Tag Archives: professional development

Thomas Henry Huxley to Samuel Wilberforce on Charles Darwin

Posted on July 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

[Replying to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in their debate on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Oxford, England, 30 June 1860:] “A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”

Quoted in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (1900)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Term of Art: Single Sex Education

Posted on July 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

“single-sex education: Classes or schools that enroll only girls or only boys. Advocates of single-sex schooling claim that it helps adolescent students concentrate on their studies, free of distracting socialization with or potential intimidation by the opposite sex. Critics claim that single-sex education is comparable to racially segregated schooling.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

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Bibliography

Posted on July 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Bibliography (noun): The study or historical cataloguing of books and writings, including dates, places of publication, description of editions, etc., or a volume containing such information; textual scholarship; listing of writings, or of sources of information in print, dealing with a particular subject, period, or author, often with descriptive notes; in a particular book, a list of works consulted by the author. Adj. bibliographic, bibliographical; adv. bibliographically; n. bibliography, bibliographer.”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Posted on July 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A long poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), his joint collaboration with William Wordsworth. The poem opens with the Ancient Mariner buttonholing a guest at a wedding to tell him his tale. Having shot an albatross (traditionally bad luck at sea), the Ancient Mariner and his shipmates were subjected to fearful penalties. On repentance he was forgiven, and on reaching land told his story to a hermit. At times, however, distress of mind drives him from land to land, and wherever he stays he tells his story of woe, to warn against cruelty and to persuade men to love God’s creatures.

The story is partly based on a dream told by Coleridge’s friend George Cruikshank, and partly gathered from his reading. Wordsworth told him the story of the privateer George Shelvocke, who shot an albatross while rounding Cape Horn in 1720, and was dogged by bad weather thereafter. Other suggested sources are Thomas James’s Strange and Dangerous Voyage (1683) and the Letter of St Paulinus to Macarius, In Which He Relates Astounding Wonders Concerning the Shipwreck of an Old Man (1618). A full examination of the possible sources is to be found in The Road to Xanadu (1927) by J.L. Lowes.

‘The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.’

Samuel Butler, Notebooks (1912)”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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Term of Art: Survival Skills

Posted on July 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

“survival skills: The term can mean more than one thing depending on the context in which it is used. Survival skills may refer to daily self-help skills necessary to survive in life, such as feeding, dressing, and communicating. In higher education, survival skills often refer to the study skills necessary to be a successful learner.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

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Term of Art: Teaching to the Test

Posted on July 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

“teaching to the test: The practice of devoting extra time and attention in the classroom to the skills and knowledge that will be assessed on the state or district test. Critics claim that it reduced education to a limited range of skills, ignores the importance of comprehension, and neglects subjects that are not tested, such as history, civics, geography, and the arts.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

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John Locke on Common and Uncommon Knowledge

Posted on July 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding “Dedicatory Epistle” (1690)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Term of Art: Visual Motor Skills

Posted on July 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“visual motor skills: A subcategory of perceptual motor skills involving the ability to translate information received by sight into a physical response. In education, visual motor skills are often used when copying information from a blackboard or reproducing letters or numbers. Individuals with problems in this area often have poor handwriting, and may also have more subtle and pervasive difficulties in school performance.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

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The Doubter’s Companion: Absolute

Posted on July 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Absolute: Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exception of this statement and death, which may explain why political and economic theories are presented so seriously.

Absolutism is a deadly serious business. If even a hair’s breadth of space is left around the edges of a theory, doubt may be able to squeeze through. The citizen may then begin to smile and wonder whether the intellectual justifications of power are really nonsense. Few within the expert elites see themselves as ideologues and yet they quite happily act as carriers of truth in whatever their field.

Whether it reveals the dictatorship of the proletariat or the virtues of privatization, truth is ideology. Not their truths, our elites say. They are simply delivering the inevitable conclusions of facts rationally organized. Absolutism is the weakness of others. Our elites have the good fortune simply to be right.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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Fable

Posted on July 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Fable: A short tale, usually epigrammatic, with animals, men, gods, and even inanimate objects as characters. The action of a fable illustrates a moral which is usually (but not always) explicitly stated at the end. This moral often attains the force of a proverb. The fable form appears early in man’s cultural development, being a common part of the oral folk literature of primitive tribes. It appeared in Egyptian papyri of c1500 BC, and in Greece a recognizable fable was included in the works of Hesiod in the 8th century BC. By far the most famous fables are those attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave who lived about 600 BC. In India the fable also appeared early, the great Indian collection, the Panchatantra, having been composed in the 3rd century. Modern fables have been dominated by the genius and style of La Fontaine, the great French fabulist of the 17th century, who wrote fables in polished and witty poetry that have been widely translated and imitated.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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