Here, on a chilly Thursday morning in Manhattan, is a Cultural Literacy Worksheet on the Nuremberg Trials. I can think of a number of places and subjects in which a high school teacher could use this short worksheet.
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.
[In my lifetime, political discourse in the United States has moved along a continuum from barely civil to openly hostile. Our current presidential administration is different only in that it uses barnyard epithets openly–you may, if you are so inclined, review the vile things one may find on Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes–in a variety of places around the Internet. It was Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, who impugned the patriotism and loyalty of those guilty of nothing more than disagreeing with his positions. If this sounds familiar, look at the headlines, because it is.]
“A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
Campaign speech, Detroit, Michigan, New Orleans, Louisiana, 19 October 1969
“Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.”
Speech at Illinois Republican meeting, Springfield, Illinois, 10 September 1970
“In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Address to California Republican state convention, 11 September 1970.
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
I’m enjoying one of those rare mornings where nothing is pressing, so I have some time to dub around, and organize materials. I’m always surprised by what I find–one of the joys, I guess, of being a packrat. Anyway, there is a context clues worksheet on the adjective amicable. I can’t remember now why I wrote this, but I suspect it was to accompany a unit on a novel, probably either Lord of the Flies or The Catcher in the Rye.
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.
“Free-trade, n. The unrestricted interchange of commodities between nations—not, it must be observed, between states or provinces of the same nation. That is an entirely different thing, so we are assured by those who oppose free-trade, although wherein the difference consists is not altogether clear to anybody else. To all but those with the better light it seems that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for any part of the goose, and if a number of states are profited by exclusion of foreign products, each would be benefited (and therefore all prosper) by exclusion of the products of the others. To these benighted persons, too, it appears as if high duties on imports are beneficial, their absolute exclusion by law would be more beneficial; and that the former commercial isolation of Japan and China must have been productive of the happiest results to their logical inhabitants, with the courage of their opinions. What defect the Protectionist sees in that system he has never had goodness to explain—not even their great chief, the unspeakable scoundrel whose ingenious malevolence invented that peerless villainy, the custom house.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, readings/research
Here, for a Wednesday morning, are two context clues worksheets on the verb evoke and the adjective evocative. These are a couple of very strong words with considerable utility in discussions and inquiry in the arts and humanities.
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.
“There are 6,585 days between one solar eclipse and another, which is 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours. This has been known, observed, and calculated for many thousands of years, but was probably first chronicled in ancient Babylon (in Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq). It would later be disseminated by the Greeks as the Saros Cycle.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a short exercise on the Greek word root erythr/o; it means red. This is another of those roots that grows a lot of words used in the health professions.
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 the mother and the father.”
Motto of the “Lost Boys of the Southern Sudan,” as seen on 60 Minutes (2001)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
I’m old enough to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in life and in death. Indeed, I remember vividly that April day in 1968–I was in third grade–when a career criminal named James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. King while he was in Memphis assisting sanitation workers in their quest to be treated with basic human dignity by that municipal government. As confused and conflicted as my parents’ political principles were, they respected Dr. King, and admired the work he was doing. My father, as I recall (remember: I was eight years old, so some of this stuff was a little over my head), was particularly demoralized by Dr. King’s murder, and saw it as a sign, along with the horrors of the Vietnam War, of encroaching barbarism.
Today, we observe the anniversary of Dr. King’s work. Here is a reading on the practice of nonviolent resistance, which was the cornerstone of Dr. King’s strategy in his fight for civil rights for Americans of African descent. You might want to use this comprehension worksheet to accompany it. Finally, here is a piece of work I consider timely–especially considering this report on inequality in schools in the United States that came over the transom yesterday–to wit, this Cultural literacy worksheet on de facto segregation.
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.
“Privative: Indicating lack of loss of, absence of, or negation, e.g., the prefixes ‘un-, ‘a-,’ ‘non-,’ and the suffix ‘-less.'”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
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