“Ability: Developed skill, competence, or power to do something, especially (in psychology) existing capacity to perform some function, whether physical, mental, or a combination of the two, without further education or training, contrasted with capacity, which is latent ability.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed then thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, science literacy
Because a our legislative branch is interviewing a candidate for a job on the United States Supreme Court, now seems like a good time to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on cruel and unusual punishment, more specifically the fact that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution forbids it.
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.
“Structuralism: Seen as a form of constructivism, it is manifest as low-relief sculpture that interprets nature in the tradition of Cezanne by the application of simple geometric forms to a flat surface. Named by American artist Charles Biederman, it has a strong following in Holland and Canada.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Latin American Boom: A term for the recognition and publication of Latin American fiction in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America during the 1960s. The ‘boom’ writers were innovative and experimental and yet also accessible, and included Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, and Julio Cortazar. Guillermo Cabrera Infante is often considered part of the group. The reasons for the boom include attention and the awarding of prizes by publishers in Spain to Latin American authors; the Cuban Revolution (1959), which focused attention on the Americas; the exhaustion of the Nouveau Roman style and a renewed interest in vibrant storytelling; and the conjunction of imaginative work that engaged political and historical themes. Paradoxically, the fame of book writers has obscured the recognition of pre-boom writers like Onetti, Pinera, Lezama Lima, Lispector, Arguedas, and Arreola, while post-boom writers have found it hard to crack the commercial market, given the starlike promotion of the boom novelists. Notable exceptions are Isabel Allende and writers whose work has been made into successful U.S. films, plays, or musicals, such as Manuel Puig.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Repetition compulsion: In psychoanalysis, a type of compulsion characterized by a tendency to place oneself in dangerous or distressing situations that repeat similar experiences from the past. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) introduced in 1914 in an article on ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’ (Standard Edition, XII, pp. 147-56) and discussed it at length in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In analysis, the transference often contains elements that involve recreations of past conflicts with parents and other family members. Also called a compulsion to repeat.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“’…The holy bearded veck all nagoy hanging on a cross’ is an example of the author’s language and questionable taste…. The author seems content to use a serious social challenge for frivolous purposes, but himself to stay neutral.”
Times (London)
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Schema: A plan, diagram, or outline, especially a mental representation of some aspect of experience, based on prior experience and memory, structured in such a way as to facilitate (and sometimes to distort) perception, cognition, the drawing of inferences, or the interpretation of new information in terms of existing knowledge. The term was first used in a psychological sense by the English neurologist Sir Henry Head (1861-1940), who restricted its meaning to a person’s internal body image, and it was given its modern meaning by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969) in his book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology [1932, p. 199] to account for the observation that errors in the recall of stories tend to make them more conventional, which Bartlett attributed to the assimilation of the stories to a pre-existing schemata. The concept of a frame, introduced in 1975 by the US cognitive scientist Marvin (Lee) Minsky (1927-2016), is essentially a schema formalized in artificial intelligence. A script is a schema of an event sequence.”
[From Greek schema a form, from echein to have]”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003
“When did Thoreau live in his hut at Walden Pond? For two years from 1845 to 1847. His account of the experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods, appeared in 1854.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Let me start with the documents, to wit this reading on personal identity and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The more I think about the conceptual and personal issues attached to personal identity, and how self-identifying has empowered oppressed communities, the more I think I would like to build either a short unit or a long lesson around these documents. If that interests you, please read on.
It’s one of those big philosophical and psychological concepts, but in the realm of the classroom teacher, individuation means that students have begun the process of discovering the self, or themselves, if you prefer. In any case, identity is important. To whatever extent we can, I think we are intellectually and morally obliged to abet this process in kids.
Especially now, when social media appear, as an emerging scholarly discourse indicates, to erode individuation. If you’re interested, this stylish and literate blog post from The Literary Blues supplies a nice basic outline of the means by which social media diminishes individualism. A lesson or unit on personal identity would proceed most effectively, I submit, if it addressed these critical issues of identity and social media.
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.
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