Tag Archives: readings/research

The Weekly Text, October 9, 2020, Hispanic Heritage Month 2020 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Emiliano Zapata

This week’s Text, in the ongoing observation of Hispanic Heritage Month 2020, is a reading on Emiliano Zapata along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Any study of the history of Mexico, United States policy there or elsewhere, or revolutionary movements across the world probably ought to include something on this patriot and revolutionary.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

Junk Sculpture

“Junk Sculpture: With Dada roots in the collages of Kurt Schwitters, which were created from trash collected from the streets, junk sculpture first appeared in the United States in the 1950s works of John Chamberlain and Robert Rauschenberg. It is a type of assemblage sculpture in which the sculptor uses materials cast off by modern urban culture and reassembles them with little or no comment. Junk sculpture has affinities to Arte Povera in Italy and similar movements in other European countries where it took on more nostalgic tones.”

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

Term of Art: Repetition Compulsion

“Repetition compulsion: In psychoanalysis, a type of compulsion characterized by a tendency to place oneself in dangerous or distressing situations that repeat similar experiences from the past. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) introduced in 1914 in an article on ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’ (Standard Edition, XII, pp. 147-56) and discussed it at length in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In analysis, the transference often contains elements that involve recreations of past conflicts with parents and other family members. Also called a compulsion to repeat.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Rotten Reviews: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

“’…The holy bearded veck all nagoy hanging on a cross’ is an example of the author’s language and questionable taste…. The author seems content to use a serious social challenge for frivolous purposes, but himself to stay neutral.”

 Times (London)

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.    

Raptor (n)

From my current perch, waiting out the pandemic in Southwestern Vermont, time and place dictate that I post this context clues worksheet on the noun raptor. I can’t remember why I wrote this, but I have to assume it was the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster.

It means “bird of prey.” Students might connect it with that feared creature of the Jurassic Park movie franchise, the velociraptor. Also, now you know what you’ll see if you visit the Raptor Center at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science over in Quechee.

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.

Term of Art: Schema

“Schema: A plan, diagram, or outline, especially a mental representation of some aspect of experience, based on prior experience and memory, structured in such a way as to facilitate (and sometimes to distort) perception, cognition, the drawing of inferences, or the interpretation of new information in terms of existing knowledge. The term was first used in a psychological sense by the English neurologist Sir Henry Head (1861-1940), who restricted its meaning to a person’s internal body image, and it was given its modern meaning by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969) in his book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology [1932, p. 199] to account for the observation that errors in the recall of stories tend to make them more conventional, which Bartlett attributed to the assimilation of the stories to a pre-existing schemata. The concept of a frame, introduced in 1975 by the US cognitive scientist Marvin (Lee) Minsky (1927-2016), is essentially a schema formalized in artificial intelligence. A script is a schema of an event sequence.”

[From Greek schema a form, from echein to have]”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003

A Lesson Plan on Pilot Checklist Steps from The Order of Things

If you have any students with an interest in aviation, here is an Order of Things lesson on the checklist of steps pilots use to assure their aircraft is ready to fly. You’ll need the worksheet with list as reading and comprehension questions to do the work of this lesson.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

Book of Answers: Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond

“When did Thoreau live in his hut at Walden Pond? For two years from 1845 to 1847. His account of the experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods, appeared in 1854.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Personal Identity

Let me start with the documents, to wit this reading on personal identity and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The more I think about the conceptual and personal issues attached to personal identity, and how self-identifying has empowered oppressed communities, the more I think I would like to build either a short unit or a long lesson around these documents. If that interests you, please read on.

It’s one of those big philosophical and psychological concepts, but in the realm of the classroom teacher, individuation means that students have begun the process of discovering the self, or themselves, if you prefer. In any case, identity is important. To whatever extent we can, I think we are intellectually and morally obliged to abet this process in kids.

Especially now, when social media appear, as an emerging scholarly discourse indicates, to erode individuation. If you’re interested, this stylish and literate blog post from The Literary Blues supplies a nice basic outline of the means by which social media diminishes individualism. A lesson or unit on personal identity would proceed most effectively, I submit, if it addressed these critical issues of identity and social media.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

Term of Art: Risk Aversion

“Risk aversion: A widespread characteristic of human preferences, first discussed in 1738 by the Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli (1700-82), according to which most people tend to value gains involving risk less that certain gains of equivalent monetary expectation. A typical example is a choice between a sure gain of 50 units (Swiss francs, dollars, pounds sterling, or any other units) and a gamble involving a 50 percent probability of winning 100 units and a 50 percent probability of winning nothing. The two prospects are of equivalent monetary expected value, but most people prefer the sure gain to the gamble, which they typically value equally to a sure gain of about 35 units.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.