"Texting Makes U Stupid"

Are you smart enough to sift through the text of this list to find the words related to stupidity? If so, the college professor who wrote the Newsweek article, Niall Ferguson, might give YOU an A.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 9 Unit 5's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: As You Like It, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Is Shakespeare still relevant, Shakespeare marathon, Iraq learns from Shakespeare, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, Kentucky inmates turned actors, Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, Texting Makes U Stupid, give the Bard the heave-ho
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. illiterate
    uneducated in the fundamentals of a branch of learning
    The U.S. is producing civilizational illiterates.
  2. avid
    marked by active interest and enthusiasm
    The good news is that today's teenagers are avid readers and prolific writers.
  3. oblivious
    lacking conscious awareness of
    Even if you don't have teenage kids, you'll see other people's offspring slouching around, eyes averted, tapping away, oblivious to their surroundings.
  4. cursory
    hasty and without attention to detail; not thorough
    You might get a cursory glance before a buzz signals the arrival of the latest SMS.
  5. inane
    devoid of intelligence
    Seconds before the earth is hit by a gigantic asteroid or engulfed by a super tsunami, millions of lithe young fingers will be typing the human race's last inane words to itself
  6. quaint
    attractively old-fashioned
    It's a quaint old habit I picked up as a kid, in the days before cellphones began nesting, cuckoolike, in the palms of the young.
  7. proportion
    relation with respect to comparative quantity or magnitude
    the proportion of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who read a book not required at school or at work is now 50.7 percent, the lowest for any adult age group younger than 75
  8. curriculum
    an integrated course of academic studies
    Do you have all--better make that any--of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum?
  9. canon
    a collection of books accepted as holy scripture
    It's not perfect, but it's as good a list of the canon of Western civilization as I know of.
  10. propose
    declare a plan for something
    Reveal that this is in fact a reading party and that for the next two weeks reading is all you are proposing to do--apart from eating, sleeping, and talking about the books.
Created on Tue Sep 30 16:59:59 EDT 2014 (updated Tue Sep 30 18:21:39 EDT 2014)

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