet under that hyperlink on the zero-sum game.
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.
“blitzkrieg (Germ., lightning war). Penetration in depth by armoured columns, usually with preceding aerial bombardment to reduce enemy resistance; a technique perfected by Gen. Guderian in France in 1940. In Britain the term was abbreviated to ‘blitz’ and used to describe the massive air attacks on London and other cities between September 1940 and May 1941.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Health teachers and others involved with the sciences, here is a reading on the common cold and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it, if you need them.
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.
“zone of proximal development: The gap between the level of a student’s independent function and how he or she may perform learning tasks with help. This term was coined by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and refers to the fact that it is crucial to provide help before a child gets frustrated. Failure can be avoided when teachers are aware of a student’s zone of proximal development and provide just enough support to enable students to achieve a goal that would not have been possible independently.
This concept may play a key role in educational approaches, in that it represents a way of thinking about what is involved in meeting students’ needs, and of understanding teaching and learning as a dynamic and developmental process, rather than as a static juxtaposition of instruction and learning readiness.
This theory allows a teacher to see a student’s learning problems not as impediments but rather as a starting point for a process of development that challenges students within the scope of what they are able to master successfully with the appropriate instruction. An approach to teaching that incorporates this concept must also mean that a teacher begins to teach a child at his or her current level, rather than at arbitrary curricular standards.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Balance of power: Diplomatic policy aimed at securing peace, particularly in Europe, by preventing any one state of alignment of states from attaining hegemony or military strength dangerous to the independence and liberty of the others. The policy is thus based on the maintenance of a counter-force equal to that of potential hegemonists. Britain had pursued such a policy for centuries to counter French predominance, but from 1904 to 1914 attempted to balance German power through the Entente Cordiale. A balance emerged between the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy. Between the world wars, Britain at first attempted to balance French power by facilitating the rapid recovery of Germany, but later abandoned her balance of power policy in favor of appeasement….”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged readings/research, term of art
“365 Days of Haab: The Mayan solar calendar was divided into eighteen twenty-day months (vigesimal notation). This produced 360 days, or one tun. In common with many religious calendars of the world, the shortfall of five extra days added on to make the 365 days of the solar year was a spirit-haunted period of ill omen, the five nameless Wayab days.
The habit of multiplying by 20 continued beyond the year, so that twenty tun (almost a solar year) is a katun, which was a great unit of time commemorated with inscribed standing stones and pyramid temples. Twenty katuns produced a baktun and twenty baktuns produce a piktun of 7,885 solar years. We have not quite got to a piktun, though quite recently, at the winter solstice of 2012, we celebrated the completion of thirteen baktuns which some observers too to be a possible date for the end of the world. The thirteen-baktun date (21-12-2012), which was safely achieved, begins by starting the calendar back at Year One in 3113 BC.”
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 hispanic history, literary oddities, numeracy
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