“History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don’t use the stuff,–well, it might as well be dead.”
Arnold J. Toynbee on NBC (1955)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on Henry David Thoreau is a good–and perhaps more importantly, short–general introduction to the this paragon of Transcendentalism and important American thinker and writer.
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.
“metacognition: Knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes, an important class of metacognition being metamemory, The term is also sometimes applied to regulation of cognitive functions, including planning, checking, or monitoring, as when one plans one’s cognitive strategy for memorizing something, checks one’s accuracy when performing mental arithmetic, or monitors one’s comprehension while reading, and these forms of metacognition are called metacognitive regulation in contradistinction to metacognitive knowledge. Writings on metacognition can be traced back at least as far as De Anima and the Parva Naturalia of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), and the phenomenon was brought to prominence during the 1970s largely by the US psychologist John H. Flavell (born 1928), who focused attention on developmental aspects of metacognition. In an influential article in the journal Psychological Review in 1977, the US psychologists Richard E. Nisbett (born 1941) and Timothy D. Wilson (born 1951) summarized a range of evidence suggesting that people are often unaware of the factors influencing their own choices, evaluations, and behavior, and that the verbal reports that they give when questioned are often quite erroneous and misleading.”
[From Greek meta beside or beyond + English cognition]
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure, in short, is to learn how things are related…. To take an example from mathematics, algebra is a way of arranging knowns and unknowns in equations so that the unknowns are made knowable. The three fundamentals involved…are commutation, distribution, and association. Once a student grasps the ideas embodied by these three fundamentals, he is in a position to recognize wherein “new” equations to be solved are not new at all. Whether the student knows the formal names of these operations is less important for transfer than whether he is able to use them.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Few citizens really know what’s going on in their schools. They settle for the familiar and ignore the substance.”
Theodore R. Sizer (1932-2009)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“[On why universities have so much learning] ‘The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, to it accumulates through the years.”
Quoted in Reader’s Digest, May 1949
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Anti-clericalism: Opposition to organized religion, particularly the power and privileges of the Roman Catholic Church. Anti-clericalism, though not a coherent political doctrine, has a long history. In England it is traceable to the 14th century when Wyclif insisted that all men had a right to access to the scriptures. In Tudor times, anti-clericalism arose from a variety of motives ranging from greed to a desire to plunder the monasteries to a genuine dislike of priestly powers and abuses. Modern anti-clericalism was prevalent in revolutionary France and remained characteristic of French radicalism during the 19th century. Anti-clericalism has broken out sporadically in Spain (notably in 1873, 1909-13 and 1931-36) and in Latin America. In Germany there has been a long history of anti-clericalism stemming from the opposition to the territorial claims of the Pole and, more recently, over the Catholic Church’s attitude to divorce and contraception. In some communist states, anti-clericalism has risen from the government’s identification of the clergy with former fascist regimes and as part of an ideological battle for the loyalty of the masses.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion
George Santayana famously said–and this is one of those quotes that is often repeated erroneously or misattributed–“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” To my mind, this is one of the most cogent aphorisms (and I wrote my MA thesis on the Zeus of aphorists, Nietzsche) ever uttered, to it deserves verbatim repetition and proper attribution.
So I hope this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Santayana’s famous quote aids that modest cause. When I co-taught freshman global studies classes in Manhattan, my excellent co-teacher always started the year with a discussion of the implications of Santayana’s maxim.
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.
“An active process whereby various strategies are used during the process of memory retrieval to rebuild information from memory, filling in missing elements while remembering. It was first differentiated from reproductive memory in 1932 by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969), who studied it with the technique of successive reproduction.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation.”
My Hates (1866)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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