Here is a lesson plan on intelligence. You’ll need this short reading and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you’d like slightly longer versions of these documents, click 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.
“Saxon math: A mathematics program that relies on explicit, incremental instruction. The series was created by John Saxon, a former mathematics teacher and U.S. Air Force officer who believed that he had found a superior way to teach mathematics, based on the step-by-step instruction that he had encountered in the military. Each day, students work on a limited number of concepts, solving problems until they have mastered each concept and then moving on to the next. Every new assignment is a cumulative review of previously studied materials. The Saxon textbooks are popular with homeschooling families and some charter schools, but are shunned by many school districts because they do not teach discovery and inquiry methods.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Classroom Interaction, Classroom Behavior: Describes the form and content of behavior or social interaction in the classroom. In particular, research on gender, class, and ‘race’ in education has examined the relationship between teacher and students in the classroom. A variety of methods have been used to investigate the amount and type of ‘teacher-time’ received by different groups of students. Much of the research has then sought to relate this to different educational experiences and outcomes among particular groups. For example, some studies showed that boys received a disproportionate amount of the teachers’ time, sat in different places in the classroom, and were more highly regarded by teachers, which may go some way towards explaining the educational differential between men and women. More recently, focus has shifted to examining the role of the school as a whole on student experiences as well as behavior outside the classroom, such as bullying and racial and sexual harassment.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
On a chilly Wednesday morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on tabula rasa, which is an educational and epistemological concept from John Locke.
So I must ask: do students arrive in our classrooms as blank slates, as Locke claimed, or do they have basic cognitive frameworks for understanding the world? I imagine that entire academic careers may still depend on the discourses this question raises.
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.
If you follow this blog regularly, you are likely aware of my obsession with handwriting. That mania extends to typefaces as well, and I have read, over the years, that the much-hated Comic Sans makes reading easy for students who struggle with the written word. I’ve always meant to test this. This morning, offhandedly, I performed that test with this short questionnaire on font styles.
To my surprise, most of my students told me they prefer Times New Roman. So, in the final analysis, I don’t know what to think.
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.
“Children rarely [are provided work in] redefining what has been encountered, reshaping it, reordering it. The cultivation of reflectiveness is one of the great problems one faces in devising curricula: how to lead children to discover the powers and pleasures that await the exercise of retrospection.”
Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
If you’ve been teaching for ten years or more, you probably remember a time in your working life before smartphones became ubiquitous and turned your classroom into a battleground of wills over the presence of these devices in school. I have only one question for people who defend the presence of smartphones in classrooms: would you want your child–or any child–arriving in class every day with a smart television set and a cable modem and wireless router?
That is, of course, a rhetorical question (unless it’s not, which is very bad news indeed for this teacher). But the fact is this: we do allow smart televisions and cable modems/wifi routers when we allow smartphones in our schools. As I like to tell students, I have nothing, and I do mean nothing, that can compete with the constant stimulation, approbation, distraction, and amusement that these devices offer. What I have is material that requires prolonged attention, engagement, consideration, analysis, and, finally, deep thought. What I offer will more often than not challenge students’ views of the world–which I think is kind of the point of education, after all.
I’ve been waiting for a moment when I would have the stamina to write a lengthy essay to accompany this extended bibliography on the hazards of screens for child development and learning. I can’t summon the outrage–probably because where outrage is concerned, my well runneth dry–to add more than these few words of expository gloss to accompany this excellent document.
But I do want to thank the good people at Parents Across America for this document–and for all the excellent work they do.
Bruno Bettelheim: (1903-1990) Austrian-born American psychologist, educator, and author, Bettelheim came to the U.S. in 1939 as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Drawing from this experience, he wrote the widely read and influential study Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations (1943). He is best known, however, for his psychiatric work with severely disturbed children and its application to the study and education of normal children. Love Is Not Enough (1950), addressed to parents and a general readership, describes his work in his Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children and outlines means for meeting both children’s and parents’ needs in the modern family situation. Among his many other books are The Children of the Dream (1969), about communal childbearing in the kibbutz; A Home for the Heart (1974); and The Uses of Enchantment (1976), in which he discusses the psycho-social importance of fairy tales. Surviving and Other Essays (1979) contains diverse essays on problems in American society, on surviving under extreme duress, and on childhood schizophrenia. Freud and Man’s Soul was published in 1983, and Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays appeared in the year of his death.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“experiential learning: Learning based on experiences, rather than lectures or reading. Experiential learning, also referred to as hands-on learning, can be especially helpful to students with a learning disability since it allows them to learn without being hindered by difficulties in reading or writing. An experiential approach to education and learning is based on the belief that students are more motivated and will remember concepts better when they have a direct physical experience.
Experiential learning also may have a strong basis in the nature of memory, especially for individuals with learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders. For many students, learning techniques that incorporate sight and touch are much easier for them to remember and retrieve. Evidence suggests that many individuals with learning disabilities or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have a hard time remembering concepts, rules, and verbal information (semantic memory), while finding it much easier to remember events, people, places, and experience (episodic memory).
To some degree, experiential learning activities may provide a means of bridging those two basic forms of memory, and for enabling individuals to use strengths in one area to compensate in one area for weaknesses in another.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
[If you would like this learning support as a Word document, just click on that hyperlink.]
“Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.
The best way to see a country, unless you are pressed for time, is to travel on foot.
This rule is difficult to apply; it is frequently hard to decide whether a single word, such as however, or a brief phrase is or is not parenthetic. If the interruption to the flow of the sentence is but slight, the commas may be safely omitted. But whether the interruption is slight or considerable, never omit one comma and leave the other. There is no defense of such punctuation as
Marjorie’s husband, Colonel Nelson paid us a visit yesterday.
or
My brother, you will be pleased to hear, is now in perfect health,
Dates usually contain parenthetic words of figures. Punctuation is as follows:
February to July, 1992
April 6, 1986
Wednesday, November 14, 1990
Note that it is customary to omit the comma in
6 April 1988
The last form is an excellent way to write a date; the figures are separated by a word and are, for that reason, quickly grasped.
A name of title in direct address in parenthetic.
If, Sir, you refuse, I cannot predict what will happen.
Well, Susan, this is a fine mess your are in.
The abbreviations etc., i.e., and e.g., the abbreviations of academic degrees, and titles that follow a name are parenthetic and should be punctuated accordingly.
Letters, packages, etc., should go here.
Horace Fulsome, Ph.D., presided.
Rachel Simonds, Attorney
The Reverend Harry Lang, S.J.
No comma, however, should separate a noun from a restrictive term of identification.
Billy the Kid
The novelist Jane Austen
William the Conquerer
The poet Sappho
Although Junior, with its abbreviation Jr., has commonly been regarded as parenthetic, logic suggests that it is, in fact, restrictive and therefore not in need of a comma.
James Wright Jr.
Nonrestrictive relative clauses are parenthetic, as are similar clauses introduced by conjunctions indicating time or place. Commas are therefore needed. A nonrestrictive clause is one that does not serve to identify or define the antecedent noun.
The audience, which had at first been indifferent, became more and more interested.
In 1769, when Napoleon was born, Corsica had but recently been acquired by France.
Nether Stowey, where Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is a few miles from Bridgewater.
In these sentences, the clauses introduced by which, when, and where are nonrestrictive; they do not limit or define, they merely add something. In the first example, the clause introduced by which does not serve to tell which of several possible audiences is meant; the reader presumably knows that already. The clause adds, parenthetically, a statement supplementing that in the main clause. Each of the three sentences is a combination of two statements that might have been made independently.
The audience was at first indifferent. Later it became more and more interested.
Napoleon was born in 1769. At that time Corsica had but recently been acquired by France.
Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at Nether Stowey. Nether Stowey is a few miles from Bridgewater.
Restrictive clauses, by contrast, are not parenthetic and are not set off by commas. Thus,
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Here the clause introduced by who does serve to tell which people are meant; the sentence, unlike the sentence above, cannot be split into two independent statements. The same principle of comma use applies to participial phrased and to appositives.
People sitting in the rear couldn’t hear. (restrictive)
Uncle Burt, being slightly deaf, moved forward, (non-restrictive)
My cousin Bob is a talented harpist. (restrictive).
Our oldest daughter, Mary, sings. (non-restrictive)
When a the main clause of a sentence is preceded by a phrase or a subordinate clause, us a comma to set off these elements.
Partly by hard fighting, partly by diplomatic skill, they enlarged their dominions to the east and rose to royal rank with the possession of Sicily.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
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