“Endeavor, first, to broaden your children’s sympathies and, by satisfying their daily needs, to bring love and kindness into such unceasing contact with their impressions and their activity, that these sentiments may be engrafted in their hearts.”
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) as Quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
The amount of research on reading is voluminous. Even after reading what I consider and exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) amount of this material across a period of 15 years, I still barely scratched the surface of this body of literature. At the classroom level, however, teaching practice demands keen attention to two things: decoding–i.e. recognizing the correspondence between letters and their sounds, known as phonemic awareness, and comprehension–i.e. understanding the meanings of words and applying that understanding, in synthesis, to the entire body of a text to understand it.
English is a tough language to decode. One person who recognized this and wanted to do something about it was the Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was sufficiently concerned about the odd vagaries of English spelling that he actually bequeathed money in his estate for spelling reform. Indeed, there is a form of orthography known as the Shavian Alphabet (Aside: Shavian is both an adjective and a noun meaning, basically, related to George Bernard Shaw and his writings.)
In any case, one of the well-known representations of the challenges of English phonics, often erroneously (it first appeared, apparently, in a letter from Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt) attributed to Shaw, is the word ghoti. It is possible, using English phonics, to pronounce this word as fish: take the gh from tough (i.e. f), the o from the plural women (i.e. short i), and the ti from action (i.e. sh).
Over the years, when I had a few minutes left in a class period, generally at the beginning of the school year, I would trot this out for the struggling readers and English language learners I served. After explaining–in summary of course–much of the foregoing in this essay, I would point out to students that if they struggled with English phonics and their representation in orthography, they were in very good company: George Bernard Shaw, Nobel prizewinning author whose plays are still routinely performed today.
This year, I finally wrote out this lesson plan on ghoti for use in a full class period. Here is the accompanying worksheet and the teacher’s copy of same. I added a few words, which I grabbed somewhere along the line. Now it’s yours if you can use 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.
OK, blink and you’ll miss this post. I write this on April 2, 2020, a day on which the even dumbest, most highly ideological governors in the United States finally yielded to the expertise of public health experts and issued stay-at-home orders for citizens of their states. Yesterday on the news, a reputable source reported that worldwide, 90 percent of schoolchildren are home. That means there are a lot of kids who need something to do.
So, I will press my luck and post another batch of material that does not belong to me in any sense of the word. Depending on which history of the paper-folding art you read, origami has been around for 1,500 to 2,000 years. But these documents come from a book that I am confident remains under its publisher’s copyright. So I won’t crosspost these or in any way promote them (hint: I will post a total of five origami posts, but you’ll need to search them in the search bar in the upper-right-corner of this website). Ready? Here we go.
origami 12 boat; origami 13 house; origami 14 piano; origami 15 oblong box; origami 16 fox; origami 17 sitting fox; origami 18 cicada; origami 19 pigeon; origami 20 pelican; origami 21 pin wheel.
This set of folding terms and directions will help direct this activity. Here is a wikiHow article on how to make origami paper. Finally, here is a link to a plethora of YouTube instructional videos for origami.
“Word Salad: One of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia is a disturbance in the use of language. Rather than select words which make communication possible, schizophrenics may combine words in idiosyncratic ways, or use associations that are out of context. This tendency may generate a minor language disturbance; or, in extreme cases, a word salad in which the combination of words is unintelligible to the listener and so makes communication impossible.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
OK, before I return to a really trashy thriller I have the bad judgement to read, here is a lesson plan on the admission on the admission–or readmission after the Civil War–of states to the United States. Here also is the worksheet at the center of this lesson.
The material I have adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The World of Order and Organization; How Things Are Arranged into Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders (New York: Random House, 1997)–the original copy I possessed of the book not long after it was published was called simply The Order of Things, hence the title of the unit–and written into lessons and worksheets is something brand new at Mark’s Text Terminal. I used only a few of them in the classroom. Since it is unlikely that I will teach at the secondary level in public schools again, these are untested. I’ll post them anyway; a rationale, and my thinking toward that rationale, for their use can be found on the “About Posts & Texts” page, linked to just above the banner photograph but below the banner itself.
Please allow me to dilate on the statement below: like just about everything on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Microsoft Word documents. That means you can alter and adapt them to your needs. If you use these materials and find them effective, I would be much obliged for your comments. And please keep in mind that if these are useful educational instruments, I will be much more likely to produce more of them–and post them here.
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.
“atypical learner: A general term for a child who is different from the typical student in physical, intellectual, social, or emotional development, and who differs in mental characteristics, sensory abilities, communication abilities, or social behavior to the extent that special education services are required for that child to develop.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on dyslexia. I can think of several uses for this, including basic instruction in literacy. Your call.
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.
Alright, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb deduce, which is only used transitively. Without getting into a major discussion on the validity of deduction as a means of analysis and cognition, I will say that I consider it inarguable that high school students should know this word and the concept it represents–i.e. a mode of thinking and analysis.
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.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb dawn. It’s only used intransitively. The context clues I use call upon students to infer that two meanings of this word, to wit. “to begin to grow light as the sun rises” and “to begin to be perceived or understood.”
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.
“Alertness, flexibility, curiosity are the essentials; dogmatism, rigidity, prejudice, caprice rising from routine, passion, and flippance are fatal.”
How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
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