“How many monsters does Beowulf kill? Three—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. The Old English poem Beowulf is thought to date from the eighth century.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, foreign languages/linguistics, poetry
This worksheet on the Greek roots hexa– and hex– builds students’ English vocabulary with words based on these two roots, which means six. Needless to say, these two roots are very productive in English, especially producing words used in science and mathematics education, as this document will demonstrate for you and your students.
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.
“Alpha * Epsilon * Eta * Iota * Omicron * Upsilon * Omega
The vowels have always been linked to the seven heavens, most famously in Hebrew, where the seven unwritten vowels created the sound for God—Jehovah. The link between the language of man and the presumed languages of the seven Heavenly spheres has always been speculated upon. However, it is one of the more arcane secrets of the mystics which of the seven planets is linked to which vowel.”
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.
Here is a short lesson on the tasting areas of the tongue, yet another derived from the pages of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s excellent reference book The Order of Things. To work students through this lesson, you’ll need this list as reading and comprehension questions.
Is this knowledge students need to possess? Probably not. These lessons are meant as confidence-building exercises for struggling learners. They deal with knowledge a little off the beaten track–often delivered in more than one symbolic systems, e.g. numbers and words–and give students experience dealing with new materials and ideas in short 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.
“Modal Auxiliaries: Any of the verbs that combine with the main verb to express necessity (must), obligation (should), permission (may), probability (might), possibility (could), ability (can), or tentativeness (would). Mary might wash the car.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Several years ago, an old friend of mine enrolled her middle-school-aged son in a prestigious private school in Connecticut. One afternoon she mentioned in passing that she struggled to help him get through his Latin homework.
Latin homework for a middle-school student?!?
In fact, as I started to think about this, an experience from my own education suddenly made sense. As an undergraduate in the Five College Consortium, I studied the Russian language in one of the colleges in that system. I’d had a year of Spanish in high school and learned a functional version of the language in my travels through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. So I understood gendered nouns and conjugating verbs, though I was no expert at the latter.
Russian, however, was the first heavily inflected language I’d encountered. I really did struggle with oblique cases and all the rules that governed them and the usage rules they themselves governed. My fellow students appeared at ease with Russian. When I gave some thought to my friend’s son studying Latin, it suddenly occurred to me: my fellow Russian students almost certainly gained their understanding of the inflected structure of Russian because they had studied Latin–either in middle or high school.
It so happened that I began using Latin and Greek word roots–with which the English language is relatively rife–for vocabulary building early on in my teaching career. Because many of my students spoke Spanish as their first language, Latin was inevitably a bridge to English for them, and they figured that out quite quickly. They also figured out that as a rule, Latin is offered in in some of the best high schools in the United States, so there was, even in the limited way they were learning it with me, some status and prestige in learning the lingua franca of the Roman empire.
So I figured that if Latin was good enough for students at Phillips Exeter, it was good enough for the inner-city kids under my tutelage. Over the years, I’ve developed a number of materials on Latin and Latinisms (if you search those two terms on this blog, you’ll find a plethora of materials) for use in my classroom.
So when it was the word of the day a few days back at Merriam-Webster, I let if go by at first; but within a few hours, I’d worked up this worksheet on the Latin noun ne plus ultra. It means, as I think the comparatively strong context in its sentences indicate, “the highest point to be attained.” Will our students ever use this noun in conversation? Not very likely. Will they encounter this word in academic or scholarly prose? There is at least a chance of that. Will this worksheet school them in an analytical reading method? My experience is, in using context clues worksheets for years, that it will. Will kids think it cool to possess this piece of arcane knowledge? In my experience some if not most do.
So that’s the reason for this post.
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.
“Parallelism: In rhetoric, a device in which a formula or structural pattern is repeated, as in the Latin sequence veni, vidi, vici and its English translation I came, I saw, I conquered. It occurs in sayings and proverbs (such as Now you see them, now you don’t and Out of sight, out of mind) and in verse and poetic prose (‘My mother groaned, my father wept—/ Into the dangerous world I leapt’ (William Blake, Songs of Experience)).”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Outwardly, which means by the text from the book I’m using to inform these documents, this English usage worksheet on understanding the use of their and their’s addresses the problem, which you may have noticed, of using an apostrophe with the plural possessive pronoun their.
And the short reading for this worksheet does deal with this, but is also emphasizes the fact that none of the possessive pronouns require an apostrophe when used with an s, as in a construction like “The jacket is hers.” I’ve also built in some instruction on antecedent/pronoun agreement, which is one of those stylistic lapses that I can tell you from considerable experience–both as a student and a tutor–that lands students in their college’s writing centers.
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.
“Glory: A general term for the representation of an emanation of light around a sacred personage. Aureole, halo, nimbus, and mandorla are types of glories.”
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
Tagged art/architecture/design
Alright, here is a reading on John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I just want to mention Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown, which tells a similar story; in fact, John Steinbeck may well have helped himself to her notes when writing The Grapes of Wrath.
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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