“I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States; this holiday, to me at least, given the political and cultural atmosphere in this country, feels especially important this year. If you ever feel a need to do something to make the world a more just place, today is the day to take action. As soon as the temperature rises to its balmy high of six degrees here in Springfield, Massachusetts, I’ll make the two-block trek to the Salvation Army Donation Center to deliver a couple of bags of things I can with which I can afford to part.
To celebrate the day, here is a reading on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and a vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet to attend it. As a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Justice Marshall did the work to bring about Dr. King’s version of a just society for all, regardless of skin color, in the United States. While he argued a number of significant cases that led to ethnic justice, his crowning achievement by most standards must be his triumph in the Kansas desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
If you find these materials useful, let me remind you that at this point in January, we are on the eve of Black History Month 2019. Mark’s Text Terminal will feature a full month of posts on Black History–as it does every year.
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 bears mentioning that cultural differences have nothing to do with intelligence and aptitude. It is hoped that the cognitively savvy educator will appreciate the unique perspectives—literally—that students from various backgrounds may have and exploit those differences to optimize and expand the learning opportunities for all students in a classroom.”
Excerpted from: Rekart, Jerome L. The Cognitive Classroom: Using Brain and Cognitive Science to Optimize Student Success. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2013.
Over the years I have been intermittently interested in the Trivium as a way of helping students to think in a linear manner. Anyone dealing with this medieval division and taxonomy of knowledge will quickly come into contact with Scholasticism, and, working backward chronologically, Aristotle. I still haven’t decided if a teacher could or should return to medieval categories of knowledge, but I do think there is a case to be made for teaching rhetoric in high school English Language Arts class.
Because I have some old-fashioned ideas about the equality of opportunity in society, I have made working in struggling, inner-city schools my office for my entire career. Last November, I made the move from one of these schools in New York City to one in Springfield, Massachusetts. One of the first documents to cross my purview in the service of a student was a writing assignment for a work of fiction in an English Language Arts class. My talented colleague, and I thank her for this, asked her students to use one of three rhetorical strategies in this assignment. It was a treat to see.
Anyway, along the way in trying to develop instructional materials related to rhetoric, I transcribed the gravamen of Aristotle’s analysis of rhetoric (from this edition of his treatise) for use in planning a unit on the it. If you can use it, there is a several-page Word document under that hyperlink
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 Milwaukee last month a man died laughing over one of his own jokes. That’s what makes it so tough for us outsiders. We have to fight home competition.”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
Students everywhere, I expect, are thoroughly assimilated into digital culture and not especially interested in its origins and folklore–of which, as it turns out, there is a great deal. Take, for example, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a nineteenth-century polymath who is arguably the father of the computer. The amount of human error involved in mathematical work troubled Babbage, so he set out to invent the difference engine, a steam powered mechanical computer engineered to produce error-free mathematical tabulations.
Babbage’s invention has fascinated people since its inception, and unless I miss my guess, you will see in the course of your teaching career at least a few students interested in the history of computer technology. If so, then this reading on Charles Babbage and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it should serve as a short but thorough introduction to this obscure but important and fascinating historical figure.
If your students are up to and for it, you might also consider putting William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s (they are, incidentally, the progenitors of cyberpunk) work of alternate history and speculative fiction, The Difference Engine, in front of them. I like Gibson’s early work (his Neuromancer is a defining text of the cyberpunk genre, and a masterpiece in any case), don’t know much about Sterling, but found the novel fascinating.
Addendum: Please see the comments below from my esteemed high school chum Terry on the role of Ada Lovelace in creating the “software” to make Babbage’s engine actually perform more than basic mathematical tasks.
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.
Once again, I can’t remember why I thought I needed this learning support on historical ages and eras, so of course I don’t know why I wrote it. Unlike similar documents I’ve posted here recently subsequent to a housecleaning in the archives, this one has been useful in my classroom for students to turn into classroom posters. A little graphic design, some brightly colored markers, some of the student’s personal sense of style, and voila! You have an authentic piece of graphic art to hang on the wall of your classroom.
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.
“(1919-1987) Jewish-Italian memoirist, novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Levi was active in the resistance during World War II and was captured and sent to Auschwitz. After the war, he worked for many years as an industrial chemist. His best-known works are Se questo e un uomo (1947; tr If This Is a Man, 1959; U.S. Survival in Auschwitz, 1961) and La tregua (1958; tr The Truce; U.S. The Reawakening, 1963), the first and second volumes of his autobiographical trilogy. Both are Holocaust memoirs distinguished by a combination of compassion and detachment and an extraordinary absence of personal bitterness. A chemist by profession, Levi gained international attention with is final volume of autobiography, Il sistema periodico (1975; tr The Periodic Table, 1984), a brilliant tour de force consisting of twenty-one imaginative pieces, each named after a chemical element robing personal, social and political experiences. After the appearance of The Periodic Table Levi attracted much more attention among English-language readers; several translations of his books have appeared, including Se non ora, quando? (1982; tr If Not Now, When?, 1985), a novel, and The Monkey’s Wrench (1986).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
These five worksheets on the homophones lead and led are not exactly the most cogent ever to issue from my pen. They do stand on their own, I think, and with some tinkering (which I may get to in the future, and since these are in Microsoft Word and can be manipulated, you can get to whenever you see fit) they might increase in cogency and therefore effectiveness.
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.
“Anagram: (Greek ‘writing back or anew’) The letters of a word or phrase are transposed to form a new word. For instance, the word ‘Stanhope’ can be turned into the word ‘phaetons.’ A common feature of crosswords. Samuel Butler’s title Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere.'”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
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