“…he breeds nothing but confusion. His plays and novels present a vision of life that is shockingly unchristian. They make the life and death of our Lord just one more of the legends man has used to delude himself…Beckett is postulating this as our inescapable condition of life. It may be for him. Not for this reader.”
R.H. Glauber, Christian Century
Excerpted from: Barnard, 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
For all the years I taught social studies classes, I used this Cultural Literacy worksheet on ideology, which is one of those overarching concepts that students can use to categorize capitalism, communism, or socialism–or any of the other ideologies we want students to recognize and understand. This is really a word students should know, and know how to use conceptually. This is one of the most basic terms of art in social studies–any social studies class.
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.
“Noun: A word that names a person, place or thing or idea. Most nouns have a plural form and a possessive form. Carol; the park; the cup; democracy.”
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
Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root aqua. Do I need to tell you it means water? It is an extremely productive root in English as well as the all the Romance languages.
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.
“cultural literacy: Knowledge of the culture in which one lives–not only its vocabulary and idioms but also references to specific events, individuals, places, literature, myths, folk tales, advertising, and other ‘insider’ information that would be familiar to those who have lived in the culture but that would be unknown to those who have not lived in the culture. It is the unstated, taken-for-granted knowledge necessary for reading comprehension and effective schooling within a culture. The concept of cultural literacy was popularized by E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his best-selling book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Critics claimed that it was elitist for anyone to attempt to define what everyone should know, but Hirsch contended that the teaching of cultural literacy was egalitarian because it had the result of breaking down social barriers and disseminating elite knowledge to everyone. Further, describing what constitutes cultural literacy within a given culture is an empirical, descriptive procedure, not a prescriptive one. The cultural literacy needed in Brazil or France of Thailand, for example, would be distinctive to those who live in that country. See also Core Knowledge (CK) program.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
From Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on the arrival and growth of teeth. You’ll need the reading with comprehension questions to complete this short reading and writing exercise, which, like all 50 of these lessons that I will eventually post here, is intended to help struggling learners experience mastery and therefore build self-confidence and competence in school.
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.
“Soft Sculpture: Sculpture made of pliable and sometimes impermanent materials, such as latex, vinyl, feathers, rope and string, hair, etc. Seen since the early 1960s, soft sculpture defies the tradition of hard and permanent material as the only suitable medium for sculpture. Artists from various movements, including Arte Povera, Pop Art, and Surrealism, have experimented with soft sculpture.”
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
For the bulk of my teaching career thus far, I worked at a economics-and-finance-themed high school in Lower Manhattan. Students, naturally, sat for a required course in entrepreneurship. One of the expectations of that class was that students would come up with an idea for a business, then draft a business plan. The teachers for this course were excellent. One student won a national competition and was honored with a visit to President Obama in the Oval Office.
Many of the students I served struggled with beginning their work for this course. I wrote up this reading on the Slinky, a favorite childhood toy of people of a certain age, and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I wanted students to understand that sometimes inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs stumble into ideas, and that students could pretty easily do the same–but they should not miss the opportunities of this kind of stumbling presents–often unclearly.
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.
“homonymic clash: A clash between two homonyms, either of which could be used in similar contexts. A classic example is a posited clash in parts of southwest France between a word gat ‘cat’ derived from Latin cattus, and an identical form gat ‘cock,’ predicted by regular processes of sound change from Latin gallus. In fact, the second was replaced by other forms that changed or extended their meaning: faisan, historically ‘pheasant,’ vicaire ‘curate,’ and others. The explanation, proposed by Gillieron, is that these replacements avoided the misunderstandings that the clash would often have caused.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Since I can’t imagine any reason I need to stress the importance of an understanding of and an ability to use these words, now more than ever, I’ll post this context clues worksheet on the noun epidemic and this one on the noun pandemic without editorial comment.
However, a note on usage on epidemic and pandemic seems de rigueur. Differentiating the use of these two nouns is as easy as understanding their Greek roots: epi means on, upon, outside, over, among, at, after, to, and can best be understood, as some of those prepositions connote, as local; pan (along with panto) simply means all, and can best be understood, in our current circumstances, as meaning everywhere, as all connotes.
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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