If you can use it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the divine right of kings. In this period of United States history, I guess, this is frighteningly relevant material.
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.
“Apocalypse Now: A film (1979) directed by Francis Ford Coppola, loosely based on the story Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). The title refers to the Revelation of St. John the Divine, also called the Apocalypse; ‘apocalypse’ (Greek apokalupsis) literally means an uncovering, but is popularly taken to mean the violent end of the world, as described by St, John. The ‘Now’ in the title refers to the fact that the film is set during the Vietnam War (which had come to an end four years before the film’s release). The film stars Martin Sheen as US Army captain detailed to assassinated the renegade Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, and includes such epic set pieces as a helicopter assault conducted to the accompaniment of Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries.’ The massive cost of the film, which was shot in the Philippines and complicated when Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack, was compounded by the extent to which it went over schedule. In the film business it became known by the alternative titles Apocalypse When? or Apocalypse Later. During filming Coppola referred to the film as his “Idiodyssey.” He later said
‘We made Apocalypse the way Americans made war in Vietnam. There were too many of us, too much money and equipment—and little by little we went insane.’
In 2001 Coppola released his own cut, Apocalypse Now Redux (redux is Latin for ‘brought back,’ ‘restored’), which included the fabled ‘French plantation sequence,’ the existence of which had been rumored among fans for years.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“action francaise: Right-wing political movement founded in France by the journalist and poet Charles Maurras (1868-1952), which was royalist, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic and which criticized the Third French Republic for decadence. Although a freethinker, Maurras approved of Roman Catholicism, believing that its traditions were a counterforce to democratic republicanism. In 1908 he and Leon Daudet (1867-1942), a pamphleteer and essayist, began joint editorship of the movement’s newspaper, Action Francaise. The Vatican became estranged from the movement after 1926 and it drew increasingly close to fascism. Between 1940 and 1944, it gave strong support to the Vichy government and was accordingly suppressed after France was liberated; Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration with the Germans.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, readings/research
[Professor Willingham cited the research of Mark Changizi for this explanation.]
“A reasonable hypothesis is that the visual system has been tuned over time (either evolutionary time, or the lifetime of an individual, or both) to best perceive shapes that appear most frequently in the environment. People who invented alphabets unconsciously capitalized on that property of the visual system. The shapes that people see most easily were judged to make nice letters. It’s a good example of what we mean when we say that the brain is not designed for reading and writing—rather, we co-opt existing mental mechanisms to make literacy work.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, philosophy/religion
“It is incompatible with democracy to train the many and educate the few.”
Arthur Bestor As Quoted in The Great School Debate: Which Way for American Education (1985)
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
Elsewhere on this blog, I published Professor Daniel Willingham’s “First Demonstration of Memory” as a lesson for classroom use with students (in fact, if you click on that second hyperlink, it will transfer you directly to that post). I originally wrote that lesson because it has important implications for classroom practice, and I wanted to discuss those implications with students at the beginning of the school year. In fact, I give the lesson on the first day of school, before talking about classroom conduct, as a way of establishing priorities–learning–and classroom methodology–i.e. students directly involved in the pedagogy in which they will engage through the school year.
Along the way, in order to satisfy my professional development requirements, I also developed this lesson, which in some respects is a cognitive science parlor trick, for use as a professional development exercise for teachers.
To present this lesson, you will need this PDF of the article that engendered it; you might also consider reproducing the article to hand out after you conclude the lesson. Here is the lesson plan that outlines and rationalizes it use. I use this learning support with both versions of this lesson. Finally, here is the context clues worksheet on the adjective condign that concludes the exercise.
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.
“theology: The systematic study of religious beliefs and systems of thinking about God (or gods), often from within a given tradition, such as Judaism or Catholicism. Theology is not far removed from philosophy and the sociology of religion when considerations of meaning and empirical manifestations of religion are primary.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, professional development, term of art
“By giving each letter a number from its order in the alphabet you can deconstruct the name ‘Bach’ as follows: 2 for the B, 1 for the A, 3 for the C, 8 for the H—which makes 14. A pleasing mirror, or reversal, of this number can also be formed from ‘J.S. Bach’—which gives 41. This pseudo-science of substituting numbers for letters is known as gematria, (or abjad in Arabic) and has innumerable variations depending on whether or not you include vowels or which language you translate back to or transcribe into. It has often appealed to creative minds and may have been behind Bach’s playful manipulation of the number 14, achieved by itself (in the fourteen canons of the Goldberg Variations for instance) or in pairs of sevens that occur throughout his work.
Gematria is a very ancient tradition, particularly in the Near East, where it has often had official sanction, with poetic inscriptions commissioned by rulers to reveal the date of the publication of a book or the construction of a building. There are examples dating back to Sargon II of Assyria (in the eighth century BC). In the first century AD gematria became a recognized tool of Jewish hermeneutical scholarship and it was tradition respected by many of the Ottoman Sultans. It seems only to have taken root in the imagination of Western Europe, however, in the seventeenth century.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged music, numeracy, philosophy/religion
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
“In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit it is the first.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
[Here’s an ugly term and concept to consider in the present-day United States; we have elected representatives, alas, articulating garbage like this.]
baskaap (Afrikaan, ‘masterhood’). The underlying white supremacist ethos crudely expressing the ideology of Apartheid.
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion
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