“We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation…. Fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in The Dunciad, and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day.”
Saturday Review, 1858
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Derek Bok, Universities and the Future of America (1990)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
OK: tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I am thankful for the day off, and for the short break of which it is a part. Here is a word root worksheet on the Latin word root ver; it means true. As you can see on the worksheet itself, ver is at the root of several key words in the academic lexicon.
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.
Oh–and Happy Thanksgiving!
“We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled that enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.”
Children’s Books
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
We hosted parent-teacher conferences last evening, which means we were here until almost eight o’clock. Long day, to put it succinctly if in agrammatical style.
A couple of hundred years ago, when I was studying Russian in college, I fell into confusion when my professor introduced the accusative case; nouns used as direct objects in Russian are inflected differently–there are five oblique cases–i.e. cases other than the nominative in Russian–than they are as subjects. For example, kniga, the word for book, becomes knigu when it is the direct object of a verb, as in “I am reading a book.” My ignorance at that moment felt legion to me (I was in my early thirties as an undergraduate). Discovering that I didn’t understand the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs only exacerbated the extent of my ignorance.
Students in high school really ought to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs for a variety of reasons, and studying inflected languages is certainly one of them. For that reason, this week’s Text is two Cultural Literacy worksheets on transitive and intransitive verbs. These are short exercises that I use at the beginning of lessons on recognizing these verbs and understanding how to use them.
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.
You might find this reading on Renaissance bluenose Girolamo Savonarola timely, as well as the reading comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
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.
“The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.”
Jean Piaget (1896-1680)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.”
James Joyce
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Some time ago, I posted the first lesson from my unit on nouns. I believe very strongly in teaching the parts of speech as a pathway to greater literacy in the students I serve, and I have had good luck using these units with them. So, for this week’s Text, I offer the second lesson plan of this unit, on common and proper nouns.
I begin this lesson, right after the second bell rings, with this do now exercise adapted from The Elements of Style. After settling students with that short exercise, I move on to the mainstay of the lesson, which is this structured worksheet on common and proper nouns. Finally, you might find useful the teacher’s copy of the worksheet with the correct answers.
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.
Mark's Text Terminal 