Finally, on this suddenly chilly Tuesday afternoon, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Stalinism that ought to be useful in a number of places in the high school social studies curriculum.
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.
“Realpolitik: (Germ., politics of realism) Term coined in 1859 by the liberal journalist and historian Rochau, to describe Bismarck’s policy. Bismarck believed that a naked struggle for power and a ruthless pursuit of self-interest were the only realistic options for a great state.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged foreign languages/linguistics, readings/research, term of art
Because it came up consistently in connection with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany when I taught sophomore global studies in New York City, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the German loan word putsch for use with the lesson on Hitler’s infamous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
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.
“If you think you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”
Quoted in Thurman W. Arnold, The Symbols of Government
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Last year, while working in Springfield, Massachusetts, I was interested to learn that many of my students were interested in and followed hockey. This was partly due, I guess, to the presence of the Springfield Thunderbirds, a minor league hockey team; it was also due to the fact that several girls I taught actually played the game themselves.
So, one of the things I developed for these students is this reading on hockey legend Gordie Howe and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I have several more hockey-related readings and worksheet, so if this sport is of interest to your students, be on the lookout here.
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.
“A ‘story’ (fictional or actual) involves an Agent who Acts to achieve a Goal in a recognizable Setting by the use of certain Means. What drives the story, what makes it worth telling, is Trouble: some misfit between Agent, Acts, Goals, Settings, and Means.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
Alright, this week’s Text is a lesson plan on the art of summarizing which is part of a bigger unit on argumentation that I wrote–but used only once–a couple of years ago.
This context clues worksheet on the verb concede (which is used transitively, but can be used intransitively, according to Merriam-Webster’s, by writing to make concession) opens the lesson. I use this exemplar of a summary, drawn from the book that informs this unit, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2018) as a learning support and model text. This learning support on the verbs used in the rhetorical figures of argumentation supplies students with the vocabulary they require to postulate and write sound arguments. Here are the two exercises for summarizing that are at the center of this lesson. Finally, here is the worksheet for this lesson that contains the full text of the exemplar linked to above.
And that’s it for another week at Mark’s Text Terminal. Enjoy the weekend.
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.
[In this squib, Stanley Kaufmann alludes to Truman Capote’s famously snarky remark about Jack Kerouac’s prose, to wit, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.]
“One can say of this book–with sufficient truth to make it worth saying: ‘This isn’t writing. It’s research.'”
Stanley Kaufmann, The New Republic
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, humor, literary oddities
Moving right along, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective prodigious, a word that students probably ought to know before they graduate high school. As I post this, I realize I probably ought to write a worksheet on the noun, prodigy, as well.
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.
“euphony: Literally the property of ‘sounding well.’ But used at one time of principle equivalent to that of ‘ease or articulation’: thus it was for reasons of ‘euphony’ that one consonant undergoes assimilation to another, or that successive syllables are matched in vowel harmony.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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