There are several places along the continuum of English Language Arts instruction, I would think, where this Cultural Literacy worksheet on allusion could come in handy.
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 village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
Gertrude Stein, in Dictionary of Biographical Quotation 1978
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, poetry
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the noun teetotaler; there is probably an argument to be made to teaching this word to high schoolers, though the reasons, for me late on a Friday afternoon, look in my mind’s eye like pretty thin gruel. I haven’t worked with many students interested in the concept teetotaler and the lifestyle it represents.
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.
“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged health, social-emotional learning
This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using coordinating conjunctions. I open this exercise with this homophone worksheet on the homophones desert and dessert; while I realize that these two words, properly pronounced, aren’t really homophones, these are nonetheless words that students (and adults for that matter) frequently confuse, so I think it’s worth taking a moment to help them sort out these two words. Should this lesson stumble into another day for any reason, here is an everyday edit on Ludwig van Beethoven–and if you like Everyday Edit worksheets, the generous people at Education World have a yearlong supply of them posted as giveaways.
This structured worksheet of modified cloze exercises is the mainstay of this lesson; here too (contrived for the teacher’s ease of use) is the the teacher’s copy and answer key for the worksheet.
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.
Scratch * Duck * Love * Nil
“Sport makes much use of the concept of zero, loading it with a multitude of names. There is scratch in golf, coined from ‘scratching out’ any trace on a score card. In cricket, a batsman who gets zero scores a duck–the slang for a bird that lays an egg, the shape of a zero. And that is the origin, too, of the word ‘love’ in tennis, corrupted from the English trying to copy the French for egg–oeuf. Football, meanwhile, favours the Latin nil, from nihil–nothing.”
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 Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged games/sports, literary oddities, numeracy
Here is an independent practice worksheet on Christianity that I wrote at some point for a freshman global studies class in New York City.
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.
Because I got stuck on the word as an undergraduate (which in turn–getting stuck, that is–happened because I have a hamster wheel for a mind), when it turned up in several things I was reading for a couple of different history courses, I couldn’t resist to compose this context clues worksheet on the noun satrap. For the record, its primary meaning is the governor of a province in ancient Persia. But it can also mean ruler, subordinate official, and, weirdly, henchman.
Can you hear the dialogue in a pulp novel? “Louie! Rocco! Get on the horn and find us some satraps for the bank job.”
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.
“Oracle (noun): A shrine where deities were consulted for prophecies or revelations; a priest or other interpreter of supernal pronouncements or prophecies; any person thought to be a source or medium or divine communication, or one revered for his profound knowledge, foresightful wisdom, or authoritative counsel; a divinely inspired utterance, especially an enigmatic or ambiguously allegorical statement; a wise or purportedly wise opinion. Adjective: oracular, oraculous; adverb: oracularly; noun: oracularity, oracularness.
‘Presumably he prefers the anonymous ‘it’; and likes to see an expression like ‘I think that…’ replaced by ‘it is hypothesized…’ which, (apart from expurgating the dirty word “to think”) ministers to the bureaucratic underlings predilection for submissive autonomy combined with oracular authority.'”
Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Let’s begin this morning with this reading on Louis XIV, the Sun King, and add the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. Remember that this is a key figure in European history, if only as an exemplar of the absurdity and excess of absolute monarchy, particularly as this self-serving, greedy, vain, and arrogant sovereign practiced 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.
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