“People in the past, in religious civilizations, had a real profound terror of apocalyptic catastrophe. What frightens us in our secular age is the computer breakdown that’ll occur if computers interpret the 00 of the year 2000 and a return to 1900.”
Conversations About the End of Time introduction, ed. Catherine David et al (1999)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, science literacy
Here, on a beautiful Saturday morning, is a reading on J.R.R. Tolkien, the esteemed author of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, along with a 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.
“It [Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House] was as though someone dramatized the cooking of a Sunday dinner.”
Clement Scott, Sporting and Dramatic News, 1889
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Here are two context clues worksheets on the noun prototype and the adjective prototypical. I’ll assume I needn’t belabor the importance of understanding these very commonly used words.
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 general system of concepts which shape or organize our thoughts and perceptions. The outstanding elements of our everyday conceptual scheme include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, and so on. To see the world as containing such things is to share this much of our conceptual scheme. A controversial argument of Davidson’s urges that we would be unable to interpret speech from a different conceptual scheme as even meaningful; we can therefore be certain a priori that there is no difference of conceptual scheme between any thinker and ourselves. Davidson daringly goes on to argue that since translation proceeds according to a principle of charity, and since it must be possible for an omniscient translator to make sense of us, we can be assured that most of the beliefs formed with the commonsense conceptual framework are true.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Here is a learning support on the primary Roman deities. If you teach anything related to classical mythology, you might find this useful.
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.
“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
This week’s Text is four context clues worksheets to teach a family of words related to the noun constitution. I use the indefinite article to modify family because all of these words–I’ve included four here, constituent, two uses of constitute as a verb, and constitution–are polysemous and their use can become relatively complicated. Daniel Willingham, in the latest of his books I’ve read (to wit, The Reading Mind), has observed that really to build vocabulary, it is almost certainly best to teach a word across the range of its morphology and usage. These four worksheets are a start in that direction, but they could easily be elaborated on and, arguably improved.
In any case, the four words presented in these worksheets, in order, are as follows (definitions come from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition: constituent defined in the sense of “one who authorizes another to act as agent;’ constitute in the first sense (i.e. in Worksheet 1) used as a verb as in “set up, establish: as a: enact b: found c (1): to give due or lawful form to (2): to legally process;” constitute in the second sense (i.e. in Worksheet 2) use as a verb as in “make up, form, compose;” and, finally, constitution used as a noun as in “a: the basic principles and laws of a nation, state, or social group that determine the powers and duties of the government and guarantee certain rights to the people in it; b: a written instrument embodying the rules of a political or social organization.”
And that is it for this week. I hope you are enjoying the summer.
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 first novel (1982) in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by the US novelist Edmund White (b. 1940). It charts a boy’s growing awareness of his homosexuality. The others are The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and Farewell Symphony (1997).
The title is an ironic echo of The Boy’s Own Paper (often referred to as ‘the BOP), a boy’s magazine published from 1879 to 1967, initially by the Religious Tract Society. The last issue of the BOP featured on its cover the 21-year-old Manchester United footballer George Best, described as a role model who ‘doesn’t smoke, drinks only occasionally, and restricts his card playing to sessions which ease the boredom of travelling.'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
If you want students to learn idioms, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Riot Act, or more specifically being read the riot act, might help.
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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