Here, on a Sunday morning, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of cyberspace. Does anyone use that word anymore?
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 society that is concerned about the strength and wisdom of its culture pays careful attention to its adolescents.”
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“An ancient oracle at Delphi, on the southern slope of Mount Parnassus. It was of extremely ancient origin, having originally belonged to a chthonic deity. Aeschylus’ claim in the Eumenides that it belonged successively to Ge, Themis and Phoebe—two of whom, at least, were earth goddesses—may not be far from wrong. In later times, the oracle was taken over by Apollo, who, according to the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, killed a python, a sacred snake associated with the oracle. The oracular utterances were made by the Pythia, a priestess who sat on a tripod over a cleft in the rock. Her incomprehensible mouthings were interpreted by a priest.
Although there were many oracles in the Greek world, the Delphic oracle was regarded as the final authority in religious matters. A great many of the most famous Greek myths involve the working out of the oracles that issued from Delphi. Associated with the shrine was the omphalos, a sacred stone that was regarded as the navel of the world, though various other centers made the same claim. Some authorities believe that the omphalos was the phallic cap of a tomb, possibly that of the python, since many oracles were associated with the tombs of heroes. In the first part of the Eumenides Orestes clings to the omphalos in seeking sanctuary from the Erinyes, or furies.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Although it doesn’t appear often in texts in secondary school texts (I did encounter it frequently in text while working on my undergraduate degree), entrepot might pop up once or twice. While I realize that might be a relatively thin rationale for the existence of this context clues worksheet on the noun entrepot, I offer it to you nonetheless.
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.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on postulating theses, i.e developing thesis statements, I wrote for somewhat more advanced students in our Wednesday afternoon institute class. Here is the worksheet that attends the lesson and the teacher’s copy of the worksheet. I wrote this last fall, and used it once; if ever you felt inclined to comment on Mark’s Text Terminal, I would enthusiastically welcome your comments on these documents. The unit of which they are a part is still in the developmental stage.
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.
A couple of years ago, in a “professional development” (a term I use both loosely and charitably when referring to the role it plays–or doesn’t–in the institution in which I serve) session, a colleague presented a workshop on the concept of the flipped classroom. I confess that my initial reaction was incredulity followed closely by hostility. After all, this person basically confessed (in my view) to turning over direct instruction in his classroom to a series of internet videos. To make matters worse, he presented no research to buttress his assertions about this style of teaching, save a promotional squib featuring a couple of young teachers (or actors playing young teachers) acting like fools as they extolled the virtues of the flipped classroom. I assumed this was the advertisement from the vendor supplying the material; whatever it was, it was far from the kind of research validation I personally would need to see to consider adopting this method in my own classroom.
More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that during the latest round (over the past couple of weeks) of high-stakes state testing here in New York, while I was proctoring math tests, several students complained that they didn’t understand the material because the flipped classroom didn’t help them to learn it, let alone master it. A couple were particularly disgruntled by their experience with the flipped classroom.
About eighteen months after the presentation I attended on this, while reading Jerome Rekart’s The Cognitive Classroom (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), I came upon this passage, which again aroused my skepticism about this method of instruction:
We know that even with intensive daily exposure to video instruction in language, infants fail to maintain phonemic awareness (i.e. ability to differentiate between the sounds that are particular to a specific language) of the learned language, unlike infants who received face-to-face instruction (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003).
Whether such studies have any bearing on older children or adult learning remains to be determined. If similar results are seen with other subjects and age groups, as they have been with the acquisition of English in early childhood, it will seriously squelch the current fervor over ‘flipped classrooms,’ with their reliance of video delivery of lecture material (Sparks, 2011).
The Sparks citation refers to this article, from Education Week, by Sarah D. Sparks. Ms. Sparks ably covers the pros and cons of the flipped classroom approach. Unfortunately, what emerges is a lot of uncertainty about the method in general, and in particular whether it is effective for all students.
As it turns out, there is a plethora of research on the flipped classroom. Even a search on ERIC (Education Research Information Services) limited to peer-reviewed articles with their full text available on that website turns up dozens of articles on the effectiveness of “flipping” a classroom. And a search of the Internet using the term “problems with flipped classrooms” also turns up page after page or articles on flipped classrooms, some of them balanced analyses like this article from Mary Beth Hertz at Edutopia; some are skeptical, as is Robert Talbert’s blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Many, however, are corrosively critical, like this article from Professor Jonathan Rees of Colorado State University.
As both a teacher and a blogger, I really have no horse in this race. Because I serve students who struggle, this method of instruction would be flatly inappropriate for my classroom. What concerns me is the unquestioning acceptance of a pedagogical method that clearly shows mixed results; moreover, I have never much cared for the magpie-like fascination among some teachers and educational administrators for every shiny new thing that comes along. Many of these programmatic curricula are untested, and simply don’t stand up to tried and true instructional methods. But, again, they’re new! They’re shiny! They are–to use a word much beloved by the credulous–innovative!
We owe our students and their parents (the property tax payers who underwrite our salaries, incidentally) better than this. If we want to be treated like professionals, we must actually conduct ourselves as professionals. That means we don’t just uncritically accept every pedagogical fad that comes down the pike. We must review the research, consider methods of application of new pedagogical strategies, and finally and most importantly, consider the needs of our students.
If we fail to do so, there is a nice solid noun to describe what we’re doing: malpractice.
The expression “crossing the Rubicon” is a commonplace in educated discourse, in the sense that one has arrived at a point of no return. This is of course its figurative meaning, and here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Rubicon River that will help your students understand the literal meaning of this expression–you know, Julius Caesar and all that.
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 newspaper story having a curious human-interest, often humorous flavor, such as one profiling a person with a hobby that would seem to be a role reversal.
‘The defendant was what the N-boys like to call a Scion (of a wealthy family of former oleomargarine manufacturers, in this instance), which, in the same idiom, qualified him as a Socialite. Scions are seldom accused of procuring, which gave the case a bit of the man-bites-dog-aspect that the schools of journalism talk about.'”
A.J. Liebling, The Press
Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, term of art
Lou Gehrig was born, to reiterate, on June 19, 1903–115 years ago. You may know that he was felled by the same disease that recently claimed Stephen Hawking, to wit Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which, not coincidentally, is known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” Mr. Gehrig famously delivered what is known as “baseball’s Gettysburg Address” on July 4, 1939, making a dignified exit from the game, and cementing his legend with that simple, eloquent address.
Here is a reading on Lou Gehrig along with a comprehension worksheet to accompany 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.
If memory serves, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the verb revolve last fall to attend a lesson on the French Revolution, so that students could understand what happens to governments and societies in revolutionary situations. Of course, there are any number of uses for this document.
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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