“absolutism (deriv. Lat. legibus absolutus, absolved from the laws.) System of unlimited government in which the governed possess no representation, right to vote or part in the administration and in which there are no legal or constitutional restraints on the ruler.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, term of art
“What about adults? Would the process of reading Billy Bathgate have been different if I had read it on paper rather than my Kindle? Experiments investigating this question have mostly examined the types of texts students would encounter in school—an expository text describing the function of the heart, for example—but have in some cases included narratives as well. Most studies have shown that reading from paper holds a small edge over reading from a screen either in reading comprehension or reading speed. People often report that reading from a screen feels more effortful, although at least one study shows not difference when more objective measures of effort were used.
Why would reading on a screen be different? Small changes in design can prompt small changes in comprehension. For example, comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling. And clickable links (hyperlinks) incur a cost to comprehension, even if you don’t click them. Because you can see that they are clickable, you still need to make a decision about whether or not to click. That draws on your attention, and so carries a cost to comprehension. Although it has not been fully investigated yet, researchers suspect that the three-dimensionality of paper books may be important—it’s easier to remember an event as occurring at the end of a book with the spatial cue that it happened on a page near the back of the book. These small effects often add up to slight knock to comprehension when reading from a screen.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“polysemy: The property of a single word which has two or more distinct but related senses. Thus the noun screen is polysemous, since it is used variously of a fire screen, a cinema screen, a television screen, and so on.
Compare homonymy. The difference, in principle, is that in cases of homonymy the senses are quite unconnected; therefore they are not treated as belonging to the same word. But in many cases, it is hard to decide, and in theories of meaning the distinction is not always seen as valid.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“History is the sum total of all the things that could have been avoided.”
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, philosophy/religion
“The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the Faerie Queen peculiarly tiresome…Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves, among our English classics; but he is seldom seen on the table.”
David Hume, in The History of Great Britain 1759
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, poetry, readings/research
Here is a reading on Rene Descartes along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve had exactly one request for this material in 17 years of teaching, which is why it exists. If, like me, you’ve had students in special education classes who were there on account of acting-out behavior, and not because they were learning disabled. I prepared this for just such a student, who was exceptionally intelligent, but suffered from an inordinate love of fisticuffs.
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.
“Understanding…[is] the development of powers of discrimination and judgment…. Understanding is more stimulated than learned. It grows from questioning oneself and being questioned by others.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
Here is a reading on Kurt Godel along with its attendant vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet. There is room in the document–and the latitude, as, like most other things on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Word documents that can be edited for your students’ needs–to deal with some of the abstractions Godel’s work deals with.
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.
heu*ris*tic adj
Flexner, Stuart Berg, and Lenore Crary Hauck, eds. Random House Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1993.
“Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
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