“ancien regime (Fr.. old government, old order). The governmental and social structure which prevailed in Europe prior to the French Revolution of 1789. Its main characteristics are taken to have been an absolute or despotic monarchy, based on the Divine Right of Kings and the rigid division of society into three orders—the aristocracy, the Church, and the Third Estate.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a lesson plan on Hesiod’s Ages of History along with its reading and comprehension questions. As I’ve mentioned previously when posting these materials, this lesson (and at least 30 others like it) are something I started working on just before the COVID19 pandemic scaled up and closed schools, and I lost my job as a public school teacher.
To reiterate (and you can read more about these on the “About Posts & Texts” page linked to just above the banner photograph on the homepage of this site), these documents aim to give students an opportunity to work with, and develop their own understanding of, moving between two sets of symbols, words and numbers, in one lesson. The worksheet can be contracted or expanded as is appropriate for the attention spans of the students with whom you’re working. These are, as you will infer, literacy development exercises.
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.
[If you would like this passage as a learning support in Microsoft Word, it’s under that hyperlink.]
“12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it.
A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing. Writers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition. Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. This calls for a scheme of procedure. In some cases, the best design is no design, as with a love letter, which is simply an outpouring, or with a casual essay, which is a ramble. But in most cases, planning must be a deliberate prelude to writing. The first principle of composition, therefore, is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.
A sonnet is built on a fourteen-line frame, each line containing five feet. Hence, sonneteers know exactly where they are headed, although they may not know how to get there. Most forms of composition are less clearly defined, more flexible, but all have skeletons to which the writer will bring the flesh and blood. The more clearly the writer perceives the shape, the better are the chances of success.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Yesterday, I posted a worksheet on the Latin roots ped, pedi, and -pede; if you scroll down–it’s 12 posts below this one–you’ll find it. As that post relays, in Latin these roots mean foot and feet.
Now here’s a worksheet on the Greek word root ped-o. In Greek this root means, simply, child. As with its Latin counterpart, this is a very productive root in English, forming the basis of words like pediatrics and pedagogue.
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.
“Regionalism: Now understood to be a movement within American scene painting. Protesting against the spread of European Modernism, the regionalists sought an authentic American style by concentrating on realistic depictions of the rural Midwest and South of the 1930s. The best-known regionalists were Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Again, if this context clues worksheet on the noun democracy isn’t timely, particularly in light of the president’s latest craziness, than I guess I don’t, after all, understand the use of timely as an adjective. For the record, I learned, after consulting my dictionary, that timely means, in one sense “appropriate or adapted to the times or occasion.”
So yeah, I stand by this document as timely at this moment in history.
And as long I as I am presuming to write things into the record, please remember that United States presidents do not have absolute power–in fact, no one in the government does. That’s why we have a separation of powers in our Constitution. At the risk of belaboring the point, let’s not forget that the founders of this country fought a revolutionary war against a British sovereign who liked to think of himself as possessing absolute power.
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.
“Ambiguous: Having two or more meanings. Defined as a property of sentences or utterances: I filled the pen is thus ambiguous, as a whole, in that the pen may refer to a writing instrument or to an enclosure for animals. Most accounts distinguish lexical ambiguity, due as in the example to the different meanings of lexical units, from grammatical or syntactic ambiguity. For the latter compare e.g. I like good food and wine, where good could relate syntactically to either food alone or to both food and wine; what is liked would correspondingly be good food and any wine whatever, or good food and wine that is also good.
Many linguists will talk of ambiguity only when it can be seen, as in these examples, as inherent in a language system. It can thus be defined as a property of sentences, independent of the contexts in which they are uttered on specific occasions. Other linguists will distinguish semantic ambiguity, as ambiguity inherent in a language, from pragmatic ambiguity. But what exactly is inherent in a language is as problematic here as elsewhere.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
If there is a better moment to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on jargon, I don’t know when it would be. And thanks (!) to all the medical and health sciences professionals who have familiarized the public on the jargon it uses to discuss viruses and their spread; you’ve made this pandemic, to the greatest extent possible, less abstruse and frightening to this member of the public.
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.
“Welfare State: A term that emerged in the 1940s to describe situations where the state has a major responsibility for welfare provision via social security systems, offering services and benefits to meet people’s basic needs for housing, health, education, and income. More recently, fiscal crises and the influence of libertarianism and other New Right ideas have led many Western democratic governments to make major retrenchments in welfare states.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a reading on sugar, certainly a cornerstone of my own nutrition-free diet, and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
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