“Ready-mades: Associated with Dada, especially with Marcel Duchamp, these are randomly selected and mass-produced found objects, often nonsensically combined and presented as art. For Duchamp, found objects implied the exercise of aesthetic taste, whereas ready-mades did not.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Once again, in an adaptation from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (to which he generously offers free access at his Washington State University web page), here is a worksheet on the use of the noun majority. This noun, one of a few of its type I imagine, governs both the use of the singular and plural verb. And that is what Professor Brians seeks to clarify in this passage.
Students are called upon to evaluate five teacher-authored sentences, then compose fives sentences of their own with majority used properly.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“achievement motivation: The need to perform well, or achievement motivation, significantly determines a person’s effort and persistence in reaching some given standard of excellence, or in comparison with competitors, and the level of aspiration that is involved in that standard or competition. This motivation is seen by psychologist D.C. McClelland (1961;1971) as a major determinant of entrepreneurial activity and as a cause of rapid economic growth when widely dispersed in a society. Many managerial roles are also said to require individuals with a high need for achievement if they are to be performed well. McClelland believes that such needs are learned in childhood, when individuals are socialized into the culture of their societies, rather than being innate. Other needs that may be learned are the needs for power, affiliation and autonomy.”
Excerpted from: Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner. Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Penguin, 2006.
As I prepared to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on hedonism, I found myself thinking that most high school students, most adolescents, do understand that the pursuit of pleasure and happiness is, if not the highest good in life, is close enough. I certainly did as a teenager. This short reading does a nice job connecting the concept of hedonism to the Epicureans.
In any case, this is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Boring: The scientific community speaks about its work in a cool and disinterested manner. To present an exciting profile would be unprofessional. Any excess of emotion would suggest a lack of neutrality and therefore a tendency to read what they want in the facts rather than reporting what they see. Scientific objectivity must therefore appear to be boring.
Scientists are well aware that their work is neither boring nor objective. If it were, very few discoveries would be made.
Social science, being falsely empirical, is triply obsessed by the obligation to present itself as the objective interpretation of observed reality. Since the more or less hard edges of scientific inquiry are not involved, social scientists are free to be more categorical about truth, reality and what they call facts. They therefore seek to be more boring than scientists.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, science literacy
If I had my druthers, I would teach five sections of rhetoric and composition every day until I retired. Readers of this blog, I am confident, understand that good writing instruction particularly interests me. Unfortunately, in 19 years of teaching, while I have seen plenty of writing assigned, I have never seen it explicitly taught. This has been, frankly, a source of a lot of bitter frustration for me. I do what I can, but it usually isn’t long before a functionally illiterate administrator shuts me down. The credo in the New York City Department of Education seems to be that if students haven’t learned diction, grammar, usage, and style by high school, they never will. How that squares with the amount of writing we nonetheless assign–which is often quite a bit–I have yet to determine.
Unfortunately, I am a special education teacher who must (as I have, again, frankly, needed to learn the hard way over and over) go along to get along. In my experience in the schools in which I have served, no one is particularly interested in anything I might have to say about teaching and learning.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t work at things anyway–that was really what drove the inception of this blog.
During the 2024-2025 school year, when I had a spare moment, I worked on a unit, Introduction to Writing Sentences, that I started during the pandemic. Now that unit is complete; the next 18 Weekly Texts will bring the whole thing to you.
If you’re a regular user of this blog, nota bene, please that some of these materials are parts of other units that I have very likely previously published. What I can tell you, I’d like to think, is that I improved many of the lessons per se, then thought long and hard, then worked long and hard, to get them into some kind of sequence. The material in this unit is more heavily supported, and includes some new learning supports.
This week’s Text, then, is everything out of the planning materials folder for this unit. Without further ado, then, here is the unit plan, the lesson plan template, and the worksheet template. This bibliography of writer’s manuals is probably something students, particularly college-bound students, ought to have. Likewise this lexicon of basic grammatical terms excerpted from from a classic, William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (New York: Longman, 2000).
This learning support on using colons and semicolons is a general handout, like the lexicon above, to support students throughout this unit. So is this learning support on dependent and independent clauses. I’m not sure why it was in the planning materials folder for this unit, but here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the parts of speech (three sentences of text, which may require a bit of editing or adaptation for struggling readers, and three comprehension questions) that I assume I planned to use downstream on this unit.
Finally, if you need it, here is a lesson checklist that I use for a variety of purposes, including quality control and improvement over this body of work.
And that, esteemed reader, is the contents of the planning materials folder for the Introduction to Writing Sentences Unit. Now, for the next 17 weeks, Mark’s Text Terminal will offer all 17 lessons for your use.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“She-Ji or She-Chi: Ancient Chinese compound deity of the soil and harvests. China’s earliest emperors worshiped She (earth), for they alone had responsibility for the entire earth and country. Since ordinary people had no part in this courtly worship, the came to focus their worship on the god of grain (Ji). Local shrines held two images, one of She and one of Ji, and eventually the two images were considered man and wife.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Finally, for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2026, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tiananmen Square. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and one comprehension question.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Red Guards: Radical university and high-school students formed into paramilitary units of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They responded in 1966 to Mao Zedong’s call to revitalize the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese Communist Party and went so far as to attempt purging the country of its pre-Communist culture. With a membership in the millions, they attacked and persecuted local party leaders, schoolteachers, and other intellectuals. By early 1967 they had overthrown party authorities in many localities. Internal strife ensued as units argued over which best represented Maoist thought. Their disruptions of industrial production and urban life led the government to redirect them to the countryside in 1968, where the movement gradually subsided.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tahiti. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the second of them a bit long, but not so long that students–even emerging and struggling readers–can’t make sense of it.
Even in two sentences, the reading mentions Tahiti’s allure to Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson, summoning both of them to the Island to create art extolling the its beauty.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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