“The Benedictines follow a rule divided into seventy-three chapters of advice covering every detail of monastic order and the pursuit of a spiritual life. However, there remains an overriding stipulation that the rules exist to help and are not an end in themselves.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Jesuits is a full-page document, so it would serve well as an independent practice–i.e. homework–assignment if you think kids should know about this order.
It might be worth keeping in mind the adjective jesuitical, meaning “practicing casuistry or equivocation; using subtle or oversubtle reasoning; crafty; sly; intriguing.” This turns up in academic and scholarly prose, and might help students understand why the Jesuits animated the Counter-Reformation and are today regarded, in some circles and to some degree, with suspicion.
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.
“Kore: (pl., korai) In archaic Greek art, statue of a standing, draped maiden; counterpart to the male Kouros.
Kouros: (pl., kouroi) A type of statue of a standing young man occurring in archaic Greek art. Kouroi are frontally disposed, bilaterally symmetrical, and the left foot is usually advanced.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
This reading on human ovaries and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are the last two things, at least for the moment, that I have to post on the human reproductive system. Anyway, health teachers take note if you need something like this.
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.
“adverb: A word of a class traditionally defined as a modifying a verb, e.g. badly in He wrote it badly, seen as a modifier of wrote.
One of the parts of speech established in antiquity. In the grammar of English, the words called adverbs are in practice those whose primary roles is a s modifier of something other than a noun. Thus an adverb such as utterly modifies a verb or verb phrase in They destroyed it utterly, and an adjective in This is utterly crazy. Very modifies an adjective, as in a very big house, or an adverb, as in very badly. Then has its primary role in e.g. I did it then, though it can also modify a noun, e.g. in her then husband. The case for lumping such words together is that many have been formed with the suffix -ly, and their roles often overlap.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Moving right along, after a very unpleasant phone conversation with a charter school recruiter, here is a lesson plan on human bodily systems, another informed from text culled from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s fascinating book The Order of Things.
Here’s the list as a reading and comprehension questions that are the work of this lesson.
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.
“Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works…in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.”
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
If I were to guess, I would say that the present participle of to lighten, lightening, is not much used in everyday discourse. That said, I heard a report earlier this summer on NPR about how the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States has inspired a discussion about colorism and skin lightening potions in India, where colorism apparently runs rampant. Also, if you ever teach Julia Alvarez’s superb novel In the Time of the Butterflies, it makes at least one specific reference to relatively well-known fact that the dictator of the Dominican Republic from from 1930 to 1961, Rafael Trujillo, used skin-lightening cream and was, unsurprisingly, a virulent racist who slaughtered thousands of Haitians in the infamous Parsley Massacre. In fact, there is even a Wikipedia page on Colorism in the Caribbean if you are interested.
Such are the wages, I’m afraid, of the valorization and privileging of white skin.
So, this set of five worksheets on the homophones lightening and lightning might be more of an exercise in ensuring students understand what the lightning is as a meteorological and electrical phenomenon and how properly to spell the word. Still, there is room in these worksheets for fooling around with the verb to lighten, used both intransitively and transitively.
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.
“Linking Verb: A verb that joins the subject of a sentence to its complement. Professor Chapman is a philosophy teacher. They were ecstatic.”
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
As this pandemic drags on, and I wonder what will happen with our public schools, my mind, like many I suppose, wanders. One way I try to snap it into focus is by writing a context clues worksheet every day, or nearly every day. I let Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day guide my choices. I pass only on words that are far outside routine educated discourse (yesterday was cognizable, an adjective which means “capable of being judicially heard and determined”–so I let it go by).
Inevitably, I suppose, some words end up here that might not be immediately recognizable as routine vocabulary words, One might say that about this context clues worksheet on the noun braggadocio. Maybe, but it’s a word that has a stout Middle English verb behind it–brag–and is the creation of Edmund Spenser, one of the great English poets.
In any case, where verbal acuity is concerned, we ought to aim high for our students. Braggadocio doesn’t necessarily arise in polite conversation, but it shows up in academic prose and fiction often enough to be worth knowing.
Finally, though, it is a word for our time–today, August 18, 2020. There is a disturbing amount of braggadocio in our midst.
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.
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