“Verbal: A verb form that functions in a sentence as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb rather than as a principal verb. Thinking can be fun. An embroidered handkerchief. (See also gerund, infinitive, and participle.)”
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
It’s the kind of adjective the late, great Joseph Mitchell called a “tinsel word,” and I am hard pressed to disagree. Nevertheless, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective vivacious. I wrote this, I think, to help native Spanish speakers make the connection between the Spanish verb vivir, “to live” and the use of the Latin roots at its base–viv, vivi, vit, “life, living, live.”
In that role, this document might work well with this worksheet on the Latin word roots viv, vivi, and vit.
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.
“Bilateral agreement: Agreement to which there are two parties as opposed to a multilateral agreement involving several parties.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art, united states history
Because it was one of those advances in the technology of human, and because it had enormous economic, political, and social consequences, this reading on the cotton gin and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are key parts of any “social studies” curriculum and integral to the United States history curriculum. This reading really serves as a beginning to the bigger historical and conceptual questions about technology, continuity, and change. Those conceptual questions about continuity and change, in my experience, turn up on high-stakes tests.
For starters, where those questions of change and continuity are concerned, any study of the cotton gin must reckon with its role in expanding slavery in the United States.
Incidentally, students tend not to see a device like the cotton gin as “technology.” That young people who came of age with Cold War computing power in their pockets would labor under this misconception is unsurprising. I use every opportunity that presents itself to remind students that technology is “a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge.” Under that definition (from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition), technical processes are a relative area of endeavor, and context dependent. For the very earliest humans, even a sharpened stone used as a knife is a technology used for accomplishing a task.
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.
Bar for Bend. ‘Bar sinister.’ There is no such thing in heraldry as a bar sinister.
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective erudite. This is the state in which I would prefer to leave my students.
And on the day after election day, 2020? I’ll belabor the obvious and argue that overall in the United States, we could use some more erudition.
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.
“When did ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘ first appear? The anti-Semitic forgery first appeared in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903. It purported to document the conspiracy of Judaism to take over the world. It may have been written by Czar Nicholas II’s secret police.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Whatever you may think of his politics, there is little question that William Jennings Bryan was either a great orator or a skilled demagogue (or both). Whichever designation you prefer, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the “Cross of Gold” speech he delivered at the 1896 Democratic National Convention supplies students of United States history with a short introduction to one of the most memorable political speeches in this nation’s history.
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.
“Brains Trust: Nickname given to a group of economists and businessmen in the USA who acted as advisers to Pres. Roosevelt (1882-1945) in formulating the New Deal policy. The term has since been widely used to denote bodies of experts believed to have influence on government policy. In the UK the term ‘brains trust’ was extended to include groups of experts assembled to answer questions put to them by the public, especially the BBC’s wartime panel of experts who broadcast on the wireless.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
It’s hard to imagine, especially for younger people (I’m old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”), that the United States once was a country that cared about the fate of its poorest citizens and sought to create something substantial and powerful enough to help them transcend their circumstances.
This reading on Upton Sinclair and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet will go some distance toward helping students understand the nature and value of civic engagement to aid the most vulnerable citizens of our nation. If you’re interested in going further than this worksheet in an inquiry into Mr. Sinclair’s biography and activism, the fifth and final paragraph of the short reading in this post notes his near victory in the 1934 gubernatorial race in California. What it doesn’t mention is that Upton Sinclair’s candidacy in that race was part of his “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) campaign, which was an amplification of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. There is a lot to understand here–particularly why such movement continue to fail when there are so many more poor people than rich in this nation.
Now go vote!
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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