Meaning of Gooey | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A thing which is soft or viscous, and sticky.
   informal
2. A person who is regarded as weak or worthless; a fool.
   dated, derogatory, figuratively, informal
3. A person who favours closer relationships with other people and less structured settings, rather than formal, organized settings; also, an educational approach, curriculum, etc., which is less structured.
   US, figuratively, informal

Equivalents

Examples

“On impulse, Pat stopped at a bakery. […] He came out with a box full of gooies—éclairs, cream horns, Napoleons— […] and we parked outside the college grounds and ate them, yapping at each other and smearing ourselves with chocolate and cream.”

“I put the "gooeys," green fluorescent snots, into Louie's nose, set up his brain, and get ready to play the game with my mom. We keep putting our fingers up Louie's nose and pulling gooeys out of it.”

“But only a confirmed chump and irremediable ‘gooey’ comes up for a third ‘chuck.’ […] ‘Jest jollyin’ these gooeys, that’s how’, he said.”

“Planned variation was based on systematically applying different educational approaches developed by academic experts, each of whom was to become a "sponsor" of a single type of program – from highly structured classroom models, sometimes called "pricklies," to open classrooms and more exploratory environments, dubbed "gooeys."”

“Alan Watts says that these two types may be named the "prickly" people and the "gooey" people. The pricklies, he says, the Marthas, are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise and like to stress differences and divisions between things. The gooeys, the Marys, are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses.”

“Which is superior: what is known as low-structure teaching (education through experience) or high-structure instruction (stress on drill in the basics)? Many low-structure advocates, sometimes described as "gooeys," follow the theory, developed since 1920 by New York City's Bank Street College of Education, that learning must adapt to the pace of the individual child. Under this system children learn to read by being provided with a rich environment that stimulates them to learn the words they need. Many high-structure people, known in the trade as "pricklies," use the DISTAR program (for Direct Instruction Systems for Teaching and Remediation) developed at the University of Oregon. DISTAR sticks to phonics, a tightly programmed curriculum and lots of drill. […] [A] more recent local study of comparable New York City neighborhood schools showed gooeys and pricklies scoring about the same. Gooeys consistently argue that standard paper-and-pencil achievement tests are narrow and cannot measure the wide-ranging benefits of their creative approach.”

“The longstanding dispute between the phonics and whole language approaches to early instruction […] has been colourfully described as the ‘Pricklies versus the Gooies’. The ‘Pricklies’ emphasise the structure of the curriculum and provide lots of teacher-directed drill, especially in the teaching of ‘phonics’. The ‘Gooies’ emphasise the child’s self-directed exploration of print. The teacher provides guided experience, especially of whole language, in rich meaningful context.”

CEFR level