Finding Family: episode 1

Tags

conqueror, dissenter, obligation, power, punishment

A striking family resemblance. Artist unknown, from the British School, thought to be painted around 1600-1610. Inscribed on the bottom left corner is the text: “Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed the same day.” Tate Gallery, London

“My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches).

While Sherlock Holmes was referring to humans, this statement above can be equally true when applied to a word and its relatives.  Holmes, the embodiment of intelligent deduction based on evidence, suggests that insight into parental character is gained from an examination of the offspring. So too can this method be applied to word study and lead to insight into the ‘character’ of a word.

It was with this motive of developing a deeper understanding of a word through an examination of its ’parentage’ and relatives, that I adapted an exercise Lyn Anderson regularly uses with younger students. (See Lyn’s latest blog post about the importance of developing morphological understanding from the early years and click here to read her description of Round Table Word Webs)

Our inquiry began with the five words I hope students will understand well in regard to the Middle Ages, our current unit of study:  power, obligation, dissent and punishment.

Find your family:

Look at the words below. Are you, dear reader, able to identify the families?

The words above were written onto separate cards and one word was handed to each student with the following instructions:

• Each of the words above belongs to a family with four members. As a family, they share the same root.
• In the room, there are five families- each with four words.
• Your task is to find the family. Note- some families have 3 different base elements, some two different bases. Look closely at the morphemes and the graphemes forming the base.
• In order to reunite with your family, you must mentally remove affixes and search for another word that has the same base element or a base element that could potentially belong to the same family! Do this in silence!!
• Once you have gathered into potential families, ask each member to divide the word into morphemes (a word sum). Be prepared to justify your analysis.

 

You’ll note the insistence on silence which heightened the focus on the words (mostly!) and individual consideration of potential morphemes.

Finding the Roots

We then reconvened as a whole group. I  placed five roots on the board and inviting one member of each group to take the root from which their words had derived. They were asked to justify their selection. In cases where the root was Latin, I gave the infinitive and the supine forms. Close observation of these etymons allowed students to confirm the related base elements as being etymologically connected. In justifying the selection of the root, students referred to graphemes that could be seen in the base. This process helped students to understand that one root could lead to several related base elements.

 

 

 

 Finding Connections in Meaning 

After justifying a claim to a particular root, students were asked ”Based on the members of the family, what do you predict the root means? What language do you predict the root is- why?” This helped students to consider the common meaning at the heart of each word and led to thoughtful discussion and questions about each word in their ‘family’. At this stage of the inquiry, students were asked to divide the word into morphemes and to consider whether they should develop another hypothesis. Students are becoming adept in recognizing the Latin suffixes <-ere>, <-ire>, <-are> that mark the infinitive form.

Asking students to find the meaning link between words helps generate deeper thinking about a word and forces students to use their own resources, ask questions, formulate hypothesises rather than rushing off to a resource to regurgitate  what they consider to be ‘the answer’. Slowing this initial process down, talking through hypothesises and asking questions of each group has helped students interrogate the resources with a little more care.

 

 

 

You will have noticed in the videos there are places where students should have reinserted the final non-syllabic <e> at the end of the base element: <punish> and <potent> being two such examples: <pote+ent> and <pune+ish>. I am waiting to see if the students come to this realization in their further research. If not, we will again discuss what we understand about the function of the <e> when final and non syllabic.

Stay tuned for the next breathtaking episode of Finding Family where the challenge lies in representing the family in webs and matrices!

The Cholmondeley Ladies:

In considering a visual representation of family, I immediately leapt to The Cholmondeley Ladies.  This double portrait of the imperturbable baby presenting, bed-sitting sisters has remained vivid after seeing this at the Tate Gallery many years ago. Likewise for other viewers. Go here to read an eloquent description of Michael Bird’s first encounter and interpretation of this Jacobean portrait embedded in his essay The Perception of Symmetry for the Tate Gallery magazine. This is worth the read not only for thoughtful insights into the painting above and symmetry in art but also for Bird’s application of the etymological understanding of symmetry, mirror and individuality.

 

 

More Tiny Tales

Tags

Bronowski, certainty, compliance, dictatorship, discrimination, opportunism, resistance

Cover to the Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey. A darkly sardonic rhyming alphabet book, each letter itself a tiny tale of terror:’A is for Amy who fell down the stairs,B is for Basil assaulted by bears.’Go to Brainpickings to find out what happened to poor old Maude and Neville!

In our last unit one of the questions we asked was: Why do some people stand by during times of injustice while others take action?  In the course of our reading, the words compliance, resistance, dictatorship, discrimination, opportunism and certainty became concepts invoking terror. The creation of the next in our series of Tiny Tales is the culmination of 20- 30 minute inquiries conducted at the beginning of class once or twice a week over several weeks. Students in small groups researched words asking the foundational questions of word inquiry:what does the word mean? how is it structured? and what other words are related?  Once we had gathered our morphological and etymological information, we reworked our initial definitions. We discussed each word in depth- asking tough questions: what causes discrimination? Who is complicit in this? Why do so may stand by and comply? What causes compliance? What are the circumstances that cause some to resist?  Are there shared traits of those who resist ?

Quick notes capturing some elements of our class discussion around the morphology, etymology and meaning of the word <resistance>.

Once we felt we understood these words, had argued and thought and asked each other many questions, we used our understandings of the words to illuminate our Tiny Tales. We came to see that these words were, in the context of our study, terrifying.

 

 

And yes we have divided resistance as <re+si+st+ance>. We continue our research on this. The prefix <re-> has a sense of against. The stem <sist>, derived from Latin sistere “take a stand, stand firm” and  is the reduplicated form of Latin stare to stand. We recognize the Latin suffixes <-are>,<-ere> and <-ire> and know to remove this when investigating how the Latin root emerges in the present day orthography of the base. When we remove the Latin suffix <-are> from the Latin infinitive <stare> we are left with <st>. When we remove the <-ere> suffix from the reduplicated form <sistere> and then the reduplicated element <-si->( we know this is not a prefix) we are left with <st>. This allows us to see the connection to so many other words that share this base. Here is the work of one student’s thinking so far:

The words that have informed this matrix above are a mere drop in the <st> ocean of words. As the number of words with <st> as a bound base become increasingly apparent to us, we envisage the matrix as becoming enormous and perhaps unwieldy. We are currently discussing the advantages and disadvantages of  treating <-si-> as an analyzable element and separated in the matrix. Is the matrix and the ability to form words from this more manageable if <sist> is treated as a bound base element? After all, <si> is not a base element, nor a prefix. Does <si> occur as a reduplicated form with other bases? How could we acknowledge the <st> base embedded within <sist> ? All questions form part of an ongoing discussion. See our earlier work and discussion of this word resistance here.

Observations of this work:

Hidden behind the production of Tiny Tales is rich dialogue as we grapple with a word’s meaning, cite examples and see how its connotations can change from positive to negative depending on the context.

We enjoyed the collaborative nature of producing the work from the research to everyone choosing someone else’s writing to illustrate or to bring to life through voice.

On being certain:

I cannot close this post without mentioning ‘certainty’. The word certainty <cert+ain+ty> from the Latin certus, cernere to sift, to separate, was the basis for lengthy dialogue and sparked by an inspiring article in the New York Times brought to my attention by my colleague Erik Ortman ( you’ll often see him working with students in class videos). In our discussion we could see the dangers of certainty, the stultification implied by the ‘right’ solution, correctness. We saw its antithesis as doubt.

‘Doubt sometimes comes across as feeble and meek, apologetic and obstructionist. On occasion it is. But it’s also a powerful defensive instrument. Doubt can be a bulwark. We should inscribe that in marble someplace.’ Cullen Murphy, The Certainty of Doubt, New York Times (2012).

Go here to read the thought provoking New York Times article : The Dangers of Certainty (2014) by  Simon Critchley, philosophy Professor at New School for Social Research in New York. The following statements by Critchley stand out:

‘Dr. Bronowski thought that the uncertainty principle should therefore be called the principle of tolerance. Pursuing knowledge means accepting uncertainty…the more we know, the less certain we are.’

The remarks below by Bronowski resonate strongly for me:

“Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

‘There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit. The assertion of dogma closes the mind and turns a nation, a civilization into a regiment of ghosts. Obedient ghosts. Or Tortured ghosts. It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some 4 million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how men behave.’

Watch Bronowski’s eloquent and moving warning about the dangers of certainty . This is the final clip in episode 11: Knowledge or Certainty from Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man” series.

 

 

We realized, as we reflected on our study, that our choices impact others, that we need courage to act with integrity and to stand up to — and for — others. Above all, we must question.