Monthly Archives: December 2018

Garrison (n)

It can also be used as a transitive verb (The conquering army garrisoned the city), but for now here is a context clues worksheet on the noun garrison.

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.

Book of Answers: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

“Who wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians? The source of the popular Disney film was Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Mickey Mouse

Here is a reading on Mickey Mouse and its accompanying comprehension worksheet. I continue to have good luck using this kind of short, high-interest reading with students who dislike reading and are unequivocal about that sentiment.

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 Devil’s Dictionary: Wheat

“Wheat, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are said to eat more bread per capita than any other people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Cultural Literacy: The Women’s Movement

On a grey and chilly Saturday morning, here is something timely: a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Women’s Movement. It might help your students understand how we reached the point we have in our zeitgeist. It turns out, to the surprise of very few, that women prefer not to be thought of or treated like objects.

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.

Term of Art: Active Reading

“A set of pedagogical strategies intended to get students involved in thinking about what they are reading. Active reading may involve any of a wide range of activities, such as underlining, outlining, predicting, summarizing, paraphrasing, connecting the reading to one’s own experiences, visualizing, or asking questions about the content of the reading material.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

The Weekly Text, December 14, 2018: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Comics Legend Stan Lee

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I took a new job a couple of months ago; I’m now five weeks in, and so far so good. I’m spread much less thin, and working on literacy issues with much greater focus.

Which has permitted me the time, and the clarity of students who know their interests, to develop some new material, including this reading on comics legend Stan Lee and the comprehension worksheet to accompany it which students requested in an interest survey. You will note, particularly if you’ve heretofore downloaded and used other readings and comprehension worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, that these two documents are quite a bit longer than is the norm here. I find that bears what I hope is a brief explanation.

First of all, I synthesized this article from Wikipedia’s page on Stan Lee. While I do understand educators’ concerns with Wikipedia, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great idea to write off the site completely. I use Wikipedia heavily, support it financially, and believe it a worthy resource for certain types of work and fact-finding. In any case, where Wikipedia suffers what I’ll charitably call epistemological problems, I find them limited to politics, especially contemporary politics, and hot-button controversies. An article on someone like Stan Lee, in my experience, is highly unlikely to have been tampered with, and therefore unlikely to contain untruths.

Second, as to length. After trying to keep this reading to one page, I decided to edit together a relatively comprehensive biography of Lee. Thus it ran to two pages, and the comprehension worksheet to five. It goes without saying, I assume, that this document, as are all documents on this website, is in Microsoft Word format. Therefore, you may edit both documents to suit your students’ and your needs. I know this may be too much for some readers; simply cut sections you think are superfluous, and voila! You have differentiated instruction for one or more students.

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.

James Thurber’s Thoughts on the Final Day of the Work Week

“I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.”

James Thurber

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Perennial (adj)

It was the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster yesterday, so here today is context clues worksheet on perennial used as an adjective. Gardeners know this word as a noun, so I am aware of this document’s limitations–including the fact that it doesn’t include, ah, some of the strongest context ever to flow from my pen.

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.

Rotten Reviews: Walt Whitman

Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste…Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense but never in direct violation of it.”

Henry James, The Nation

“Incapable of true poetical originality, Whitman had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the shrewdness to stick to it.”

Peter Bayne, Contemporary Review, 1875

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.