Tag Archives: science literacy

A Lesson Plan on Data Storage from The Order of Things

As you get older, you take it for granted, but it’s still fun to experience synchrony. A friend of mine and I land on synchrony quite often while texting–often using the same words simultaneously. In this case, the same day I interviewed with some very nice, clearly talented, unusually engaged and deeply committed folks at a computer-themed career and technical education high school in the North Bronx, I pulled out this lesson plan on data storage, adapted from text I grabbed from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things. I expect this would work well at a school such as theirs. I hope they find their way to it.

For your students, here is the list as reading and comprehension questions, which is 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.

E.O. Wilson on the Importance of Insects and the Relative Unimportance of Humankind

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed then thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Edward O. Wilson

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Mendelian Genetics

In general, I don’t teach science. But I’ve spent sufficient time in the company of the discipline, especially that middle-school and high-school level, that I know this reading on Mendelian genetics and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are the foundations of a broader inquiry into genetics.

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.

Word Root Exercise: Cerebro

OK, moving right along this morning, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root cerebro. It means, I expect you’ve gathered by now, brain. Most of the words that grow from this root–it’s very productive in English–denote brain but also connote mind and intellect. But again, you probably already know that.

Like many Greek roots on this blog, this Latin root will be useful, indeed necessary, for students interested in the healthcare professions.

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.

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

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.

Word Root Exercise: Avi-

Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root avi, which means bird. So now you know why the place where the birds live at the zoo is called an aviary.

What do birds spend a lot of their time doing? Flying. That’s why this root also appears in a flight-related noun like aviator. This is a very productive root in English for certain kinds of technical terms in flight, like avionics and aviation.

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

Circadian Rhythms

For just over ten years, I served in a school without windows in any of the classrooms. In fact, that school has been in the news recently for deficiencies in its reopening plan.

Students, as they will (and I thank them for it), often questioned and commented about the building–it really was dismal–and wanted to discuss it at times. I used this reading on circadian rhythms and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet as a way of capitalizing on students’ desire to know why their school possessed the architectural charm of a maximum security prison.

In any case, the reading doesn’t necessarily answer any questions. It does present opportunities to ask critical questions about allocation of public resources, investment in communities, and whether or not one needs to see daylight to operate on a circadian cycle.

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.

A Lesson Plan on the Chronology of Space Flights from The Order of Things

Here’s a lesson on the chronological order of international space flights and the list as reading and comprehension questions that constitute the lesson’s work. This lesson derives, as does every lesson on this blog under the header The Order of Things, from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book of the same name.

Incidentally, I’ve just finished writing all the lessons and worksheets for the unit they comprise. There are 50 lessons in all, and I’ll soon post supporting documents for the unit, including a user’s manual for the worksheets and the unit plan itself.

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.