This Cultural Literacy worksheet on Henry David Thoreau is a good–and perhaps more importantly, short–general introduction to the this paragon of Transcendentalism and important American thinker and writer.
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.
“A lot of technical experiments indicate that sound and meaning are separate in the mind, but everyday examples will probably be enough to make this idea clear. We know meaning and sound are separate because you can know one without the other.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“metacognition: Knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes, an important class of metacognition being metamemory, The term is also sometimes applied to regulation of cognitive functions, including planning, checking, or monitoring, as when one plans one’s cognitive strategy for memorizing something, checks one’s accuracy when performing mental arithmetic, or monitors one’s comprehension while reading, and these forms of metacognition are called metacognitive regulation in contradistinction to metacognitive knowledge. Writings on metacognition can be traced back at least as far as De Anima and the Parva Naturalia of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), and the phenomenon was brought to prominence during the 1970s largely by the US psychologist John H. Flavell (born 1928), who focused attention on developmental aspects of metacognition. In an influential article in the journal Psychological Review in 1977, the US psychologists Richard E. Nisbett (born 1941) and Timothy D. Wilson (born 1951) summarized a range of evidence suggesting that people are often unaware of the factors influencing their own choices, evaluations, and behavior, and that the verbal reports that they give when questioned are often quite erroneous and misleading.”
[From Greek meta beside or beyond + English cognition]
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
This reading on panic disorder has endured over time with my students, especially those who live in crowded and violent inner-city neighborhoods, as a high-interest reading. Here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies 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.
“Mercers * Grocers * Drapers * Fishmongers * Goldsmiths * Merchant Taylors * Skinners * Haberdashers * Salters * Ironmongers * Vintners * Clothworkers
Medieval London was a free city that governed itself through the interconnections between its wards, its parishes, and the guilds that controlled the various aspects of trade. The twelve great livery companies are the richest and oldest of the guilds whose foundation charters (though often much older) can be securely dated to fourteenth-century documents. They were (and are) managed by a clerk but controlled by a Master, a number of wardens and a court of assistants elected by the liverymen and freemen of the company. Access is through patrimony (descent), servitude (apprenticeship to a guild member) or redemption (a fee).
Liverymen famously squabbled about order of precedence. It is said the origin of the phrase ‘being at sixes and sevens’ is the Skinner and Merchant Taylors’ dispute and eventual agreement to exchange being number 6 and 7 in the hierarchy.”
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.
Elsewhere on this blog I have posted lessons from the opening unit of the adapted freshmen global studies I used while teaching in New York. The idea for this, as I have also mentioned elsewhere, came from an Introduction to Liberal Studies class at Amherst College called, unsurprisingly, “Causes of History.” That was an interdisciplinary course that various students in my Russian classes (I was a Hampshire student taking Russian at Amherst) called “causes of misery.”
In any case, the phrase stuck in my mind, and I decided to appropriate it for a unit on basic concepts in historical inquiry for the struggling students I served. So this lesson plan on technology as a cause of history is one of a series of ten in that unit. The challenge I find is that students possess a very narrow view of technology; unless something is electronic, they don’t consider it technology. So this context clues worksheet on the noun technology aims to broaden their definition and understanding of this concept. When the first early human discovered how to use sharp stones as a knife or a hammer to open bones and get at the high protein marrow within, that piece of stone was a technological advance. Technology, this lesson means to convey, is anything that makes work and life easier and causes advances in human development.
For that reason, this worksheet for this lesson is really a note-taking blank. This is really a brainstorming lesson designed to get kids to revise their understanding of technology so that they can see, for example, that something as basic as the wheel was a significant technological advance–and that it moved history along as surely as it moved goods and people along trade routes.
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.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun tier, which is a word students should know by the time they leave high school. This is a very common noun in educated discourse, in which I want the students I serve to participate. It means, on this worksheet, layer. This word, to my mild surprise, also has use as a verb.
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.
“attention: The focus of consciousness on something in the environment, or on a sensation or an idea. Attention includes a number of elements that are essential to all activities, including
The length of time in which a child can pay attention to something (the attention span) increases with age, interest, and intelligence level.
Breakdowns in these different elements can cause a variety of problems. A breakdown in vigilance, for example, might cause someone to select or focus on the wrong details. A breakdown in monitoring might lead to repeated careless errors. Persistence or continuity is necessary for a complex task to be completed.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Alright, I think this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a vested interest would complement the reading, one post below this one, on the military-industrial complex I just published.
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.
“Aristocracy, n. Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts—guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.”
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
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