Tag Archives: professional development

Mullion

Posted on August 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Mullion: The vertical element or elements that divide a window into two or more lights.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Term of Art: Self Esteem

Posted on August 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

“self esteem: A particularly positive way of experiencing the self that involves emotional, evaluation, and thinking components.

Self-esteem is the ability to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life, and of being worthy of happiness. By extension, it is confidence in the ability to learn, to make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change, It also involves the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment, and happiness are right and natural.

While many things can make a person feel good temporarily, if self-esteem is not grounded in reality, it is not self-esteem.

If a teacher treats students with respect, avoids ridicule, deals fairly, and projects a benevolent conviction about every student’s potential, then that teacher is supporting both self-esteem and the process of learning and mastering challenges. On the other hand, if a teacher tries to nurture self-esteem by empty praise that bears no relationship to the students’ actual accomplishments, then self-esteem is undermined and so is academic achievement.

Research indicates that there is a significant relationship between self-esteem and academic achievement, and that if a student’s self-esteem can be improved, academic achievement tends to follow. Many factors influence self-esteem, including parents, teachers, and other adults, and biology and life experiences.

Many students with a learning disability experience low self-esteem due to years of academic failure. This is why it is especially important to build positive self-esteem by creating opportunities for success, giving sincere praise, and cultivating talents and strengths in individuals with learning disabilities.”

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

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Absurdity

Posted on August 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

“absurdity: The experience of absurdity is a common theme in the work of novelists such as Dostoevsky and Kafka, as well as in the many varieties of existentialism. The early essays of Albert Camus and his first novel The Outsider are classic modern expressions of this experience. The realization that existence is absurd arises from the sense of futility and meaninglessness provoked by the perception that there is a divorce between the human aspiration towards infinity and the finite nature of actual human experience, or between the intellectual desire for rationality and the irrationality of the physical world. The world is experienced as something unintelligible, and as the product of random combinations of events and circumstances. Although the experience of the absurd can induce s suicidal despair, the realization that there is no God and that human beings are not immortal can also produce an exhilarating sense of freedom and inspire a revolt against the human condition. There is a somewhat tenuous connection between the literary-philosophical notion of the absurd and the themes of the Theater of the Absurd.”

Excerpted from: Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2001.

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Trade War

Posted on August 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

“trade war: A situation in which two or more nations restrict one another’s exports. Trade wars are ancient and modern. Until Adam Smith and the contemporary physiocrats. No thinkers believed in free trade. All economists believed that the best policy was to maximize one’s own exports; many added that it was good to restrict others’ imports. If pursued worldwide, such policies were obviously self-defeating, but that does not lessen their attraction to individual national policy makers. The Napoleonic Wars were largely a trade war between France and her allies and the UK, which caused serious damage to third parties, such as the USA.

The nineteenth century saw the heyday of the bilateral trade treaty and the invention of the most favored nation clause. Between them, these devices restricted the scope for trade wars. However, the revival of protection in the 1920s and 1930s revived trade wars. Since the 1960s, world trade politics has become multilateral rather than bilateral (GATT, World Trade Organization). This has not eliminated trade wars, but has made them multinational also. If the EU declares war on US hormone-fortified beef and export subsidies, then the USA may declare war on EU luxury goods and Caribbean bananas.”

Excerpted from: McLean, Iain, and Alistair McMillan, editors. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Term of Art: Self-Efficacy

Posted on August 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

“self-efficacy: The belief that an individual can produce effects through personal effort. Like self-esteem, self-efficacy is important in setting and meeting goals for students of all ages.”

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

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Elizabeth Hardwick on Reading

Posted on August 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Reading—what sort of subject is this? There are ‘reading scores,’ and ‘my early reading,’ and ‘reading the future.’ There are neurology and pedagogy and linguistics and dyslexia and lipreading. And then there is plain reading for information and pleasure—neither very plain indeed….”

Elizabeth Hardwick

[If you’d like to read the rest of this important essay, you can find it here transcribed as a Microsoft Word Document.]

Excerpted from: Hardwick, Elizabeth. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. New York: New York Review of Books, 2022.

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Warsaw Uprising

Posted on August 1, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Warsaw Uprising: (August-October 1944) Insurrection in Warsaw in World War II that failed to prevent the pro-Soviet Polish administration from gaining control of Poland. In July 1944, as Soviet troops approached Warsaw, the Polish underground was encouraged to stage an uprising against the Germans. Though wary of Soviet promises of self-government, the Polish home army of 50,000 troops attacked the weakened German force and gained control of most of Warsaw in four days. German reinforcements then bombarded the city with air and artillery attacks for 63 days, The approaching Red Army halted, and the Soviets refused to allow aid from the Allies to the beleaguered Poles, who were forced to surrender when their supplies ran out in October; the Germans then deported the rest of the city’s population and destroyed most of the city itself. By allowing the Polish home army to be eliminated, the Soviets diminished potential resistance to their establishing political domination for Poland in 1945.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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The Doubter’s Companion: Biographical Films

Posted on August 1, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Biographical Films: Since attention to historical detail ruins filmed drama, the essential property of biographical cinema is that it improves in quality by not telling the truth.

These films, whether describing the lives of American presidents or criminals, French generals or Russian kings, are among the beneficiaries of the ‘big lie’ idea. As a result they have helped to create a modern mythology which erases the Western idea of intellectual inquiry and returns to the pre-intellectual tradition of mythological gods and heroes. This is the context in which the portraits of John Kennedy, James Hoffa, Napoleon and so on can most easily be understood.”

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

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Museum without Walls

Posted on July 21, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Museum without Walls: Phrase describing the illustrations and reproductions that today make works of art widely available. Introduced by Andre Malraux in his book The Voices of Silence, 1954.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Term of Art: Student Study Team

Posted on July 21, 2025 | Leave a comment

“student study team: A team of educators, convened at the request of classroom teacher, parent, or counselor, that designs in-class intervention techniques to discuss the needs of a particular student. The team may consist of the primary teacher; the parent or guardian of the student; two specialists (for example, in speech therapy, psychology, or counseling); a teacher who does not teach the student in any class; and the principal. Six weeks after implementing a program for the student, the team reconvenes to determine whether further steps, including a transfer to special education classes, are necessary.”

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

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