tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851614.post3785229104853414975..comments2023-12-21T05:18:05.820-05:00Comments on Lemming's Progress: vocabulary wordslemminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06767103318863906140noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851614.post-22327380706927635672007-03-15T21:23:00.000-04:002007-03-15T21:23:00.000-04:00Well, with as much attention as such workaday envi...Well, with as much attention as such workaday environmental matters as wastewater treatment have gotten for several decades now, I'm guessing that "effluent" won't be a new term to most of your students. I could be wrong, of course. I can't think, offhand, of a single plainer word that means the same thing, at least all by itself.<BR/><BR/>But don't get me started on textbooks. Back when I was an undergraduate studying physics -- and yes, that would have been when the one-room schoolhouse was heated with a woodstove, and we didn't call it "physics" anyway, we called it "ye olde natural philosophie" -- back in the day, I was saying, a physics textbook was large blocks of words, with the occasional simple line drawing, and more-frequent lines of mathematics. My students now try to learn from a "textbook" that's broken up by boxed-off features, thousands of photos, three or four typefaces, garish colors ... it's a "book" prepared for people who grew up on MTV. It's impossible to read the accursed thing; you can't hold your eyes still on one place on the page for more than a second or so. <I>O tempora, O mores!</I>Jim Wetzelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07358539074647113747noreply@blogger.com