“People in the past, in religious civilizations, had a real profound terror of apocalyptic catastrophe. What frightens us in our secular age is the computer breakdown that’ll occur if computers interpret the 00 of the year 2000 and a return to 1900.”
Conversations About the End of Time introduction, ed. Catherine David et al (1999)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, science literacy
“The general system of concepts which shape or organize our thoughts and perceptions. The outstanding elements of our everyday conceptual scheme include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, and so on. To see the world as containing such things is to share this much of our conceptual scheme. A controversial argument of Davidson’s urges that we would be unable to interpret speech from a different conceptual scheme as even meaningful; we can therefore be certain a priori that there is no difference of conceptual scheme between any thinker and ourselves. Davidson daringly goes on to argue that since translation proceeds according to a principle of charity, and since it must be possible for an omniscient translator to make sense of us, we can be assured that most of the beliefs formed with the commonsense conceptual framework are true.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Here is a reading on the birth and growth of the Internet with a comprehension worksheet to accompany it. For the right student, I suspect, this will be some relatively high interest material. In fact, it might work well with this material on the ARPAnet, which was the precursor to Internet we all use today.
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.
As I sit down to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the digital divide, I wonder if it is still relevant. It looks like, to some extent, the availability of relatively cheap smartphones have done something to close this gap. At the same time, as net neutrality ends, the divide may reopen with different fissure lines. And as far as smartphones go, yes they are readily available; but neither smartphones themselves nor the data plans that make them useful are created equal. On could make the argument that the lines of the digital divide now run along the lines of smartphones and the plans that drive them.
If nothing else, this worksheet introduces students to the idea that social class determines what one has access to in our society, so this worksheet could be used to open a conceptual inquiry on social class and the extent to which it circumscribes life itself.
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 is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on clones and cloning. This is the kind of stuff that tends to fascinate kids; it’s a neat little literacy exercise, even if you don’t teach 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.
Here, on a Sunday morning, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of cyberspace. Does anyone use that word anymore?
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’s a worksheet on the Greek word root pale/o; it means ancient. This is another of those roots that produces a lot of words across the common branch curriculum.
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.
“(1605) A treatise on philosophy by Francis Bacon. Considered an excellent example of Renaissance thought, it extols the pursuit of learning and critically surveys the existing state of knowledge. Bacon later wrote a greatly expanded version, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientarium (1623), to form the first part of his projected Instauratio Magna.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“In science ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’”
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes “Evolution as Fact and Theory” (1983)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Late spring cleaning continues at Mark’s Text Terminal, and I’ll take a moment here to post the last of my short word root exercises, this exercise on the Greek root xanth/o. It means yellow. It will turn up at the base of many words in the sciences.
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.
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