FINDING RELEVANCE IN STUFF

Last summer I accepted a freelance writing position at Time 4 Learning, the online educational publishing company. I visited the Ft. Lauderdale office and met founder John Edelson. He is very engaging. His enthusiasm for learning is quite contagious, and yet as I sat there trying my darnedest to focus on his words, I was distracted by his stuff.

There, up on the ledge just beyond John’s desk was an array of vintage technological gadgetry. I snuck numerous glimpses at the projectors, microphones and cameras that loomed overhead. As I sat in the company of this homeschool curriculum entrepreneur, not only had I just made the acquaintance of a fellow educator, but I had met another nerd junker!

In the vast world of rediscovering the past, John and I both gravitate toward teaching tools and collectibles. We may hunt for different looking objects, yet the realm of educational toys continually attracts us. I find the iconic graphics of classroom flashcards and colorful counting cubes and tangrams irresistible, and he is pulled more toward the manly world of machines.

The continual “march of technology,” as John puts it, is a topic he enjoys pondering. Over a year ago, John revived this blog as a platform to showcase his collection, to document the ever changing tech landscape, and to discuss how it has impacted learning in school and at home. The best laid plans, however, were derailed by a Time 4 Learning growth spurt, which John, as father of the site, was responsible to nurture.

That’s where I come in…a freelance writer (who loves ellipses as you will see), stylist, crafter, and substitute teacher who believes in sneaking in learning when it is least expected. In my world, that means nonchalantly filling a cocktail table bowl with vintage vocabulary cards, turning a cemetery stroll into an impromptu arithmetic lesson, and using a new recipe to explore fractions. I relish bridging the gap between the need to learn and the desire to have fun. I don’t think any child leaves Epcot without acquiring some geographical knowledge.

I am picking up where John left off, dusting off some more of his relics, and sharing bits from my own stash as well. But before I plow full steam ahead, I need to revisit that fabulous Smith Corona….

About Retro Educational Technology

This site features the retro or vintage educational technology that has been collected in the World HQ of Time4Learning (homeschooling curriculum) , Time4Writing.com, and Time4MathFacts.com.

John Edelson with VIP visitors

 If you happen to have any vintage educational materials cluttering up your attic or basement, such as a copy of the Science Song Records, a classic overhead projector, or a old telephone switchboard, I'll happily donate Premium Memberships, pay shipping, and maybe pay more.  Just this past weekend, I bought some surveying equipment that must date from the mid 1800s.

This blog, like its topic, has some history.  It's purpose and authors have shifted around a few times. It started as a discussion of the history of words. Then, after moving my old typewriter from my parents basement to my office, I started collecting other educational technology.  I went on a buying spree for vintage edtech.  I invite fellow hobbyists to post on it and am sometimes not involved in the content.

To be above-board, I'll disclose that this blog belongs to the John Edelson, founder and president of Time4Learning.   T4L is a great service for those who are accidental homeschoolers, ie have turned to homeschooling as a last resort and is trying to make sense of this educational choice.   Time4Learning.com. Online automated learning for kids from preschool to eighth grade.  The service is also widely used as a supplementary skills sharpener or for summer study.

We've also developed through the years, WritingCity (an elementary writing program) and VocabularySpellingCity . The blog is written by a few people especially me,   the self-proclaimed "mayor" of VocabularySpellingCity.

And some others. It should be understood that this is, among other things, a  type of advertising.
Of course, it's based on one of my hobbies and interests.  Which I enjoy. I hope you do too.

VocabularySpellingCity - It's great for all grades for spelling vocabulary, writing, and phonics. Enter your own lists, find popular lists posted by others, or use the sites teacher resources with materials such as  compound words,  homophones, Dolch Words, and more!

A online service teaching writing online!  Time4Writing.com. There are online eight week tutorials for students in high school, middle school, and elementary school (students must be in 2nd grade). The course is popular as an afterschool supplementary program and with homeschool families where the parents (usually Mom) is ready for a little reinforcements in giving feedback to the kids and developing their writing. The courses are run out of an online website and students to the work whenever it fits into their schedule. Roughly three hours of study is required per week. The students have the same teacher through-out the course which is highly motivating. Upon request, the courses can be accelerated which is often requested to fit test prep or vacation schedules.

Kinetic Potential Energy Song

Here is a fantastic old song about kinetic and potential energy.  Enjoy.  It's appropriate for elementary school science class. I think it pretty much teaches the lesson. But of course, teaching the lesson is not enough, students must also learn it. Many  teachers enjoy showing examples of potential energy such as:

1. A rubber band pulled taught and ready to shoot
2. A chair held over a student's head (NOT RECOMMENDED!!!!)

The Typewriter that got me through high school

I'm fascinated, as was my father, by how technology changes the world around us. I've decided to use this blog to discuss.

Here for instance, from the attic, is the typewriter that I used to write my high school papers. It's a Smith Corona. There's a printer ribbon which can set to type in red. I suppose eraser ribbons might have also existed for this type of typewriter although I never had one.

To erase, I used either an eraser (if I was using erasable paper) or white tape.

The return key that you see on the computer keyboards is an echo of how we use to hit the silver return bar at the end of the line. The next generation electronic typewriters, which I used in college, had a Return Key.

I graduated from high school in 1976. The hands in this picture are those of my daughter who thought this was really cool. The kids love the typewriter. And when I showed them carbon paper (which is the next post), they really thought it was cool.

In some related posts,  did you know that carbon paper is cool  and that while it's still available in Office Depot, most kids have never seen or used it?

If you appreciated this post, here's some things you should do to show it:
1.  Comment here on how you learned to type. I personally took a summer school typing course before junior year in high school.
2.  Facebook share, tweet about it, or write a short post in a blog or forum.
Thanks, I could use the support.

Mighty Aphrodite

Mighty is a word that should be used with care.
If you use mighty as in "I'm mighty glad to see you," it will either date you, as someone who actually worked on the original Foghorn Leghorn comics, make you sound Southern, but cheesy Southern, not the cool Southern that you would like to be, or make you sound stupid.

The only way you could convincingly use the expressive mighty is if you are writing for a network television show and you write a line to be said by someone who is rescued out of, say, a well, right before a cliff-hanging commercial break, as in:

Brock wipes the two inch layer of mud from his eyes, reaches for his cowboy hat, and says, "I'm mighty glad to see you!"

Otherwise, keep mighty to be used as an adjective when describing something of great power, skill, strength, or force, such as Aphrodite

Material Girl

Materialize actually means to "make material" or to "invest with or regard as material."

It does not mean "to take place or to happen."

So, when you say"the party never materialized," you are just plain wrong, and should have been home reading fine literature that night instead of worrying about some silly party.

Mannish Boy

Forgetting for a moment that we all love Mckinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters, who masterfully rendition of Mannish Boy could be titled nothing else, the words mannish and manly are not synonymous.

Manly signifies of or becoming to a man, man-like, and also manfully. Mannish means masculine, or suitable to a man. We characterize a brave and courageous man as manly and a woman's masculine attire as mannish.

A Likely Pet Peeve

Here is another misuse of words that is on the top third of my Teeth Gritter List.

Likely. Liable. They are not interchangeable. Really. And liable is not a fancy way to say likely, and no, it doesn't make you sound more Southern. You won't be increasing your grammatical status or your cool by saying liable when you mean likely.

"He's not here today, but he's liable to be in tomorrow." This is wrong. Say instead, "He's not here today, but he's likely to be in tomorrow."
Liable is used chiefly with regard to answering the consequence of an act that is likely to be the cause of trouble; as in, "The arrest of one who exceeds the speed-limit is likely, and may render him liable to a fine."

Am I Idle or Lazy?

The words idle and lazy are not synonymous, are they?

Idleness mean inaction at least the absence of useful action. So a person who is usually hard working could be, due to some medical condition, forced to be idle for a period of time. So for instance, I will in December of 2018 (true story), get my right hip replaced. Following the surgery, I am supposed to stay in the house with a walker for a week. I expect that I'll be on enough drugs so I shouldn't be doing anything important or delicate. So I will be forced to be idle.  I'll be in a state of idleness.

Laziness, which is indisposition to exertion, indolence, or a state of sluggish inactivity. Laziness is not forced on someone, it is a reluctance to make an effort or do anything useful.

One could be idle since one is lazy.  One could also be lazy but be forced to be active, so not idle.

So I'm distinguishing between lazy, which is an attitude and idle which is a state, not necessarily an attitude. Of course, an awful lot of dictionaries seem to give a primary meeting of idle which is really close to lazy.

What do you think? This is open to debate. Your ideas?  To be frank, it's Sept 2018 and I just rewrote this old post and in doing so, I found that I reversed the previous explanation of these words by Miss Suzy.  Was it really ten years ago that Miss Suzy was here writing about words for us?

Knitted vs. Knit

"The stockings were knitted with care by Grandma."

No, no, a thousand times no.
"The stockings were knit with care by Grandma."

If you speak this way you might as well have putted your sippy cup on the table, you are So Very Preschool.

A more common use of this phrase might be, "The stockings were knit with care by a lead-laden machine in China." In any case, a dollar fine for misuse of this verb would be fair.

Don't "Kid" Around

The word kid means a few different things.

It can mean a baby or young goat, which is the original meaning of the word. It also is used as a verb meaning "to tease or joke around with" or as a noun for a child.

Although I don't object to the use of the word to describe a light joke, I do prefer to call a human child a child, and a young goat a kid.

I try not to say, " I have to go pick up my kids" as I like to identify with humans, not cloven-hoofed creatures with slitty pupils.

Jealousy, Envy, Suspicion

Jealousy, envy and suspicion. These are powerful words, and distinct in meaning, so let us use them correctly.

Jealousy fears to lose what it has, envy is pained that another should receive what it wants for itself, and suspicion is directed toward one who has the power and/or the will to hurt another in some way.

Rival suitors are jealous of each other; competitors are suspicious of each other's good faith.

Do not say that you are jealous of your neighbor's new wood floors, when you are really full of envy.
You may however be jealous of your teenage son's basketball skills when he begins to beat you in four out of five games when you used to regularly trounce him.

You may receive a suspicious package in the mail, but do not look suspiciously upon your neighbor's new wood floors unless you are a police officer and you think the floors may be stolen.
Instead, keep yourself commandment-clean and look on the floors with admiration.

Labor

Labor is sometimes erroneously restricted to physical toil. Properly, labor may be physical or mental but must have some useful end. Toil signifies oppressive or harassing labor, or hard continuous work that taxes the bodily strength or mental powers.

Here is a quote that helps explain it:

"Of all the wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labor. No man minds work or its being hard if it comes to something. Perhaps you think "to waste the labor of men is not to kill them?"
-- John Ruskin, Work

Let's Settle Farther and Further Right Now

Farther and further are actually different words and should be used differently. It's not some old to-may-to/to-mah-to pronounciation hold-out.

Is the store farther or further down the road?
This one is easy.

Farther actually means "more distant" or "more advanced."
Further indicates "additional" or advancement to a greater degree, as in time.

The store is farther down the road.

You read further into the textbook.

Question:
Do you farther or further your education by reading further into the textbook?
Let me know.....

A Lurid, Livid Little FYI

Lurid, although interesting, is frequently misused. That which is lurid gives off a ghastly yellowish red light, such as flames with smoke, or reflecting or made visible by such light. By extension, this also means giving uncertain or unearthly light of any kind, such as lurid flashes of lightening; or a lurid atmosphere.

Please distinguish it from livid, which means black and blue, ashen, or lead-colored.
Livid does not mean angry and lurid does not mean lewd, or sexually vulgar.

So the child molester doesn't give a lurid smile, unless he is bathed in yellow light. What he probably gives is a lewd smile, or perhaps a leering glance.

And you should probably describe your mother as "furious" rather than "livid" when you break her favorite crystal vase, unless you drop the vase on her head, in which case she might indeed be black and blue.

Lay Lady Lay

First off, if Mr. Dylan were truly trying to get the lady in his big brass bed, he would have told her, "Lie Lady Lie" and, captured by his exquisite grammar, she might have given in. Doubtless, she left immediately upon hearing the phrase and Mr. Dylan was forced to work on his songwriting all by himself. Perhaps he devoted his lonely time to co-writing the lyrics for Mr. Clapton's song Lay Down Sally, as both of the songs erroneously use lay for lie.

Here is how you remember when to use lay and when to use lie:

Lay requires a direct object and lie does not. You lie down on the big brass bed. You lay your guitar down on the big brass bed.
If it is a person getting horizontal by himself, it's lie, if a person is putting something down, including another person, it's lay.

Just to completely befuddle you, you use lay for the past tense of lie, as in "Last night I lay down and went to sleep." And as a past participle, you would say, "Last night I had lain down to go to sleep, when I heard a noise."

Now, to take it a step further, it is also not uncommon to hear lay as past-tense for laid, as in, "He lay the package down on the table." This is wrong.
Say instead, "He laid the package down on the table."

If Mr. Dylan had known this, he might have gotten laid more often but then again, we wouldn't have the wealth of Mr. Dylan's songs to clutter up open mike coffee houses around the world.

A Pronounciation Niblet

Here is s simple tip for sounding well-educated, even when you aren't. There is nothing wrong, by the way, with not having been afforded a superior education when you were a child and young adult. It's never too late. Educate yourself!

Regarding the suffixes "-ive" and "-ively," know this: these suffixes are frequently mispronounced, especially in the words positive and positively. In traditional American English speech, they are pronounced pos' i-tive and pos' i-tive-ly.


Avoid pos- i-tive'-ly if you don't want to sound like a roob.

English Pronounciation in a Nutshell

I love this poem. I'd like to give the author credit, but s/he is unknown. If you are anything but a native English speaker, you may have trouble with it. Native English speakers, be honest and let me know if you had a perfect run-through. Non-native English speakers -- good luck with it! Feel free to comment. I may post a recording of it at some point.

Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language ... until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sleeve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?

Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!

Jangle and Jar

No, I'm not talking about your change jug. I'm talking about two borderline quirky words which can be useful when used properly.

Historically, jangle is discord, and jangling is wrangling or babbling. Jar, however, is a clashing as of opinions or interests. Jangling disconcerts or discomposes us: jarring produces conflict, causing us to clash the one with the other, thus producing ill-will where good nature should prevail.

I'm not being sexist, just using this sentence as an example: A nagging woman can destroy the peace and happiness in her home by jarring her husband, and an irritable host may jangle his company by ill-humor.

Modern use of these two words include use as descriptions for sound. Jarring is a harsh, rough, irritating sound, and jangling is described as a harsh or discordant sound such as "keys jangling in a pocket."
Let's not limit the use of these two good words. Use the older versions -- it's more fun, which is why I often put on my spectacles to find my trousers.
---
Here's a page full of fun lists of sound-alikes that can be played in matchit type games like this one (click to play)

Grammar-Globulin

This phrase is so important to proper grammatical health that I submit that a body one cannot live without it.

The phrases "It is I" and "It is me" have long been the cause of controversy.

Little Billy visited his grandmother and was standing in front of her dressing mirror, saying, "Yes, that's me."
"Billy," said his grandmother, "You should say "That is I.""
Little Billy said, "Well it may be I, but it looks like me."

Little Billy was right in his conclusion. for me is the object of the preposition unto understood.
In the vernacular, both "It is I" and "It is me" are used, and "It is me" finds greater favor with the masses. But many grammarians are against it. They insist that one must always say "It is I," never "It is me," and that the same course must be followed with every personal pronoun following the verb to be, and in apposition with its subject. That's right. It's an appositive. Remember that from high school?

This same sort of error is commonly made with such phrases as "She is better looking than me," in which, if the elliptical verb were supplied, the correct construction would readily be seen to be "She is better looking than I (am)."

Does this make sense? Let me know.