“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.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, philosophy/religion
“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.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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.
“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.
“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.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.