“Harbor, n. A place where ships taking shelter from storms are exposed to the fury of the customs.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Here is a short word root exercise on the Greek root cryo; it means cold. Now you can explain what it means that baseball legend Ted Williams is in cryogenic storage.
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.
“A knowledge of its contents will be essential to conversational poise in contemporary literature during the next three months—perhaps.”
Boston Evening Transcript
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on absolute monarchy which might be useful to social studies teachers. It’s designed to begin a class period and introduce, generally, the topic.
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.
“Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, humor, philosophy/religion
This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using nouns as subjective complements.
When I teach this lesson I begin with this short exercise on the homophones compliment and complement. The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using nouns as complements. Here is a learning support to aid students in the labors on this lesson. Finally, you might find useful the teachers’ copy of the worksheet.
That’s it. Now I must return to cleaning up the mess that accumulated in my absence. I hope you have much-deserved, relaxing weekend.
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.
(As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have long considered the American Federation of Teachers quarterly magazine, American Educator to be a credible and edifying periodical that includes useful research for teachers. Recently, it ran this excellent article on the problem of fake news in the United States. My school’s mindless ban on Wikipedia, I think, represents little more than an unwillingness to recognize the opportunities Wikipedia offers for students to learn how to evaluate evidence judiciously. In this short quote, the authors of the aforementioned article make the case for using Wikipedia for just that purpose.)
“You heard right: Wikipedia. Fact checkers’ first stop was often a site many educators tell students to avoid. What we should be doing instead is teaching students what fact checkers know about Wikipedia and helping them take advantage of the resources of the fifth-most trafficked site on the web.
Students should learn about Wikipedia’s standards of verifiability and how to harvest entries for links to reliable sources. They should investigate Wikipedia’s ‘Talk’ pages (the tab hiding in plain sight next to the ‘Article’ tab), which, on contentious issues like gun control, the status of Kashmir, waterboarding, or climate change are gold mines where students can see knowledge-making in action. And they should practice using Wikipedia as a resource for lateral reading. Fact checkers, short on time, often skipped the main article and headed straight to the references, clicking on a link to a more established venue. Why spend 15 minutes having students, armed with a checklist, evaluate a website on a tree octopus (www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus) when a few seconds on Wikipedia shows it to be ‘an internet hoax created in 1998.’”
McGrew, Sarah, et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American Educator Fall 2017 (4-10). Print.
Here’s a context clues worksheet on the verb declare, which can be used both transitively and intransitively. In this worksheet it’s used both ways: sentences one and five use it intransitively, and sentences two, three and four use it transitively.
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.
“The most important achievement of American education in the last thirty years is bringing a much larger proportion of our diverse society into the schools and succeeding with them there to some degree is not adequately recognized in the national debate about school quality. If we could get the youngsters who drop out or high school each year to stay there, it would cause another [test]score decline, and I’d be in favor of it.”
Harold Howe II, from His Martin Bushkin Memorial Lecture (1984)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
If you’re teaching the Holocaust or related issues to your students, and you want to delve deeper into meaning of that Greek word, you might find this short exercise on the Greek word roots caust and caut useful. Otherwise, it’s a quick and systematic way to build vocabulary. In either case, it means to burn. You’ll see these roots showing up in words like holocaust and cauterize.
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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