A few minutes remain to me before I must leave for work, so I’ll use them to post this just-typed reading on the sun and nuclear fusion and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it.
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.
Finally, on this rainy Tuesday morning, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun trajectory. I suppose there is not much to say about this word other than it might pay to be aware both its denotative meaning, “the curve that a body (as a planet or comet in its orbit or a rocket) describes in space,” and its more connotative meaning, to wit “a path, progression, or line of development resembling a physical trajectory” as in “an upward career trajectory.”
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.
Finally, on this very productive Wednesday morning, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root cosmo. It means, as you probably assumed, both universe and world. It’s at the root of many English words, especially those related to astrophysics and astronomy; but you also find it under such words in the social sciences like cosmopolitan.
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.
Here are a short reading on gravity and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.
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.
In response to student demand, I have begun producing some new materials for basic science literacy. To that end, here is a reading on friction and its attendant vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet.
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.
“Sanguine * Choleric * Melancholic * Phlegmatic
The Four Humours or Temperaments were a foundation of European medieval medical philosophy. The ideal was for a balance of the four, which were conceived to be based on the properties of blood (Sanguis), yellow bile (Khole), black bile (Melas), and Phlegm in the body.
A predominance of Sanguine was believed to create an easy-going, sociable, pleasure-seeking type. A choleric character was fiery, strident, and ambitious. Melancholic was watery and emotional and created thoughtful, introverted and intellectual types. Phlegmatic was slow and earthy but also governed the most relaxed, content and quiet of types.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged health, science literacy
“Drew, Charles Richard: (1904-1950) U.S. physician and surgeon. Born in Washington, D.C., he received his PhD from Columbia University. While researching the properties and preservation of blood plasma, he developed efficient ways to process and store plasma in blood banks. He directed the U.S. and Britain’s World War II blood-plasma programs until 1942. An African-American, he resigned over the segregation of the blood of blacks and whites in blood banks. He died in an auto accident.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
While I understand that an essential element of adolescence is thinking one is the center of the universe, I hold that this independent practice worksheet on Copernicus possesses utility in both the middle and high school classroom–if only to remind teenagers that the sun, not they, stands at the center of our universe. Also, Copernicus is a key figure in the history of science.
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.
If you’re looking for a short text on smoking that doesn’t in any way equivocate, than this short reading on that deadly habit should be more than adequate; here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet than accompanies it.
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.
Students everywhere, I expect, are thoroughly assimilated into digital culture and not especially interested in its origins and folklore–of which, as it turns out, there is a great deal. Take, for example, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a nineteenth-century polymath who is arguably the father of the computer. The amount of human error involved in mathematical work troubled Babbage, so he set out to invent the difference engine, a steam powered mechanical computer engineered to produce error-free mathematical tabulations.
Babbage’s invention has fascinated people since its inception, and unless I miss my guess, you will see in the course of your teaching career at least a few students interested in the history of computer technology. If so, then this reading on Charles Babbage and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it should serve as a short but thorough introduction to this obscure but important and fascinating historical figure.
If your students are up to and for it, you might also consider putting William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s (they are, incidentally, the progenitors of cyberpunk) work of alternate history and speculative fiction, The Difference Engine, in front of them. I like Gibson’s early work (his Neuromancer is a defining text of the cyberpunk genre, and a masterpiece in any case), don’t know much about Sterling, but found the novel fascinating.
Addendum: Please see the comments below from my esteemed high school chum Terry on the role of Ada Lovelace in creating the “software” to make Babbage’s engine actually perform more than basic mathematical tasks.
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.
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