Critical Queer and Disability Theory in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

Critical Queer Theory in the ELA Classroom

There are two senses in which ELA pedagogy can be queer: in one sense, we might study texts featuring queer characters or themes; in the other, somewhat more abstruse sense, it is queer to look at a text slantwise, focusing on violations of social normalcy and norms (especially, but not exclusively, sexual or gender norms) within the text – to look at the text with the queer lens. I would maintain that both senses are good and desirable, and an intersection between the two – looking slantwise at texts featuring queer characters – is best of all.

Queer pedagogy calls for queer readings […] in at least two ways: incorporating texts about and from the perspective of queer subjects, and reading queerly. The mainstream curriculum already includes, or at least allows for including, plenty of texts written by and about queers; it is just that we read them ‘straight.’ If reading queerly is seeking out the queer or potentially queer meanings in a text […] then reading straight is reading around queer meanings and seeking out meanings that support normalcy. […] Queer educators […] need to notice what it is that reading straight has prevented us from knowing, and invite the queer subtext back into our readings. (Shlasko, 2005)

Queer theory, and pedagogy in reference to queer theory, is a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as 2005, queer theory was “often discussed not as a discrete theoretical model, but rather as an indeterminate and shifting set of theoretical possibilities. […] Queer pedagogy, like queer theory, resists stable discrete definition. […] Queer pedagogy is a queer thing to study, and so only a ‘queer lens’ will suffice to examine it.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Texts With Queer Content

As a matter of definition, queer is anything that stands outside the ‘normal’, chiefly, but not necessarily exclusively, in terms of gender and/or sexuality. “As a subject position, queer describes people whose gender and/or sexuality fall outside of cultural norms and expectations. It describes one’s location relative to those norms, or perhaps, one’s status from the point of view of the normal as an outsider.” (Shlasko, 2005) For the purpose of this paper, the entire long and ever-growing alphabet soup (LGBTQQPIA23NF[1]… etc.) of sexual and gender identities is included within the umbrella of this sense of queer.

Some teachers, especially newer or pre-service teachers, may “believe that teachers must be neutral and apolitical” (Bach, 2016); the prima facie response could be that the identity of a substantial portion of one’s students is not a political matter, states which ban discussion of such subjects (Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557, 2022) notwithstanding – but my position would target the premise itself: there are certain political matters that secondary school teachers are not only permitted but expected to address and to equip students to come to a socially just personal position on: is, for example, a social studies teacher covering the 20th century expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of the social pros and cons of Nazis and Fascists? Is a science teacher expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of intelligent design, whether humans have landed on the moon, or whether the Earth is flat? Is a math teacher expected to acquiesce in the name of neutrality and apoliticality to a student who insists that π is equal to exactly 3 (Bible, 1611)? There are some few political subjects where there is an objectively correct and good position, and the existence, identity, validity, acceptance, and welcoming of queer students is one of them.

It is good and important to include texts featuring queer characters and themes in the ELA classroom – “Given the number of studies that indicate the importance of including these titles in secondary schools as a way to validate and explore students’ sexual orientation and gender expression, meet curriculum standards, and address bullying, these books belong in secondary classrooms”. (Bach, 2016) “The absence of school-based supports such as inclusive curricula is associated with school climates more hostile to [queer] students.” (Schey, 2021)

In the 1990s, students might have had access to “historical texts detailing Nazi medical experiments; ‘scientific’ information in biology class asserting that homosexuality was genetic, and neither unhealthy nor voluntary; literary images of depressed and alienated gay people much older than myself; […] Ellen DeGeneres’s (1997) (finally!) coming out episode.” (Shlasko, 2005) Today, fortuitously, “adolescents have access to a wide range of books that feature LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters.” (Bach, 2016) “Each of these genres of gay/lesbian representations has multiple messages, and will have different meanings for different students.” (Shlasko, 2005)

That said, “research continues to suggest that teachers are reluctant or unsure how to incorporate these LGBTQ-themed texts into their classrooms, other than as independent/out-of-school reading.” (Bach, 2016) I would answer to such teachers: the most productive way to read a queer text is queerly (subsequently proceeding to read straight texts and the world queerly, too).

Queering the Text: the Queer Lens

“Queer pedagogy […] pulls from queer theories and ‘requires something larger than simply an acknowledgement of gay and lesbian subjects in educational studies.’” (Bach, 2016) “As a politic, queer challenges the very idea of ‘normal.’ […] As an aesthetic, queer looks for and enjoys potentially subversive content in cultural texts of any media. […] The text itself is not queer. Rather, it is one’s reading of the text as politically radical that ‘queers’ both text and reader. We might say, one is reading (or listening, or viewing) queerly.” (Shlasko, 2005) “One of queer pedagogy’s purposes is to interrupt ‘familiar patterns of thinking’”. (Bach, 2016)

Queer pedagogy beyond simple representation and inclusion is important for, among other things, the inclusion and uplifting of queer students. “To tell students that, ‘It’s okay to be gay’ is dishonest, and transparent in its dishonesty. After all, we do not tell them that it is okay to be heterosexual. The very pronouncement of tolerance assumes an underlying intolerance. […] Furthermore, simply to tell students that they are okay belies the lived experience of queer kids who feel themselves violently excluded from the realm of normal. They know very well that something is not okay.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Moreover, “If we stick to representations that are unthreatening to the norm, we only reinforce the legitimacy of the boundaries that continue to keep some people on the outside.” (Shlasko, 2005) Inclusion is “not only un-queer but actually […] anti-queer.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Teachers can “engage students with textual representations of diverse and norm-disruptive sexualities and genders in ways that work against normative and oppressive discourses, practices, and systems which produce and regulate sexuality and gender”. (Helmer, 2016) Teaching the queer lens can “disrupt[] cisheterosexism and, in turn, invite[] youth to disrupt further.” (Schey, 2021)

The queer lens is thus not just about queer representation and inclusion. To read with a queer lens is to read queerly, to queer the text and the self, to internalize the queer. In the same sense as reading with the feminist lens opens the mind to issues of gender, or reading with the Marxist lens opens the mind to issues of social class and wealth, reading with the queer lens opens the mind to the possibility that there might be more to the world than the normal, especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to gender or romantic or sexual attraction.

Critical Disability Theory in the ELA Classroom

In discussing the critical lenses in pedagogy in ENG694, we only looked at most of the important theories and lenses, but there's at least one important one that we conspicuously left out: the lens of disability.

Disability studies is of universal import: every human being is fated to become disabled (if they don't die first). As far as I can reason, the only form of oppression more universal within humanity is ageism (everyone was once an oppressed youth, and everyone will eventually be an oppressed elder if they don’t die first). In my life in particular, my partner is physically disabled, and I've got approximately three minor mental disabilities myself, so it's relevant to me already. Moreover, every teacher will, in their time, teach countless students with mental or physical disabilities – and will therefore have classrooms full of abled students with disabled classmates, abled students who can be persuaded, through the magic of the lens of disability, to better put themselves in the shoes of said disabled classmates.

Where an aspect in queer pedagogy and the queer lens is on queering the text and the self, the disability lens can have more to do with abled students becoming aware of the struggle of navigating in an uncaringly ableist world while disabled. The “responsibility [is] on able-bodied people to pay attention to how disabled people have to navigate the spaces being afforded to them, including […] educational spaces.” (Stewart & Way, 2023)

“‘Disability encompasses a broad range of bodily, cognitive, and sensory differences and capacities’ but also […] ‘the meanings we attribute to disability are shifting, elusive, and sometimes contradictory’ […] disability and education need to be understood intersectionally.” (Stewart & Way, 2023) “As a pedagogical application, [disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies] incorporate the experiences, texts, podcasts, artwork, and activism of disabled scholars of color, poverty scholars, and community activists, highlighting educational inequities to center the lives of students.” (Kulkarni, Miller, Nusbaum, Pearson, & Brown, 2023)

Disability Topics and Texts

There is a “massive diverse array of imagery related to people with disabilities.” (Nocella, 2008) Disability is common in texts, and, almost as commonly, a shorthand for – i.e., occurs in a character in conjunction with – something else, usually something negative – villains are disabled more often than heroes.

Disability can, most obviously, include physical disability, such as, most commonly in popular media, missing limbs – e.g. Star Wars[2] (Lucas, 1977-2005), How to Train Your Dragon (Sanders & DeBlois, 2010), Harry Potter (Rowling, 1997-2007), and virtually any media focusing on pirates.

In online discussions of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, debate periodically raises its head about the validity of adventurers in wheelchairs – a play option made possible by a fan-made item supplement (Thompson, 2020), popularized by a variety of Actual Play series – The questions on each side of the argument are something like: is it unreasonable to expect ADA-accessible dungeons (in the fictional game-worlds our characters inhabit)? or is it unreasonable to expect disabled players to never want to play characters who are like themselves?

Disability can also include mental disability, which is perhaps more common in the traditional literary canon – e.g. Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1937), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey, 1962), and Flowers for Algernon (Keyes, 1966).

What, one might ask, of mental illnesses, such as sociopathy and/or psychopathy? Are they disabilities to be accommodated? What does it say about us as a society that ‘he's a psychopath’ is so often used as the entire characterization of a villain – e.g. the Joker from DC comics and movies (Finger, Kane, & Robinson, 1940)?

The lens of disability can lead one to ponder subjects that may prove important in social and legal spaces – is genetic discrimination, as one sees in Gattaca (Niccol, 1997) or X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963), fair and reasonable, or is it good that laws have been passed prohibiting it, or should those laws be strengthened?

What of people with increased ability relative to human average, such as in superhero media (including, again, X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963))? Is it fair that Michael Phelps is some sort of super-powered swimming mutant? Should such people be brought down to human average – or even, should everyone be brought down to a minimum, so that everyone is truly equal, as in “Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut, 1961)?

These Theories in My ELA Classroom

One core element of my personal teaching philosophy has to do with holding a line of defense against an epidemic of harmful and hateful misinformation, by teaching critical literacy to today’s young people; moreover teaching them to apply critical literacy to all texts, defining texts as broadly as possible: each book, story, or poem we read in English class is a text, of course; every movie, television show, or anime that a person might watch are texts; news media is a text; televised sports are texts; when you’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and the Algorithm draws you ineffably into a dark pit of questionably hateful politics (Ribeiro, Ottoni, West, Almeida, & Meira, 2020), you bet your sweet bippy that’s one or more texts; this goof standing at the front of your ELA classroom trying to teach you critical literacy, that’s a text; the self is a text, on whom the eye of critical literacy can very well be turned; the world can profitably be treated as a text, which overlaps critical literacy with social studies and science (without the teacher expressing any judgements or assertions about the authorship of that particular text, of course).

Each lens serves to view each text in a different way, and when the lenses are turned on the text of the self or the text of the world, an increased understanding of truths about the self or the world can be attained.

When the critical queer lens is turned on texts, the self, and the world, some students might come to realize things about their own genders or sexualities that they had not previously understood; certainly may be brought to greater understanding of queer peers; and everyone can just inherently benefit from contemplating the rejection of societal norms, even if one does not actually end up rejecting them.

Similarly, a disabled lens can bring students to understand more about their own minds, may bring better understanding of disabled peers, and may lead to slightly better lives for the disabled among us – in my experience, many problems faced by disabled people result less from overt ableism than from people simply not thinking (which, of course, has ableist results). The classic example is the maintenance guy who chooses to shovel snow off the stairs before shoveling the ramp, not pausing to think that a shoveled ramp is usable by all students while shoveled stairs are usable only by able-legged students. Perhaps if the maintenance guy had studied critical disability theory in his ELA classes, he would have paused for that thought.

Works Cited

Bach, J. (2016). Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 917-932. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1071758

Bible (King James Version ed.). (1611). Church of England. Retrieved from https://www.bible.com/bible/1/1KI.7.KJV

Finger, B., Kane, B., & Robinson, J. (1940, April 25). Batman. DC Comics. DC Comics.

Helmer, K. (2016). Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom: possibilities and challenges. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 902-916. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1120943

Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Viking Press & Signet Books.

Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. Harcourt, Brace & World.

Kirby, J., & Lee, S. (1963). The X-Men. Marvel Comics.

Kulkarni, S. S., Miller, A. L., Nusbaum, E. A., Pearson, H., & Brown, L. X. (2023, July 11). Toward disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies in teacher education. Critical Studies in Education. doi:10.1080/17508487.2023.2234952

Lucas, G. (Writer). (1977-2005). Star Wars, Episodes I-VI [Motion Picture].

Niccol, A. (Director). (1997). Gattaca [Motion Picture].

Nocella, A. J. (2008). Emergence of Disability Pedagogy. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies(6), 77-94.

Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557. (2022, July 1). Florida. Retrieved from https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=76545

Ribeiro, M. H., Ottoni, R., West, R., Almeida, V. A., & Meira, W. J. (2020, January 27). Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 131-141. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372879

Rowling, J. (1997-2007). Harry Potter (Vols. I-VII). Bloomsbury.

Sanders, C., & DeBlois, D. (Directors). (2010). How to Train Your Dragon [Motion Picture].

Schey, R. (2021). Fostering Youth's Queer Activism in Secondary Classrooms: Youth Choice and Queer-Inclusive Curriculum. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(6), 623-632. doi:10.1002/jaal.1150

Shlasko, G. (2005). Queer (v.) Pedagogy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38, 123-134. doi:10.1080/10665680590935098

Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of Mice and Men. Covici Friede.

Stewart, F., & Way, L. (2023). Beyond boundaries? Disability, DIY and punk pedagogies. Research in Education, 115(1), 11-28. doi:10.1177/00345237231160301

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved April 3, 2024, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sirEGlUeANviDstyZMpVUDf-KVqyhs40/view?usp=sharing

Vonnegut, K. (1961, October). Harrison Bergeron. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Student Engagement and Motivation in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

The Problem

A core element of a well-managed, productive, and engaged classroom is well-motivated students. There are, according to my classes, two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation – wanting to do the thing for the sake of doing the thing, because the thing is inherently desirable (also called, in the literature, autonomous motivation) – and extrinsic motivation – willingness to do the thing for a desired external reward or to avoid an undesired external consequence (also called controlled motivation).

A student’s intrinsic motivation generally has more effect on their engagement, productivity, self-efficacy, and generally doing the thing; their extrinsic motivation has less effect, to the point sometimes of having virtually no significant effect at all.

The core conundrum that arises is this: the forms of leverage available to teachers work almost exclusively on students’ extrinsic motivation and hardly at all on their intrinsic motivation. How do we, as teachers, square this circle? What tools are available to us to increase intrinsic motivation, or, failing that, at least to make extrinsic motivation more effective?

What Is Motivation?

It’s more complicated than the above-described two-factor schema, of course – “high-school students possess complex motivational characteristics” (Xie, Vongkulluksn, Cheng, & Jiang, 2022); “Achievement motivation is not a single construct but rather subsumes a variety of different constructs like ability self-concepts, task values, goals, and achievement motives” (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).

The aspects of motivation are more finely divided out by Kosovich et al. (2015): assessment of ability to do a thing – i.e. whether one can do a thing now (ability) and whether one will be able to do the thing in the future (expectancy) – is termed expectancy; assessment of value expected to be derived from the the thing can be split out into intrinsic value (the thing is inherently enjoyable), utility value (the thing can help achieve other short- or long-term goals), and attainment value (the thing can affirm an important aspect of one’s identity); cost reflects any negative aspect of doing the thing, e.g. time and/or effort required, opportunity cost, boredom, or negative psychological states induced by struggling or failing at the thing. Expectancy and value are positively correlated with one another, and with positive educational outcomes; cost is negatively correlated with all three things (Kosovich, Hulleman, Barron, & Getty, 2015).

It appears that classroom motivation is influenced by at least five factors: the learner, the educator, the course content, the teaching method, and the learning environment. (Kong, 2021)

The Impact of Motivation on Learning

Student interest in education has a positive effect on learning: “It is extensively approved that learners who are actively participating in the learning progression and take interest in their academic education are more likely to achieve higher levels of learning.” (Kong, 2021)

As a subset of that, it is pretty consistent that student motivation correlates with academic outcomes – highly motivated students tend to be highly successful in school (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).

As a subset of that, high intrinsic motivation is strongly correlated with student success. According to Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde (2020),

high-quality learning can only be achieved if the learner experiences a sense of self-determination. Self-determined learning (e.g. based upon intrinsic motivation) leads to a sense of well-being and contentment during the learning activity, a higher degree of learner engagement, and better performance outcomes. By contrast, learning processes that learners perceive as being controlled by others are connected to less contentment, less engagement, and a relatively low level of performance. (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020)

This reiterates the problem: intrinsically motivated students are more equipped to learn and to succeed at learning than extrinsically motivated students.

Techniques for Already Motivated Students

When students are already intrinsically motivated, clear and comprehensible instruction improves student outcomes relative to muddled or unclear instruction – but it has no significant effect on unmotivated students. (Bolkan, Goodboy, & Kelsey, 2016)

Similarly, when content and lessons are ‘gamified’, using principles of game design, it can increase learning… but primarily among students who are already intrinsically motivated. “[I]t is not a simple ‘gamification increases engagement’ relationship. Gamification impacts students with different types of motivation differently. […] it is particularly effective for students who are intrinsically motivated, particularly either by a motivation to know or a motivation towards stimulation. […] Overall, the results suggest that gamified learning interventions have a larger impact on students who are intrinsically motivated.” (Buckley & Doyle, 2016) Thus, gamification, while potentially good practice, doesn’t much help to improve intrinsic motivation.

Relevance of Material

Johansen, Eliassen, and Jeno establish that when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases (Johansen, Eliassen, & Jeno, 2023). This seems straightforward, but in tension with the student’s interests are the texts the curriculum demands be covered – which the teacher does not necessarily set themselves – and the interests of every other student – even assuming a teacher who can bring themselves to be interested enough in subject matter that interests any given student to plan lessons about it.

The fact that choice of content influences student motivation – when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases – seems, prima facie, challenging to use in the classroom. The curriculum may call for specific texts, with the teacher having limited control over it; a text that interests one student may hold no interest for another student; and a text that interests many students may hold no interest for the teacher, and it is, of course, challenging for a teacher to devise compelling lesson plans for content that is uninteresting to themselves – I find myself able to find a shared interest or two with most individual Gen Z students these days, but what tends to interest most of them – sports, dance TikTok, rap music, etc. – is usually difficult for me to bring myself to share. Still, I can usually count on a fair degree of success when using pop music for an anticipatory set.

One good solution to this, of course, is a decentralized inquiry-learning-based curriculum where each student pursues their own content interests, as propounded at length in the Buffalo State English Education program. This doesn’t help me as much if I end up in a position where I have no influence over the curriculum, though aspects of decentralized inquiry learning can be deployed even in the absence of curricular control.

Teaching Style

According to Zou et al.,

teachers' motivating styles can be divided into two orientations: controlling and autonomy‐supporting. The controlling motivating style is one in which teachers exert pressure on students to think, experience, or behave in a particular way, while the autonomy‐supporting motivating style is one in which teachers use noncontrolling methods to reduce pressure on students, and support students' autonomous development. […] Autonomy‐supporting classroom activities can improve students' perception of classroom teaching and can increase students' motivation and learning ability. […] Particularly, as for student psychological needs, experts agreed on the destructive effect of yelling, unfair punishments, abusive language, and criticism of fixed qualities, while the benefits of helping students find ways of monitoring their own progress and empathy for students. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023)

The obvious conclusion for a teacher to draw is that they should teach autonomy-supportingly, not controllingly, and definitely without yelling at, screaming at, ranting at, verbally abusing, punishing unfairly, or criticizing fixed qualities of students.

Juxtaposing good and bad and very bad methods of teaching in this way could lead to a misapprehension: so long as I’m not screaming at the students, I’m fine, right? Wrong! Students do need to, ideally, be supported and given tools to succeed, not just not yelled at.

Unfulfilled basic psychological needs, like perception of autonomy, perception of competence, and perception of relatedness, can negatively affect motivation (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020). “[W]hen students feel controlled, their intrinsic motivation is weakened, while their extrinsic motivation is strengthened.” (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023) Conversely, fulfilling these psychological needs can positively affect motivation:

To enable students to experience autonomy, competence and relatedness, a context should be created in which students’ actions result in the desired outcomes […] this means that students are provided with tasks […] that help them to reach the learning objectives […] By doing so, students get the opportunity to determine their actions (autonomy) and be effective (experience competence). […A] teacher can create the right conditions by providing appropriate help to students. Help contains the provision of resources to obtain the learning objectives, and information on how to apply those resources, like strategy explanations and meta-cognitive or self-regulatory suggestions. Providing help to students will empower them to act autonomously and effectively (experiencing competence). Moreover, as they experience that the teacher cares about them, it contributes to students’ feelings of relatedness. Feedback that provides information on how to proceed […] has proven to be effective. […] Teacher classroom practice in which constructive feedback [i]s provided [i]s associated with higher student perceptions of autonomy and competence. (Leenknecht, et al., 2021)

Other supports for motivation include: providing choices; taking student preferences and interests into account; explaining a rationale of why the material is important; giving opportunities for students to ask questions. Meanwhile, use of uninteresting activities can thwart motivation. (Patall, et al., 2018)

Teacher-Student Relationship

Much of the academic literature suggests that the teacher-student relationship mediates student motivation, making it a key to teaching, in this matter as it is in so many matters. On a basic level, it contributes towards the student’s need for relatedness, as mentioned above.

Zou, et al. (2024), among others, have found that the teacher’s intrinsic motivation for teaching correlated strongly with their students’ intrinsic motivation for learning, with the arrow of causation pointing from the former to the latter.

Students who believe that teachers are intrinsically motivated to teach are more willing to explore new skills and learn more than students who believe that teachers are extrinsically motivated to teach […] a teacher's motives for engaging in instruction can provide cues related to teachers' displays of positive affect and autonomy supportiveness, which can provide contextual cues that positively influence motivational orientations of students. Additionally, teachers' own motivating style and personality traits that involve control have been found to lead to their tendency to adopt a controlling motivating style. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023).

Henry & Thorsen (2021) finds self-disclosure – teachers telling students about themselves – can improve teacher-student student relationship and increases student motivation:

While some strongly-endorsed reasons are instrumental, and relate to the content of learning, for example clarifying learning materials and providing real-world examples, other purposes are relational and aimed at developing positive teacher–student relationships and creating a comfortable classroom environment. Generally, students are aware of teachers’ self-disclosures and recognize their value in creating a climate conducive to communication. Students often see beyond the personal stories teachers tell, interpreting their self-disclosures as attempts to be honest and open about themselves, to make personal connections, and to create an open and positive learning environment. (Henry & Thorsen, 2021)

Henry & Thorsen are, to be sure, looking at ENL teachers in Sweden, but this seems like a finding that could plausibly be consistent between disciplines and across oceans.

Impact on My Teaching

These findings reinforce the understanding that teacher-student relationship is paramount and fundamental in virtually every aspect of teaching. I shall henceforth redouble my efforts to quickly learn every student’s name and general interests and attempt to make connections by being authentic and (within reason) open about myself.

Luckily for my students, my motivation for teaching is largely intrinsic, which should correlate with them ending up intrinsically motivated. I enjoy teaching, I enjoy it for its own sake as well as believing it is inherently a good thing, and the motivation of money is, while not entirely unimportant, secondary.

Moreover, my teaching style tends not to be very controlling, though I could stand to do better at encouraging and helping students to autonomy.

Works Cited

Bolkan, S., Goodboy, A. K., & Kelsey, D. M. (2016, April 2). Instructor Clarity and Student Motivation: Academic Performance as A Product of Students’ Ability and Motivation to Process Instructional Material. Communication Education, 65(2), 129-148. doi:10.1080/03634523.2015.1079329

Buckley, P., & Doyle, E. (2016, August 17). Gamification and student motivation. Interactive Learning Environments, 24(6), 1162-1175. doi:10.1080/10494820.2014.964263

Henry, A., & Thorsen, C. (2021, January 2). Teachers' self-disclosures and influences on students' motivation: A relational perspective. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 24(1), 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1441261

Johansen, M. O., Eliassen, S., & Jeno, L. M. (2023). "Why is this relevant for me?": increasing content relevance enhances student motivation and vitality. Frontiers in Psychology, 14(1184804). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184804

Kaiser, L.-M., Großmann, N., & Wilde, M. (2020, November 21). The relationship between students’ motivation and their perceived amount of basic psychological need satisfaction – a differentiated investigation of students’ quality of motivation regarding biology. International Journal of Science Education, 42(17), 2801-2818. doi:10.1080/09500693.2020.1836690

Kong, Y. (2021, October 22). The Role of Experiential Learning on Students’ Motivation and Classroom Engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 771272. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771272

Kosovich, J. J., Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., & Getty, S. (2015). A Practical Measure of Student Motivation: Establishing Validity Evidence for the Expectancy-Value-Cost Scale in Middle School. Journal of Early Adolescence, 35(5-6), 790-816. doi:10.1177/0272431614556890

Leenknecht, M., Wijnia, L., Köhlen, M., Fryer, L., Rikers, R., & Loyens, S. (2021, February 17). Formative assessment as practice: the role of students’ motivation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(2), 236-255. doi:10.1080/02602938.2020.1765228

Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F.-F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016, April). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314-328. doi:10.1037/edu0000092

Patall, E. A., Steingut, R. R., Vasquez, A. C., Trimble, S. S., Pituch, K. A., & Freeman, J. L. (2018, February). Daily autonomy supporting or thwarting and students’ motivation and engagement in the high school science classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(2), 269-288. doi:10.1037/edu0000214

Steinmayr, R., Weidinger, A. F., Schwinger, M., & Spinath, B. (2019, July 31). The Importance of Students' Motivation for Their Academic Achievement – Replicating and Extending Previous Findings. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(1730). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01730

Xie, K., Vongkulluksn, V. W., Cheng, S.-L., & Jiang, Z. (2022). Examining High-School Students’ Motivation Change Through a Person-Centered Approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(1), 89-107. doi:10.1037/edu0000507

Zou, H., Yao, J., Zhang, Y., & Huang, X. (2023, July 28). The influence of teachers' intrinsic motivation on students' intrinsic motivation: The mediating role of teachers' motivating style and teacher-student relationships. Psychology in the Schools, 61(1), 272-286. doi:10.1002/pits.23050

Study of Etymology in the Secondary English Classroom

for The Teaching of Writing class, 2020

Why, I might begin, is English so riddled with contradictions? Why do similar words not have the same structures – “mouse” and “louse” pluralize to “mice” and “lice”, so why does “house” pluralize to “houses” while “dice” is the plural of “die” (and “douse” is an unrelated verb, not even a noun)? Why do so many words just not follow the rules? We call such maverick words “irregular”, but they’re so common that irregularity is practically the norm.

In the video game Katamari Damacy, I might illustrate, there is a ball, the eponymous katamari, which accretes objects to itself. As you roll the katamari over objects, they stick to it, and it grows, until you have grown it from accumulating pins and bugs to accumulating whales and skyscrapers. Why, then, is English such a linguistic katamari, accreting vocabulary to itself until it grows bloated and pendulous with exception upon irregular exception, in a way that other languages are not?

CONQUEST, I might declare, jabbing a finger in the air. Conquest of the rest of the world by English invaders, obviously; we are all well aware of this centuries-long history, whence we get words like “juggernaut” (from Hindi “Jagannath”, “lord of the world”) and “barbeque” (from Arawakan “barbacoa", “framework of sticks”) and “safari” (from Swahili and Arabic, meaning “journey”).

However, I might amend, before its history of conquering everyone else, England has an even longer history of being conquered by other Europeans. The Romans; the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; the Vikings; and, central to my point, the Norman French under William the Conquerer. William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, installed his Norman cronies at all levels of the government, and instituted Norman French as the language of law and governance. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon peasantry continued on as they always had, speaking Anglo-Saxon. Over the centuries, the two languages merged into one creole, which became modern English. The grammatical structure and about a quarter of our vocabulary remains Germanic from the Anglo-Saxon, but much of the rest of our vocabulary is from Latin via the French (and via later importation by scholars directly from Latin).[1]

English, I might exemplify, has, unusually among the world’s languages, different words for many meats than the animals whose flesh those meats are made from. “Pork” comes from Old French “porc”, while “pig” comes from Anglo-Saxon “picga”. “Beef” comes from Old French “boef”, while “cow” comes from Anglo-Saxon “cu”. Why? Because only the French-speaking Norman nobility could afford to eat meat, while the Anglo-Saxon serfs raised the animals for them! Picga in the Anglo-Saxon farmyard, porc on the Norman dinner table.[2]

Many of the baffling inconsistencies in English, I might conclude, come from this imposition of Norman French upon Anglo-Saxon. Most of the words that conjugate or decline in the middle, like “goose” → “geese” and “throw” → “threw”, come from Anglo-Saxon, while the words that do so at the end, like “duck” → “ducks” and “toss” → “tossed”, come from Norman French. Anglo-Saxon has its own rules, separate from those of French vocabulary.

Germanic/Anglo-Saxon words, I might elaborate, have long been considered by many English thinkers to be stronger, more emphatic, and more earthy than namby-pamby, formal, and distant Norman French/Latin. Many efforts or exemplifications have been made, some more serious than others, to de-Latinize the language.[3] The linguist and novelist JRR Tolkien, for example, wrote The Lord of the Rings with heavy reliance on the Anglo-Saxon words, in part to read as stronger, but also because he was trying to simulate a native English mythology, free of Continental influence.

It is this history, I might bring the lesson home, that informs the choice that somebody made, at some point, based either on either a scholarly or an instinctive understanding of this distinction, the decision that the past tense of the new-fangled slang verb “yeet”[4] is not weak and formal Norman “yeeted” but strong and burly Anglo-Saxon “yote”.

 

So, more or less, would go the lesson, one I’ve been crafting in my head (and with my friends and my partner, and on Twitter, and in a few different contexts in a few different classes, and so on) since around the time I decided to become an English teacher. Not in those specifics, necessarily – Katamari Damacy and Lord of the Rings may be dated references already, let alone by the time I get into teaching young people, and who knows how long “yeet” will last in the lexicon – but in that general gist, for sure.

But this is an etymology lesson, and halfway a history lesson – does this have a place in the English classroom? Just how multidisciplinary is the modern high school classroom?

Of less direct relevance to me, an English Education 7-12 student, but still an intriguing question: what of the English as a Second/Next/Foreign Language classroom – would just knowing that there really is some logic to the inconsistencies help English language learners?

Is there a most appropriate time to introduce this lesson – conspire with the social studies teachers to teach this when they are covering medieval Europe, perhaps? – though that was fifth grade when I was going through the system, a bit earlier than I’m going to wind up qualified to teach.

Most centrally of all, the question I shall focus most of my efforts upon: how can teaching etymology and the history of English be best incorporated usefully into teaching modern English grammar (syntax, spelling, vocabulary, etc.)?

 

I preliminarily begin my quest with searches on Buffalo State’s library system for “etymology teaching”, “etymology pedagogy”, and their ilk.

My eyeball is immediately seized by an article from 1693 by one Joseph Aickin, “M.A. and Lately one of the Masters of the Free-School of London-Derry”. How does the English teacher of the past feel about the present study of the English of the past?

It turns out, even in his day, students of English were complaining of how ridiculous the language is – “that Englishmen as well as strangers should account the English Tongue intricat and difficile; and that they should think that it cannot be reduced to Grammatical Rules”.[5]

And his response was similar to mine: He thinks it makes sense, actually:

Besides it is the easiest tongue to be taught and learned in the world; for the Grammatical part of it, may be reduced to a very small volume: and it may be improv’d far beyond the Latine, Greek, or French: it being very fertile and fit for compositions. There is no difficulty at all in the parts of speech, for Nouns have for the most part but two endings, to distinguish their Numbers. There are but two genders. Verbs have but two endings, and but few irregular; all the moods are express’d by eight particles, the tenses by fourteen signs: the formation of the passive voice is made by the auxiliary verb, am; so that the whole Etymological part of the Grammar, is a very short and compendious business.[6]

…Except for the parts where it doesn’t:

for indeed the Orthographical part of the English Tongue is the most difficile; There are many defects in the Orthographical part of the Tongue: for the number of Characters, are not sufficient to express the several articulat sounds, we have, as may appear by the several sounds of the vowel a as in can, cane, call, man, &c. o likewise hath several different sounds, as in god, roll, come, &c. g hath two different sounds as in get and generation: t hath two as in time and nation, c hath two, as in censure and came. Besides custom hath obtained so far upon us, that we are forced to spell words according to the idiom of the Tongue, from whence they are borrowed: nay and most commonly we are forc’t to pronounce these words contrary to the genious of our Tongue; Besides as our Alphabet is defective, so likewise it is Superfluous, for either c or k are needed. Ph sounds the same with f. q might as well be expressed by cw since w e are forced to add u after q to asist it. Cs might found x. ts z. g and j are two letters of the same sound, whereas the one viz. g. might always expresse the sound of g in get: and the other viz. j the sound of g in generation and j in Jesus its natural sound: w indeed is a neat connexion of two single uu’s: but the sound might aswell be expressed by two single uu’s. Y might aswell be express’d by i vowel: when it is taken for a vowel. It would be a great ease to Children, if all the Letters were named from their proper force and sound. But a sudden remedy thereof, is not to be expected.[7]

Aickin is right: English orthography is the most difficile (at least, I think, outside of those languages which have hundreds of characters to keep track of). And he’s right about the source of the problem: English is a linguistic katamari[8], and we are forced to spell words according to the idiom of the tongue from whence they are borrowed. We can’t blame just Anglo-Saxon and Norman French for this one.

Perhaps my case in the hypothetical lesson was overstated: the Norman Invasion only explains a substantial chunk of English’s irregularity and is only a subset of what I now hypothesize to be the ultimate twin causes of everything that’s weird or interesting about English: conquest and trade (including the transfer of scholarly ideas under “trade”). Still, the gist of the Norman Invasion more or less fits into one lesson (so long as you omit irrelevant specifics like individual battles); good luck covering all English conquests and trades in less than at least a full year.

Whether or not I’m inclined to overemphasize the Norman Invasion, the broader question remains at issue. Aickin is of little help on the specific issue of teaching etymology and the history of the language, except as an example – he offers only English in his English class, and he even holds somewhat the opposite position from what I’m trying to ascertain the efficacy of: he takes specific issue with the standard schooling practice of his time, the teaching of Latin to the exclusion of English (he does include in his text the teaching of “etymology”, but he doesn’t seem to mean by that what we mean today)[9].

In the 17^th century, learned discourse was still conducted in Latin – René “Renatus Cartesius” Descartes published in Latin from the 1620s through ‘40s; Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was translated into Latin in 1635, 3 years after its initial publication in Italian[10]; Baruch “Benedictus” de Spinoza’s magnum opus, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, was published in Latin in 1677; Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica in Latin in 1687. Although one might notice that those esteemed gentlemen were each of a differing nationality from all the others (only one of them English), giving them good cause to use a common lingua franca; why not Latin?

On the other hand, Aickin’s position, that English should be taught on its own merits, makes sense in history – by the late 17^th century, the turn-of-the-century English works of William Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible (not exactly the first English Bible ever, but the first major officially Church-sanctioned English Bible) would have had time to grow established in the canon of literature. Aickin would have been well-positioned to argue his case that English is at least as good for literature, scholarship, and religion as Latin or any other vernacular[11]. And, to be sure, history has demonstrated him correct, at least insofar as English has taken over from Latin as the language of science[12].

Aickin is a fascinating diversion, and the above digression could easily germinate another example lesson in the history of the language, but he doesn’t exactly answer: How can teaching etymology and the history of English be best incorporated usefully into teaching modern English?

 

 “Every standardized test that the student takes from high school through college contains a section on word meanings. I have found that a one-semester etymology course can raise the class vocabulary average a full grade level”[13]. That’s more like it. J.D. Sadler: “Etymology and Latin Teaching”, 1970. In this paper, Sadler is trying to recruit students to Latin classes, by discussing the Latin roots of many English words. He gives a plethora of examples – without covering the actual history of why English has all this Latin vocabulary.

If you were a student of Latin, you could be forgiven for assuming that our Latin words come from Roman rule over England in the first four centuries (as my Latin textbooks, the Cambridge Latin Course, implied). But it turns out that Roman Latin only had limited influence on Anglo-Saxon (as the Anglo-Saxons later invaded Britain and imposed their own Germanic language on the Celts, mostly overwriting the earlier Roman influence on the Celts), and most of these words come through the Normans and later scholars importing Latin words![14]

Sadler’s article also touches on teaching English etymology to improve student understanding of Latin. Which does recall how I did well in my Latin classes – most Latin words have English descendants, so if you have a large enough English vocabulary, most Latin words are easily rememberable (and a smattering of Spanish vocabulary picked up the slack) – so I agree with him here.

Similarly, Rasinski et al. summarize existing research since Sadler: “Studies have demonstrated the promise of teaching Latin and Greek roots in the intermediate grades”, and go on to propose that Latin and Greek roots be taught even at elementary levels – though, again, without their historical contexts.[15]

Moreover, Hosseini et al. studied etymology as a technique for teaching vocabulary to learners of English as a Foreign Language and determined that it compares favorably in results to memorizing the dictionary definitions. Latin and Greek etymology of English words helps every English learner, but especially native speakers of Romance languages.[16]

Thus the literature appears to have a broad consensus: learning etymology, in the form of common roots and affixes, especially Latin and Greek ones, is beneficial for learning English vocabulary. The answer to this part of the question is a straightforward “yes”, seeming to require not a tremendous amount of elaboration.

But I see no mention being made of teaching the history of the language as context for that etymological study. Perhaps the academy wants us to just stay in our lane as English teachers and leave history to the history teachers.

So, the unanswered part of the question remains: How can teaching the history of English be best incorporated usefully into teaching modern English?

 

A few initially promising, but ultimately fruitless, articles ensue in further explorations. Then:

Aha, a find! Kate Parry: “A language in common: an approach to teaching the history of English”. Sounds perfect!

Parry teaches a course on English literature, which she structures into three parts, which she calls European, Neo-European, and Non-European. European is the history of the English language up until the Age of Exploration, before England started colonizing everything (which, one might observe, covers the overwhelming bulk of recorded history, not to mention all of human prehistory, though Parry consciously eschews teaching any prehistory); Neo-European covers English settlers and colonists and  invaders elsewhere; and Non-European covers everybody who’s been forced, more or less against their will, to speak the language – primarily, those who dwelt upon land colonized by Europeans and persons forced to migrate at the end of a whip, into servitude under English speakers. [17]

Parry aims her focus strongly at the side of history where Zinn’s People’s History dwells, that which has often been neglected in mainstream education but has come into vogue recently, the history of that informs the English(es) her City University of New York students tend to speak. Even though the European category forms the overwhelming bulk of time, not to mention of development of the language, Parry focuses at least equal attention on the Non-European category. She likes to use primary and literary sources, but, as she points out, “literary sources […] have an inbuilt bias. Their authors must be literate, which means that before the nineteenth century nearly all those who wrote in English belonged to a minority that was at least relatively wealthy and relatively close to the centers of power.”[18]

    I say Zinn-style history has been neglected in mainstream education, but really, the lesson I outlined at the beginning of this paper was also neglected in my education – not once in all my history classes from kindergarten through secondary school, much less in any English classes, were the name “William the Conquerer” or the term “Norman Invasion” so much as mentioned in passing. I first encountered reference to this series of events through a video game, Crusader Kings II, which I first played as an adult, years after having acquired a bachelor’s degree. (Virtually all of what I know about history – indeed, everything outside of the Revolutionary War, which was all any of my history classes ever covered, with the exception of a vague overview of Medieval Europe in fifth grade and a barest surface-level survey of the entire history of the entire world, called “Global Studies”, in ninth grade – I have learned, from a variety of sources, since leaving school. My beef with the state of history pedagogy, at least as it was inflicted upon me in ‘90s and early ‘00s America, could stock a butcher’s shop for a year. But I am studying to be an English teacher, not a history teacher.)

Parry’s focus on the development of the language from the perspective of the oppressed is one I hadn’t considered, and which should probably inform future lessons... just not, perhaps, William the Conquerer – except insofar as the native Anglo-Saxon dwellers in England found themselves on the oppressed side of history under Norman boots, at the points of Norman swords.

It does come to mind that the Anglo-Saxons themselves had invaded the native Celts only half a millennium prior, not to mention the Roman occupation of the first few centuries. Is there a point to be made that even the English have a long history of having been oppressed? Perhaps England is as the schoolyard bully who only inflicts upon his peers what has been inflicted on him at home. Or does that simply muddy the dominant “England has oppressed everyone forever” narrative?

Here's an interesting lesson, from Parry:

My students do a substantial amount of work, however, on documented changes in English spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, through a series of assignments in which they examine in detail two biblical verses as translated by Ælfric in c. 1000, by the Wycliffites in 1375, by Tyndale in 1525, and by the King James translators in 1611 (Burnley 2000). They have first to transcribe their verses (I tell them that they must pretend to be medieval monks), then gloss each word of the two earlier versions (which requires using the Oxford English Dictionary extensively as well as the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary of Bosworth and Toller) and write about the changes that they have observed in the language through doing these exercises[19]

This recalls the Aickin-based rudiments of a lesson, above. It doesn’t sound very fun – a bit tedious, in fact – but it’s for sure interesting. (It would probably be improper to pick any of the really fun verses, like the part where Jesus gets hangry at an out-of-season fig tree and curses it to barrenness[20], or the part where the prophet Elisha sics two she-bears to maul forty-two youths who were calling him names[21], or the randiest parts of Song of Solomon, or the most psychedelic parts of Revelation.)

Parry’s teachings seem a solid basis for borrowing ideas from, but only as history of English qua history of English. Would her work inform learners of the English language, its grammar and vocabulary?

At this point, we have now explored teaching the history of English, as pertaining to the earlier question of teaching etymology, so the portion of the question that remains is: How can the above be best combined and incorporated usefully into teaching modern English?

 

As I’m running into a bit of a wall, source-wise, let us take stock. What have we accomplished so far? We have, among other things, determined that Latin and Greek etymology is useful for teaching modern English; and we have explored how to teach history of English. Perhaps our quest is now to simply construct a transitive argument, connecting the teaching of history of English to the teaching of etymology, and thereby determining: “We have determined that Latin and Greek etymology is useful for teaching modern English, and we (will) have determined that history of English is useful for teaching etymology, so therefore history of English is useful for teaching modern English.” (The possibility remains open that there is not much overlap between the portions of history of English that are useful to teaching etymology and the portions of the teaching of etymology that are useful to teaching modern English, but I’m content to leave that possibility dangling.) What we need now, to complete the argument, is to determine if history of English really is useful for teaching etymology. On the one hand: obviously yes. On the other hand: let’s see if we can find some support for this obvious thing.

Fred Robinson’s article, “The History of English and Its Practical Uses”, covers both etymology and history. I first found it to back up my existing understanding of Anglo-Saxon and the Norman invasion[22], but it’s good for other purposes, as well. It is not about teaching etymology through teaching history, but it does teach etymology through teaching history, so at least I have an example of this working well. (He also draws a new-to-me distinction, which could be further explored in the lesson I sketched out while writing about Aickin, between the Latinate words that come to us via Norman French and the Latinate words that come to us through the coinages of late-medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment scholars.) Robinson, therefore, is an example of an apparently effective pedagogical technique, not a study of the effectiveness of pedagogical techniques, so the answer to question of “how”, then, has currently become “as Robinson does.[23]

 

Summing up, then:

I have determined that etymology and the history of English clearly have a place in the English classroom, and the latter can inform the former; that etymology, at least, has a place in the English as a Second/Next/Foreign Language classroom, though I haven’t specifically answered whether simply knowing that there is a logic to English can help English language learners; I have not addressed specifically when this history of English should be taught, though for etymology it seems fine to sprinkle it through every vocabulary lesson.

As for the centralmost question: How can teaching etymology and the history of English be best incorporated usefully into teaching modern English grammar (syntax, spelling, vocabulary, etc.)? I have dug up a few examples[24] that seem effective and interesting to me, through I have turned up little scientific study of the assessment-based results of this specific pedagogical technique. This, then, is the traditional point where one might say “Further study is warranted.”

Further study is warranted.        

Works Cited

Aickin, J. (1693). THE English Grammar: OR, The ENGLISH TONGUE Reduced to Grammatical Rules: Containing The Four parts of Grammar, [etc.]. London: M.B. Retrieved from https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/vfepa5/alma999210693104813

Hosseini, E., Sarfallah, S., Bakhshipour, F., & Dolatabadi, H. R. (2012, September). The Impact of Using Etymological Analysis on Teaching Vocabulary to EFL University Students. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(9), 1868-1876. doi:10.4304/tpls.2.9.1868-1876

Parry, K. (2018). A language in common: an approach to teaching the history of English. Word, 64(1), 1-8. doi:10.1080/00437956.2018.1425185

Rasinski, T. V., Padak, N., Newton, J., & Newton, E. (2011). The Latin-Greek Connection: Building Vocabulary Through Morphological Study. The Reading Teacher, 65(2), 133-141. doi:DOI:10.1002/TRTR.01015

Robinson, F. C. (2004, July 1). The History of English and Its Practical Uses. The Sewanee Review, 112(3), 376-395. Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_journals_212014859

Sadler, J. (1970, December). Etymology and Latin Teaching. The Classical World, 64(4), 117-120. doi:10.2307/4347341

 

---

[1] (Robinson, 2004)

[2] (Robinson, 2004)

[3] (Robinson, 2004)

[4] yeet, v. to throw from oneself with great force

[5] (Aickin, 1693)

[6] (Aickin, 1693)

[7] (Aickin, 1693)

[8] Not his words.

[9] (Aickin, 1693)

[10] I love the central conceit of Galileo’s Dialogue – he’s practically like, “Here are two opposing worldviews, equal in weight, which I present without bias or opinion, and also one of them is espoused by a character named Imbecile.”

[11] (Aickin, 1693)

[12] One could argue, accurately but perhaps sophomorically, that the current most common language of science (and everything, and everyone) is, in fact, binary code.

[13] (Sadler, 1970)

[14] (Robinson, 2004)

[15] (Rasinski, Padak, Newton, & Newton, 2011)

[16] (Hosseini, Sarfallah, Bakhshipour, & Dolatabadi, 2012)

[17] (Parry, 2018)

[18] (Parry, 2018)

[19] (Parry, 2018)

[20] Matthew 21:18-22

[21] 2 Kings 2:23-24

[22] I found Robinson at roughly this point in writing the paper, just before beginning to piece together a final conclusion – my example lesson was initially from my own recollections of previously-read sources, not new-to-me sources, and I tucked the Robinson citations in well after the writing of that section.

[23] (Robinson, 2004)

[24] (Robinson, 2004) (Parry, 2018)