“syllabus: A summary outline of a program of study that explains in detail what teachers will teach, what students are expected to learn, and what the examination for the course will cover.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Definitely for Definitively. ‘It was definitely decided.’ Definitely means precisely, with exactness; definitively means finally, conclusively.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Cognate (adjective): Related or common ancestry, as two words having the same derivation; descended from the same verbal root; intrinsically similar. Noun: cognate, cognateness.
‘The vulgarity of a lot of writing about food is cognate with the vulgarity of a lot of writing about sex.’ Anthony Burgess, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Participation: Democracy is built and maintained through individual participation, yet society is structured to discourage it.
And ours is the most structured of civilizations. Forty-hour work weeks. Work breaks calculated to the minute. Weekends measured for recuperation. Various specific leaves for sickness and giving birth. Set holiday periods. Official days of celebration or mourning. When it’s all added up and the time to eat, copulate, sleep, and see families is included, twenty-four hours have been accounted for.
The only built-in space of time for individual participation is a fixed period for voting, which probably averages out to an hour a year. The only time society formally organizes extended participation is over matters of violence. (Military service or when a judge orders convicted criminals to do community service.)
Why is the function which makes democracy viable treated as if it were expendable? Or rather, why is it excluded by being reduced to a minor activity requiring the sacrifice of time formally allotted to other things?
Nothing prevents up from revising the schedule to build in four or five hours a week for public participation. Our failure to do something like this is a statement either about the state of the democratic ethic or about the real nature of power in our society.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Posted in Quotes, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, professional development
“sight word approach: A method of teaching reading and spelling in which small numbers of instantly recognizable sight words are presented while the child masters them.
While many early readers naturally learn to read words through frequent exposure to them in stories, sight words often should be explicitly taught to individuals with a learning disability. Sight words can be hard to learn for these children because they frequently have trouble following common spelling and pronunciation patterns, such as are, were, been, and some, and require a strong visual memory for words.
To avoid such confusions when using the sight-word approach to teach reading and spelling, words should be carefully selected initially to follow consistent spelling patterns.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“summative evaluation: Evaluation carried out for the purpose of gathering information to assess the overall worth of educational staff, programs, and products. Evaluation is often motivated by a prospective decision, such as purchasing a product, adopting a program, or determining the amount of a raise for staff. See also formative evaluation.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Code Word: A code name: a word with a covert meaning, such as a sociological generality or a euphemism with an inexplicit but unmistakable signification to certain people. E.g. the Marxist term ‘rootless cosmopolite’ for Jew; word of menace; shibboleth.
‘He noticed it in her friends, too—that nearly manic combing of the hair, the chewing gum and talk about music. They disparaged everything, and their talk was full of clichés and code words.’ Anne Beattie, Falling in Place.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the true history of our country, wrenching though it may be. The persistence of caste and race hostility, and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste. You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.
‘We must make every effort [to ensure] that the past injustice, violence, and economic discrimination will be made known to the people,’ Einstein said in an address to the National Urban League. ‘The taboo, the “let’s-not-talk-about-it” must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practice is a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.’
The challenge for our era is not merely the social construct of black and white but seeing through the many layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have. Even the most privileged of humans in the Western word will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough. They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death. A caste system spares no one.”
Excerpted from: Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. New York: Random House, 2020.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, professional development, united states history
“As I begin to consider whether some educational practices resulted in higher educational achievement, I began to think in terms of patterns, types, and syndromes. Can educational practices, philosophies, and beliefs be classified into broad patterns and types? Do some students learn better when exposed to one pattern or another?
I thought this was a particularly appropriate time to ask such questions. The number of proposed educational reforms seems to be at an all-time high. And precisely when we need stability, we seem to be investing our hopes in one educational change after another—with little evidence that any one of them will improve student achievement levels. Whether because we have too little supporting evidence or simply fail to use that which we have, we go about debating the merits of one or another practice as though we were in an intellectual vacuum relative to our own past experience.”
Excerpted from: Chall, Jeanne S. The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom? New York: The Guilford Press, 2002.
“bowdlerize: To expurgate a book. In 1818 an English physician, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), gave to the world a ten-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works ‘in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’ Bowdler later treated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in the same way. Hence, we have the words bowdlerist, bowdlerizer, bowdlerism, bowdlerization, etc.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, literary oddities, poetry, professional development
 | 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.