“Argot (noun): The special idiom used by a particular class or group, especially an underworld jargon; distinctive parlance.
‘She smoked cigarettes one right after the other, and did not care who knew it; and she was never more than five minutes out of the office before she was talking in newspaper argot, not all of it quite accurate.’ John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra“
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Teachers…are particularly beset by the temptation to tell what they know…. Yet no amount of information, whether of theory or fact, in itself improves insight and judgment or increases ability to act wisely.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Cognitive Theory: A major cluster of theories in social psychology, which focus upon the links between mental processes (such as perception, memory, attitudes, or decision making), and social behavior. At a general level such theories are opposed to behaviorism, and suggest that human beings are active in selecting stimuli, constructing meanings, and making sense of their worlds. There are many branches of cognitive theory, including Fritz Heider’s cognitive balance theory, Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, George Kelly’s personal construct theory, and attribution theory. (See J.R. Eiser, Cognitive Social Psychology, 1980).”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Weltanschauung: A German term which refers to the ‘world-view’ or ‘philosophy of life’ of different groups within society. For example, it is sometimes argued that the long-term unemployed have a fatalistic outlook, the middle classes an individualistic approach to life, while members of the working class hold a set of beliefs and attitudes which emphasize collectivism. Sociologists have posed a number of interesting questions around this topic. Do particular social groups actually adhere to identifiable world-views? If so, how do individuals come to hold specific images of society, and what is the relationship between membership of a group and an individual’s subjective representations of it? The major problem confronting sociologists who address these issues is that of defining and describing a world-view itself. What beliefs and values may be said to constitute a world-view? Should we even expect people to hold to consistent world-views, given that (for example) research on class imagery suggests that, more often than not, people’s attitudes and values are inconsistent or ambiguous, and rarely form a coherent whole? In short, use of this term usually points to a certain imprecision in an argument, and almost invariably indicates that data appropriate to the particular case are wanting.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Dewey’s genius grasped the educational principles underlying such sequences. Coming to understand an established idea in school must be made more like discovering a new idea than like hearing adult knowledge explained point by point. We learn complex and abstract ideas through a zigzag sequence of trial, error, reflection, and adjustment. As the facets tell us, the student needs to interpret, apply, see from different points of view, and so forth, all of which imply different sequences than those found in a catalog of existing knowledge. We cannot fully understand an idea until we retrace, relive, or recapitulate some of its history—how it came to be understood in the first place. The young learner should be treated as a discoverer, even if the path seemed inefficient. That’s why Piaget argued ‘to understand is to invent.’”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
[As school closures, and therefore homebound children, mount during this COVID19 crisis, I cannot think of a better time to post this squib on the way I was educated in high school and college, and a particularly sound method of education for children in our current circumstances.]
“project-based learning: A teaching technique in which students learn by doing, engaging in activities that lead to the creation of products based on their own experiences. The project method was first described in 1918 by William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, Columbia University, who hoped to replace subject-matter teaching with real-life projects chosen by students.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Humanism: In the first place, the humanists of the Renaissance period were students of literae humaniores (q.v.); the literature of Greek and Latin poets, dramatists, historians and rhetoricians. At the Renaissance (q.v.) there was a great revival of interest in Classical literature and thought and this revival was, to some extent, at the expense of medieval scholasticism (q.v.). The long-term influences of this revival were immense and incalculable, and they led to an excessive devotion to Classical ideals and rules in the late 17th and 18th centuries.
Humanism, a European phenomenon, was a more worldly and thus more secular philosophy; and it was anthropocentric. It sought to dignify and ennoble man.
In its more extreme forms humanistic attitudes regarded man as a the crown of creation; a point of view marvelously expressed in Hamlet by Hamlet:
‘…What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god. The beauty in the world. The paragon of animals.’
It would have been inconceivable that anyone in the 14th century should have expressed such a view. Then Hamlet adds: ‘And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’ And in that one line he summarizes another attitude or feeling, which a man in the 14th century would have responded to instantly.
At its best, humanism helped to civilize man, to make him realize his potential powers and gifts, and to reduce the discrepancy between potentiality and attainment. It was a movement that was at once a product of and a counteraction to a certain prevalent skepticism; a way of dealing with the disequilibrium created by the conflict between belief and doubt. Humanism turned out to be a form of philosophy which concentrated on the perfection of a worldly life, rather than on the preparation for an eternal and spiritual life.
The popularity of the courtesy book (q.v.) in the 16th and 17th centuries, for instance, suggests what a radical change there had been in man’s view of himself. He was increasingly regarded as a creature perfectible on earth. Hence the secular emphasis on courtesy books.
Humanistic ideas and beliefs pervade much other literature of the Renaissance period. Ficino (1433-1499); Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494); Erasmus (1466-1536); Guillaume Bude (1468-1540); Sir Thomas More (1478-1535); Juan Luis Vives(1492-1540); and Montaigne (1533-1592) were outstanding humanists.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Teaching is the world’s most important job.”
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“What about adults? Would the process of reading Billy Bathgate have been different if I had read it on paper rather than my Kindle? Experiments investigating this question have mostly examined the types of texts students would encounter in school—an expository text describing the function of the heart, for example—but have in some cases included narratives as well. Most studies have shown that reading from paper holds a small edge over reading from a screen either in reading comprehension or reading speed. People often report that reading from a screen feels more effortful, although at least one study shows not difference when more objective measures of effort were used.
Why would reading on a screen be different? Small changes in design can prompt small changes in comprehension. For example, comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling. And clickable links (hyperlinks) incur a cost to comprehension, even if you don’t click them. Because you can see that they are clickable, you still need to make a decision about whether or not to click. That draws on your attention, and so carries a cost to comprehension. Although it has not been fully investigated yet, researchers suspect that the three-dimensionality of paper books may be important—it’s easier to remember an event as occurring at the end of a book with the spatial cue that it happened on a page near the back of the book. These small effects often add up to slight knock to comprehension when reading from a screen.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“polysemy: The property of a single word which has two or more distinct but related senses. Thus the noun screen is polysemous, since it is used variously of a fire screen, a cinema screen, a television screen, and so on.
Compare homonymy. The difference, in principle, is that in cases of homonymy the senses are quite unconnected; therefore they are not treated as belonging to the same word. But in many cases, it is hard to decide, and in theories of meaning the distinction is not always seen as valid.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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