With a little knowledge of embedding code into a webpage or an HTML block, a fair number of tools and interactive time-spacers can be made available to students through WIDGETS.

I place widgets on our Moodle course pages for our students to spend their time engaging in some wordplay or history if they have completed their other assignments. These widgets have proven to be more beneficial than other things they might be doing. They could also be placed on a schoo;'s home web page.

Check out the examples for "This Day in History" or "Word of the Day" at The FreeDictionary by Farlex which makes the HTML/CSS code for widgets available here.

There may be adolescent boys who are opposed to singing because it doesn't seem manly enough.

These two video clips may be of some use -- even if they do nothing more than to give some courage to a music teacher who has to face the formidable opponents of such boys in a music class:

Non nobis, Domine is sung by the victorious troops after the Battle of Agincourt in which their opponents had been heavily favored.

Men of Harlech was sung in the Michael Caine film, Zulu, as a response to the Zulu war chant when the British were about to be overrun by the tribal warriors in the Battle of Roarke's Drift.

Sometimes, those brave teachers new to Latin (i.e. those having a go a teaching something they had not previously learned) are worried about how to pronounce the Latin. I try to tell them not to worry about it too much, even if "Mr. Chips" nearly lost his teaching position for objecting to the "modern" approach to Latin pronunciation (1939).

There are several different schools of thought about pronunciation, e.g. "classical," vis-a-vis "ecclesiastical." There is no shortage of material on the subject - one might even consult Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Book I.xi.4ff, (Loeb, p. 185) who took the matter quite seriously:

"What then is the duty of the teacher whom we have borrowed from the stage? In the first place, he must correct all faults of pronunciation, and see that the utterance is distinct, and that each letter has its proper sound. There is an unfortunate tendency in the case of some letters to pronounce them either too thinly or too fully, while some we find too harsh and fail to pronounce sufficiently, substituting others whose should is similar but somewhat duller. For instance, lambda is substituted for rho, a letter which was always a stumbling block for Demosthenes . . ."

There you have it. If Demosthenes had difficulty, we might also. We might, then, be attentive, but flexible so that the matter of pronunciation while learning does not altogether become an impediment to the progress which we hope to make.

To this end, some might appreciate this resource: Read it Right (though, if it ought to be "Read it Rightly" some things might be suspect from the outset).This comes to us from the Association for Latin Teaching, which I became aware of through the Classical Association. (When one applies for the free membership with the Association for Latin Teaching, one also get access to their Latin teachers' forum and back issues of The Journal for Classical Teaching.

Some 20 years ago, when I first embarked on my classical Lutheran education trek, I followed many leads. One of them led to "Direct Instruction" (capital D, capital I) for a number of reasons which appealed to me.

1) They emphasized the mastery of material.

2) They promoted a direct, highly orchestrated method of instruction utilizing hand signals and scripted lessons rather than "discovery learning" wherein students were permitted to self-discover material or to work in groups. (To be sure, not the best approach for every subject, but it was wonderful in making certain each and every student was engaged in the lesson.)

3) They had done quite a bit of research on Project Follow-Through, a little-known, highly-documented government program which followed on the heels of the Head Start program.

4) It was through this program that I was introduced to the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching phonics which was language-based, multisensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible -- the most widely used and familiar version is Romalda Spalding's method, The Writing Road to Reading produced by Spalding Education International.

5) It really showed its strength with children in inner-city schools (one of which I was serving at the time), but also worked well with children in other socio-economic environments.

6) It led me to learn about the Baltimore Curriculum Project, a curriculum which, in form if not in fact, has elements worth emulating in classical Lutheran schools.

While I don't know that I would endorse any of their materials without qualification for classical Lutheran education, I think it would be worth one's while to become familiar with the organization and history of The National Institute for Direct Instruction which still seems to be going strong in some parts of the country.

One is hard-pressed to find a curriculum better than the Shurley Grammar Method for teaching the principal parts of speech and the basic mechanics of grammar. The art of writing well, however, consists in something more than learning the rules of grammar and punctuation.

At the risk of minimalizing a couple of noteworthy programs, I believe Andrew Pudewa's Institute for Excellence in Writing does well in teaching students how to summarize what they read and to be economical in the use of words (unlike this sentence). I think the strength of Andrew Kern's The Lost Tools of Writing does as much for getting students to think as it does to write.

Now it may be that I am not sufficiently acquainted with those programs -- and for that reason I do not mean by this brief blog to give them short-shrift -- but so far, they do not seem to address writing style in the way that I imagine it. The problem is, at this point, I do not have any other comprehensive program to recommend. I have a full-shelf-a-half of books and texts from which I pick this and that.

I like a number of the exercises in Holt, Rhinehart and Winston's "Elements of Language" (there are several levels -- for the sake of discussion, check out Sentences and Paragraphs, ISBN 0030563143 and Combining Sentences ISBN 0030563062). If you are on a budget, check out a used textbook company like Follett.

I also like Richard Nordquist's work in Passages: a Writer's Guide (ISBN 9780312101176) and Writing Exercises: Building, Combining, and Revising (ISBN 9780023882203). Again, if on a tight budget, these can be acquired as used copies from Amazon or alibris. I have enjoyed his grammar website for years, though he stopped serving as the site's editor in 2016.

Ever on the lookout for helpful material, I just ordered June Casagrande's It Was the Best of Sentences; It Was the Worst of Sentences: a Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences (ISBN 978-1580087407). Check out her website: Grammar Underground.

There are, of course, those who want to throw out grammar rules and stylistic conventions altogether -- and one can find their "creative" approaches in many places. It is not a bad idea to become familiar with them as long as one does so without swalloing hook, line, and sinker.

"Wow! What's THAT?" I exlaimed to my wife (who teaches Grades 1-2). She was working on a jigsaw puzzle of a map of the Nile delta with 3D figurines of Egyptian architecture . . . and scanning them on her phone for multimedia connections!

National Geographic has produced a series of 4D cityscape puzzles (3D + time dimension) for Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome - as well as Paris and Chicago!

The 4D Cityscape puzzles are affordably-priced and might make a wonderful gift or activity for students during the summer or during the school year.

President Elect Trump's nomination for the Secretary of Education is Betsy Devos. She claims to be opposed to Common Core, but some organizations apparently don't believe it. That is the position of the group Stop Common Core in Michigan.

I tried finding some primary sources, actual articles that Devos might have written or speeches that she gave. I haven't been successful in finding any, even on her own webpage: http://betsydevos.com/

Exactly what are her objections to Common Core? Stop Common Core in Michigan advances some facts. And before any classical Lutheran educators start praising Donald Trump for opposing Common Core, it might be worth the effort to find out what it is about Common Core which Donald Trump opposes. The philosophy that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is not always a wise one to pursue.

It will also be interesting to see where The LCMS education execs, The Lutheran Education Association (LEA), and the Concordia University system's professors stand on this now that the political winds seem to be blowing a different direction. Will it be any easier to find primary sources from them than it appears to be for Devos?

In order to play baseball, one needs to know the rules of baseball. Mastering the rules, however, doesn't enable one to play baseball well, to pitch, catch, throw, hit, and run.

Learning grammatical rules is certainly important for writing well, but a mere knowledge of the rules doesn't help one to compose well. Grammar is an essential part, but style and rhetoric are not to be neglected. So, what resources are there for teaching rhetoric and style to students who must compose essays, reports, and research papers?

One resource I found recently seems to help a great deal: Richard F. Nordquist's Writing Exercises: Building, Combining, and Revising. It needs a little adaptation to fit into the coursework of my middle school students, but I find that the exercises are quite practical and attainable.

Richard also has a very helpful grammar blog which I have enjoyed over the years located here: http://grammar.about.com/

Are the current political candidates heroes . . . or celebrities?

In 1961, Daniel J. Boorstin published The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, contrasting heroes and celebrities in chapter 2:

"The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name. Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays, he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye. . . . The man of truly heroic statue was once supposed to be marked by a scorn for publicity. He quietly relied on the tower of his character or his achievement.

". . . The hero was born of time: his gestation requuired at least a generation. As the saying went, he had 'stood the test of time.' A maker of tradition,he was himself made by tradition. He grew over the generations as people found new virtues in him and attributed to him new exploits. Receding into the misty past, he became more, not less, heroic. It was not necessary that his face or figure have a sharp, well-delineated outline, not that his life be footnoted. Of course there could not have been any photographs of him, and often there was not even a likelness. Men of the last century were more heroic than those of today; men of antiquity were still more heroic.

". . . The celebrity, on the contrary, is always a contemporary. The hero is made by folklore, sacred texts, and history books, but the celebrity is the creature of gossip, of public opinion, of magazines, newspaers, and the ephemeral images of movie and television screen. The passage of time which creates and establishes the hero, destroys the celebrity. One is made, the other unmade, by repetition. The celebrity is born in the daily papers and never loses the mark of his fleeting origin. The very agency which first makes the celebrity in the long run inevitaably destroys him. He will be destroyed, as he was made, by publicity. The newspapers make him, and they unmake him -- not by murder but by suffocation or starvation. No one is more forgotten than the last generation's celebrity." (pp. 61-63)

Thus Boorstin opined: "Celebrity worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real mdels. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great. We come close and closer to degrading all fame into notoreity." (p. 48)

Someone (not I) posted a PDF scanned copy of that chapter here: From Hero to Celebrity.

In the same vein, readers may also want to peruse Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and How to Watch the TV News.

In the introduction to The Children's Hymnal (p. vi) published by Concordia Publishing House circa 1955, we read,

"Many letters from pastors, teachers and workers with children emphasized strongly the fact that much of what has been called the classical heritage of the church can be understood only by adults. Church school leaders, concerned first of all with the spiritual life of the children, have rightly demanded that the materials for children's worship be suited to the comprehension of the child."

One criticism that classical Lutheran education receives from progressive teachers and parents manifests the same mindset. They opine that the vocabulary of the historic liturgy, Lutheran hymnody, and classic literature is unintelligible to children. It is interesting to note and compare the following re-posting of an online article on the site of Houston's Rice University, Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies - School of Literacy and Culture, wherein we find that healthy language acquisition does not favor dumbing down vocabulary when communicating with children. In fact, it would seem that just the opposite should be the case:

A summary from "The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3" by University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley. (2003). American Educator. Spring: 4-9, which was exerpted with permission from B. Hart and T.R. Risley (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.

In this study, University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley entered the homes of 42 families from various socio-economic backgrounds to assess the ways in which daily exchanges between a parent and child shape language and vocabulary development. Their findings showed marked disparities between the sheer number of words spoken as well as the types of messages conveyed. After four years these differences in parent-child interactions produced significant discrepancies in not only children’s knowledge, but also their skills and experiences with children from high-income families being exposed to 30 million more words than children from families on welfare. Follow-up studies showed that these differences in language and interaction experiences have lasting effects on a child’s performance later in life.

Betty Hart and Todd Risley were at the forefront of educational research during the 1960’s War on Poverty. Frustrated after seeing the effects of their high quality early intervention program aimed at language skill expansion prove unsuccessful in the long-term, they decided to shift their focus. If the proper measures were being taken in the classroom, the only logical conclusion was to take a deeper look at the home. What difference does home-life make in a child’s ability to communicate? Why are the alarming vocabulary gaps between high school students from low and high income environments seemingly foreshadowed by their performance in preschool? Hart and Risley believed that the home housed some of these answers.

Experimental Method:

Hart and Risley recruited 42 families to participate in the study including 13 high-income families, 10 families of middle socio-economic status, 13 of low socio-economic status, and 6 families who were on welfare. Monthly hour-long observations of each family were conducted from the time the child was seven months until age three. Gender and race were also balanced within the sample.

Results:

The results of the study were more severe than the researchers anticipated. Observers found that 86 percent to 98 percent of the words used by each child by the age of three were derived from their parents’ vocabularies. Furthermore, not only were the words they used nearly identical, but also the average number of words utilized, the duration of their conversations, and the speech patterns were all strikingly similar to those of their caregivers.

After establishing these patterns of learning through imitation, the researchers next analyzed the content of each conversation to garner a better understanding of each child’s experience. They found that the sheer number of words heard varied greatly along socio-economic lines. On average, children from families on welfare were provided half as much experience as children from working class families, and less than a third of the experience given to children from high-income families. In other words, children from families on welfare heard about 616 words per hour, while those from working class families heard around 1,251 words per hour, and those from professional families heard roughly 2,153 words per hour. Thus, children being raised in middle to high income class homes had far more language exposure to draw from.

In addition to looking at the number of words exchanged, the researchers also looked at what was being said within these conversations. What they found was that higher-income families provided their children with far more words of praise compared to children from low-income families. Conversely, children from low-income families were found to endure far more instances of negative reinforcement compared to their peers from higher-income families. Children from families with professional backgrounds experienced a ratio of six encouragements for every discouragement. For children from working-class families this ratio was two encouragements to one discouragement. Finally, children from families on welfare received on average two discouragements for every encouragement. Therefore, children from families on welfare seemed to experience more negative vocabulary than children from professional and working-class families. 

To ensure that these findings had long-term implications, 29 of the 42 families were recruited for a follow-up study when the children were in third grade. Researchers found that measures of accomplishment at age three were highly indicative of performance at the ages of nine and ten on various vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension measures. Thus, the foundation built at age three had a great bearing on their progress many years to come.

Sources Cited:

Hart, B. & Risley, T.R. “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3” (2003, spring). American Educator, pp.4-9..http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf

— Prepared by Ashlin Orr, Kinder Institute Intern, 2011-12.

For information about how School Literacy and Culture’s work with oral language development is affecting young students in Houston, please explore our work at the Rice Oral and Written Language (OWL) Lab.

This is an excerpt from the book Crimes of the Educators: How Liberal Utopians Have Turned Public Education into a Criminal Enterprise by Samuel L. Blumenfeld and Alex Newman. I ordered my copy through Amazon.com, but then I found this version published online:

http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Books/Crimes%20of%20the%20Educators.pdf

The excerpt in the book references this more comlete interview in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/23/cat-people

Most parents are unaware that the Dr. Seuss books were created to supplement the whole-word reading programs in the schools. Most people assume that Dr. Seuss made up his stories using his own words. The truth is that a textbook publisher supplied Dr. Seuss with a sight vocabulary of 223 words which he was to use in writing the book, a sight vocabulary in harmony with the sight reading programs the schools were using. Thus, the children would enter first grade having already mastered a sight vocabulary of several hundred words, thereby making first-grade reading a breeze.

Because the Dr. Seuss books are so simple and delightful, many people assume that they were easy to write. But Dr. Seuss debunked that idea in an interview he gave Arizona magazine in June 1981. He said:

They think I did it in twenty minutes. That damned Cat in the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties, in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition, as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway, they had it all
worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can learn so many words in a week and that’s all. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme that’ll be the title of my book. (That’s genius at work.) I found “cat” and “hat” and I said, “The title will be The Cat in the Hat.”

So Dr. Seuss was quite aware of what the educators were up to. He was correct in citing John Dewey, the progressive educator, as the culprit in this insidious changeover from phonics to the sight method, which Seuss believed was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in America. But somehow that insight, made by America's most famous writer of children's books, has escaped our educators.

This excerpt comes from “It’s Not About the Dream,” WORLD magazine, Sep 24, 2011, 57-58.

VeggieTales was a rags-to-riches entrepreneurial success story. Vischer and his counterpart, Mike Nawrocki, left college to pursue their dream of making wildly creative children’s videos. At the height of their success in the late 1990s, VeggieTales videos sold 7 million copies in a single year and generated $40 million in revenue. Though primarily aimed at a Christian market, VeggieTales had a broader cultural influence, pushing forward the boundaries of computer animation and children’s programming.

But success brought failure. Though Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber are still around, they aren’t the same. Big Idea Productions went bankrupt in 2003 and Vischer lost ownership and creative control of the whole enterprise. VeggieTales is no longer VeggieTales. The characters still exist – and in some cases are even voiced by Nawrocki and Vischer as hired talent – but the decisions are now made by studio execs who don’t share the vision or worldview of the original founders.

In a recent issue of WORLD magazine, Vischer acknowledged to interviewer Megan Basham that the bankruptcy and subsequent trials have given him perspective. His words reveal a man who’s beginning to see the difference between moralism and the gospel. And a man humble enough to acknowledge his role in confusing the two:

“I looked back at the previous 10 years and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, ‘Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,’ or, ‘Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!’ But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality. American Christian[s]… are drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true. It’s the Oprah god… We’ve completely taken this Disney notion of ‘when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true’ and melded that with faith and come up with something completely different. There’s something wrong in a culture that preaches nothing is more sacred than your dream. I mean, we walk away from marriages to follow our dreams. We abandon children to follow our dreams. We hurt people in the name of our dreams, which as a Christian is just preposterous."

Some teachers like to put up motivational posters to dress up their classroom and inspire their students. While good quotes from various authors can be thought-provoking, their words don't bear the promise of the Holy Spirit. We like to enliven our students with God's living Word by which He upholds all things (Hebrews 1:3).

Philippians 4:8 is a passage which we take to heart in classical Lutheran education: "Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy--meditate on these things. " These are the adjectives we prefer to use regarding schoolwork instead of cool, fun, exciting, and awesome.  Using foam board, a circle cutter, some paperclips, mini Christmas ornaments and ceiling clips from FFR, Inc, (ffr.com, Cleveland, OH), I made these medallions for my classroom to serve as touchstones throughout the year. When going over student work, I might ask them, "Which of those adjectives best describes your work?"

Then, I also found a website which would let me design my own "motivational" posters. I used the adjectives from Philippians 4 and associated other Bible passages with them (see below). I added pictures from Luther's Wittenberg with the anniversary of the Reformation in mind. (This triangular ceiling clip is also from FFI.) Lastly, as you might be able to see on the bulletin board in the background, I used a program to enlarge a photo I took in our sanctuary. This program simply enlarges the photo automatically so that it can be printed on 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper and then stitched together.