Word: primed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Violence on TV, despite protests, does not seem to be declining. Last month Professors George Gerbner and Larry Gross of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications came out with their tenth annual Violence Profile. On the basis of a prime-time and a weekend sampling, they report that crooks still make up 17% of all television characters (vs. 1% or less in real life), and that 65% of them are involved in violence. The damage, Gross argues, does not lie in rare incitements to acts of violence, but in the attitudes and views of the world...
...live with the electronic menace, and even turn its endless noise, repetition, violence, materialism and banality to some advantage. All last year in Lansing, Mich., for example, High School Senior Eric Pretzlaff has been filling out his home "viewing log." His assignment is to take notes on the prime-time shows he sees with a view to improving his understanding of economics. After watching CBS's Alice, he noted that Alice's high standard of living is not consistent with her job as a waitress in a small restaurant. In Eric's class, Economics Teacher Rudy Johnson...
Johnson's educational use of TV is based on something called Prime Time School Television (PTST), a Chicago-based, nonprofit organization that prepares TV-related study guides. And PTST illustrates the general principle of prime-time teaching: use the screen to get students' attention, then engage their intelligence with questions, study guides and sometimes scripts read as homework. Thereafter, Archie Bunker's layoff from his job on the loading dock can be used to prompt a class discussion of unemployment. An arrest by Starsky and Hutch helps illustrate constitutional guarantees like that of a suspect...
Proponents of prime-time teaching say familiar television examples make schoolwork less imposing and more interesting. "Reading becomes exciting," asserts Melinda Douglas, assistant to the general manager at KNXT-TV, CBS'S Los Angeles affiliate, "because students can imagine those words being spoken by an actor or actress on television." Opponents point out that the minimal degree of reading skill and concentration required by TV teaching is not adequate training for serious study of literature or history, or for the effort necessary to master subjects that cannot be easily popularized, like math and chemistry. They also fear that television...
...cicadas finally emerge, it is in the shadows of dusk. They also gain protection from their monstrous numbers-as many as 1.5 million per acre. Finally, since they appear only once every 13 or 17 years, nature may have endowed them with an unlikely mathematical defense. These are prime numbers, divisible only by themselves, and so parasites would have to live at least as long-a half or a quarter would be improbable-to partake in a 17-year feast...