Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

Two Short Word Root Exercises: Hemi and Demi

Here is a worksheet on the Greek root hemi (it means half or partly) and another on another on the Latin word root demi (it means half or less than). These are short worksheets designed to open a class session–they are not full lesson-length documents.

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.

What Students Need

“Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.”

Chinese Proverb

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

A Short Exercise on the Greek Word Root Mis/o

Here is a short exercise on the Greek word root mis/o. Neither you nor your students will need to look hard or far to see that this means to hate.

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.

The Teachers’ Art

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

Albert Einstein Motto for the Astronomy Building at Pasadena Junior College

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

A Short Exercise on the Greek Word Root Agog

Here’s a worksheet on the Greek word root agog, which you will know doubt recognize as the basis of the word pedagogue. It means leader and to lead. With another Greek root, ped/o (child), you can see how pedagogue means, literally, “leader of children,” i.e., teacher.

Unlike the longer word root exercises on this site, this is a short exercise meant to open a class session before continuing on to a period-length lesson.

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.

Neil Postman on Print Culture and the Development of Intellect

“…In his books The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman makes the case that as society moves away from print culture–wherein knowledge is amassed in stages, sequentially, forcing greater levels of rigor, maturity, and comprehension upon the reader–and toward mass media, we begin to lose the mechanism for civic life. Indeed,Postman contends that greater literacy is inextricably linked with the core defining traits of adult cognition and discourse: ‘A child evolves toward adulthood by acquiring the sort of intellect we expect of a good reader: a vigorous sense of individuality, the capacity to think logically and sequentially, the capacity to distance oneself from symbols, the capacity to manipulate high orders of abstraction, the capacity to defer gratification,'”

Excerpted from: Natasha Vargas-Cooper. “Childhood’s End: Which Disney Princess Is Neil Postman?” The Baffler No. 35 (Summer 2017)

Jean Piaget on a Problem with Education

“Our school system has been constructed by conservatives who were thinking much more in terms of fitting our rising generations into molds of traditional learning than in terms of training inventive and critical minds. From the point of view of society’s present needs, it is apparent that those old molds are cracking….”

Jean Piaget, Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (1970)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Elbert Hubbard on Making Oneself Obsolete

“The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Sequencing DNA in High School Science Classes

Back in the early 1980s, while living in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, I fell in with a group of doctoral candidates in the genetics department of the University of Wisconsin. I was and remain no genius when it comes to science. At that time, the lab in which these scholars worked, under the direction of a man named Fred Blattner, was on the cutting edge of genetic research. So perhaps only initiates into that world really understood what was going on in the Blattner Lab, as it was known.

The fellow who introduced me to this circle, Tim Durfee, remains a close friend of mine. So I was delighted this week when he sent me a PDF from the Genome Web on a new technology, developed at Columbia University, to bring what was once the arcane science of DNA sequencing into middle school and high school classrooms. Tim will develop the analytical software for this endeavor, and he is clearly excited about it.

For this is, in fact, exciting: bringing real-world scientific inquiry into the high school classroom can only be a good thing. If this interests you, you may want to have a look at this PDF: PlayDNA Works on Bringing DNA Sequencing, Big Data Analysis to Secondary Schools.

Albert Einstein’s Self-Assessment

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.