“To refuse to face the task of creating a vision of a future America immeasurably more just and noble and beautiful than the America of today is to evade the most crucial, difficult, and important educational task.”
George S. Counts (1889-1874) As Quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Most people would die rather than think; in fact, they do so.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, philosophy/religion
In my classroom, I rely almost exclusively on the Socratic method in my teaching for a variety of reasons, the most salient of them is simply that students who are talking in class–i.e. answering questions–are also thinking. As Daniel Willingham, the cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia (with whose work all teachers ought to familiarize themselves) succinctly puts it, “memory is the residue of thought.” If you want your students to retain what you teach them, ask questions that compel–or, one hopes, impel– them to think about the matter at hand in your classroom.
A couple of years ago I read Education for Judgement: The Art of Discussion Leadership by C. Roland Christenson, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet and published at the Harvard Business School Press. It’s one of the better books I’ve read for my own professional development, and I highly recommend it. To give you a sense of the riches this book contains for those interested in developing their skills in leading class discussion, I offer as this week’s Text this taxonomy of questions from its pages.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. Since this isn’t my work, I seek no peer review of it (and in any case, it seems like a safe bet that this material has been peer-reviewed by some of the best people in education).
“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”
Abigail Adams (1744-1818)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, united states history
This week’s Text is a series of worksheets related to the the Greek word root pro. I’d originally planned to post these about a month ago, but I became embroiled in a controversy of my own invention over this root, which I had always understood as Latin in origin, as it forms the basis of so many Latin words. The word root dictionary I use for this kind of work, Roger S. Crutchfield’s English Vocabulary Quick Reference: A Comprehensive Dictionary Arranged by Word Roots (Leesburg, VA: Lexadyne Publishing, 2009) lists pro as a Greek root, even though it forms the basis of so many Latin words.
Because I’m not a linguist, but rather a special education teacher in a high school, I struggled with this. In the final analysis, I’ve decided, pro is a Greek root that found its way into Latin–and means essentially the same thing in both languages, which is before, forward, forth, in place of, and in addition to. Crutchfield’s dictionary breaks down some of these words in their Greek and Latin parts. One word on the worksheet below, pro bono, is Latin, but, again, proceeds (proceeds, as Crutchfield breaks it down, is all Greek) from the Greek root pro.
So, that said, here is a word root worksheet on the Greek word root pro for this week’s Text. In addition, to complement the word root worksheet, here are three context clues worksheets on the verb proceed, the noun procedure, and the noun protagonist.
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.
Of all the units on using the parts of speech I’ve built, the fifth, on pronouns, is the longest and most involved of the whole yearlong course of study. As both an undergraduate and a graduate student, I worked in college writing centers. The two most common writing errors that impelled professors to send students to the writing center were pronoun-antecedent agreement errors and subject-verb agreement faults. Consequently, I have taken particular pains in building training around these two writing issues into the worksheets in my pronoun and verb units.
This week’s Text is a complete introductory lesson plan on the personal pronoun. This lesson begins, depending on how you use it, and with which population, with an Everyday Edit worksheet on Pocahontas (and, incidentally, if you like Everyday Edits, the good people at Education World very generously give them away; if you click that hyperlink, it will take you to the page where they keep the answer keys). If the lesson runs into a second day, then here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on satire that should serve well as your second do-now exercise. The center of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using the personal pronouns in all three cases. Students will very likely benefit from using this learning support on pronouns and case. Finally, to help you guide your students through this lesson, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.
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.
“Not until this century have we undertaken to give twelve years of schooling to all our children…. Suffrage without schooling produces mobocracy, not democracy—not rule of law, not constitutional government by people as well as for them.”
Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto (1982)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
If your school is dealing with rules concerning cell phones, and more specifically, smartphones, then I wish you luck. I won’t win any friends with the administration of my school in noting–as I have to the administration itself–that it has failed in its attempt to arrive at a sensible policy regarding these devices. In fairness to the principal and assistant principals of this institution, this is a very complicated and challenging area in which to formulate disciplinary code.
Educators can muster many reasons for prohibiting the use of smartphones in school. At the very least, they are a serious distraction and impede learning. It now appears that these devices may impair cognition and stunt brain development, perhaps permanently. For some time I’ve been waiting for the science on this, particularly science that teachers can use to design teaching activities that raise students’ consciousness about the risks theytake when they use smartphones excessively. My own sense is that until we educate students about the hazards of these devices, we don’t stand a chance of competing with them, let alone assisting students in developing their own understanding of the hazards of the excessive use of smartphones.
So, lo and behold, this morning when I woke up, I heard a short squib on the BBC about the problems associated with excessive social media use–which is the mainstay, I expect, of patterns of smartphone use among adolescents. I can’t find the exact link, but if you search “BBC Social Media Report” in your preferred internet browser, you’ll find that the BBC has done an comprehensive job covering this.
After getting myself to Lower Manhattan on the 5 train, I turned on my computer, opened Diane Ravitch’s Blog, scrolled down a few posts, and found that she posted yesterday this excellent post from Edward Berger (which actually links to a podcast) on the dangers of excessive screen use among children.
In my not especially humble, but nonetheless formed-from-direct-experience, opinion, smartphones are one of the major educational issues (and this, remember, in an environment where someone as manifestly unqualified as Betsy DeVos can be named Secretary of Education) facing teachers. Until we develop pedagogy around the cognitive hazards of excessive screen time, we will play a losing game with smartphones.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, professional development
“Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body.”
Sir Richard Steele (1675-1729)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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