Word: mcguffey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...biography beatified Washington; Fourth of July speeches were gravely heeded. Even arithmetic books instilled patriotism. Symbols burgeoned-Old Glory, the Liberty Bell, the bald eagle, Uncle Sam. Everyone memorized militant songs, such as Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean ("Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue"). And McGuffey readers-hardly a child alive could not recite Longfellow's verse...
...same strain deeper into the American character. Fast-buck operators flourished, the rapid turnover and the quick profit were the dreams of many a businessman. But the more typical pattern for 19th century business and industry was the narrowed eye with the long view, the reinvested profit, the McGuffey and Horatio Alger mottoes on the mind...
Americans no longer live in a McGuffey world. The patterns of patience and impatience are apt to be paradoxical. A businessman may want to rush to California in five hours and yet wait patiently for a delayed jet takeoff. A scientist may bolt instant coffee at a hurried breakfast and then spend a day of slow, painstaking research in his laboratory. Americans love speed and power on the highway, but they are the most disciplined drivers in the world. While the French, Italian or German driver burns out his batteries with his horn and uses his car as an instrument...
...challenging the "look-say" method that took over the field beginning 40 years ago. Look-say, best known through the "Dick and Jane" readers, counts on sight identification of whole words, using pictures as clues, and brings in phonetics only gradually. The new method, without being a throwback to McGuffey, is centered on phonetics, freely uses picture clues and-most significantly-puts to work on a broad scale the theory of programmed learning...
...most five-year-olds already speak and understand, even if they cannot read them. Sullivan contends that most reading primers are compiled from word lists that have no logical basis; each list came from a survey of the most used words in older readers, and all went back to McGuffey, "who must have obtained his list from God." Sullivan and a research team financed by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc. compiled their lists instead by exploring the world of the five-year-old. "A little kid is very sane," says Sullivan. "He just won't pay any attention to something...