Yearly Archives: 2020

Futurism

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Futurism: Chiefly an Italian literary and artistic movement, futurism stressed the dynamism of motion and appealed to young Italian artists to reject the art of the academies and museums. The first ‘Manifesto of Future Painters,‘ proclaimed in 1910 in Turin, was signed by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and L. Russolo. Attempting to represent time and motion, these painters and sculptors showed multiples of moving parts in many positions simultaneously. While futurism was not directly associated with fascism until after World War I, evidence of right-wing political ideas and the glorification of war can be found in Boccioni’s States of Mind of 1910-1911.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Brooklyn Bridge

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

It was the biggest civil engineering project in the history of the world when it was built, so it has global significance. But whenever I post something like this reading on the Brooklyn Bridge and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet, I do so with my erstwhile New York City colleagues in mind. This is as much about the Roebling family, father and son, who designed and built the bridge–did you know that the day-to-day superintendency of the project fell to Emily Warren Roebling, the daughter-in-law of John Roebling, who began construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? There’s some women’s history to be extracted from this material for the right learner.

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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Term of Art: Usage

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Usage: The way in which the elements of language are customarily used to produce meaning, including accent, pronunciation, words, and idioms. The term occurs neutrally in formal usage, disputed usage, and local usage, and it has strong judgmental and prescriptive connotations in bad usage, correct usage, usage and abusage, and usage controversies.”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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The Weekly Text, May 15, 2020: A Lesson Plan on the Simple Present Tense of Verbs

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

OK, I think this lesson plan on using the simple present tense of verbs speaks for itself and therefore doesn’t require much comment.

I open this lesson with this worksheet on the homophones who’s and whose. These two words (well, a contraction and a word) are quite easily confused, so the explanation for their use is extensive. Students will walk away, after completing this, with a page from a grammar and usage manual. In the event the lesson goes into a second day, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the term and concept expletive.

This scaffolded worksheet is the centerpiece of this unit for students. You might need this word bank to support completion of the worksheet. Finally, here is the teachers’ copy of the worksheet to make getting through the lesson a little easier for you.

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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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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Kubla Khan

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

“”Kubla Khan: A famously unfinished, opium-induced poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who had claimed to have written down as much as he could of what he had just been dreaming before being interrupted by the arrival of ‘a person on business from Porlock.’ Composed while Coleridge was living in Somerset in 1797-8, the poem was first published in Christabel and Other Poems (1816). It bears little relation to the historical Kublai Khan (1215-94), the grandson of Genghis Khan. Kublai led the Mongol conquest of China and made himself the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty in 1279. He was made famous in Europe by Marco Polo, who spent 20 years at Kublai’s court.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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A Sample Outline and Structured Outlining Blanks

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

For ten years, I worked in a school in Lower Manhattan that assigned synthetic research papers to students who lacked basic writing skills. And that issue was one of many at that school where writing assignments were concerned. Over the years, I fabricated a lot of learning supports on the fly, including this sample outline and these structured outlining blanks.

At one point, in the social studies classes I co-taught, students were required to submit outlines in the run-up to writing their actual paper. I suspect I prepared the documents in this post to support students in drafting their outlines. At least that’s what these supports look like to me. Of course, you can use them however you see fit. As always, these documents are in Microsoft Word, so they can be manipulated for your students and circumstances.

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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Term of Art: Imperative

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Imperative: Indicating explicit request, supplication, prohibition, warning, command, etc., e.g., ‘Stop!’ ‘Do let’s be serious.’”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Enlighten (vt), Enlightenment (n)

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

When I co-taught global studies classes in New York City, the fact that the deeper conceptual processes of history were ignored in favor of a pedagogy of discrete, decontextualized facts greatly troubled me. This was a particular problem–and I am confident it remains so, particularly in the classroom in which I served during the final two years of my tenure in New York–in teaching the French Revolution and its animating intellectual ideology, the Enlightenment. Students in the classroom I shared could walk away from the unit on this period with absolutely no sense of the enormity of its epochal influence. Therefore, they could not understand that in many respects, the world, especially the Western world, continues to argue over and contest the legacy of the Enlightenment.

In an attempt to convey the significance of the Enlightenment in my own classroom, I started with these two context clues worksheets on the verb enlighten and the noun enlightenment. The verb, incidentally, is only used 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.

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Book of Answers: Dylan Thomas

Posted on May 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

“How did poet Dylan Thomas die? He died at age thirty-nine in New York City after drinking eighteen straight whiskeys in a bar and lapsing into a coma.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Morphine

Posted on May 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

When I left Vermont in August of 1996 to seek my fortune as a doctoral candidate in history, I intended to return posthaste–if not to Vermont, than as near to the state as possible. Last August (of 2019) I finally made it back here to work in a public school system. I’d visited every summer for many years, but as I learned slowly and the hard way (like the way I learn everything in my life, alas), living in a place is quite a bit different than visiting it.

Of course I was aware of the opioid crisis in the state–it has been national news–and a national problem, after all–but I hadn’t had a chance to see it up close.

Now I have, and I can tell you that in the 23 years I was away, opioids cut a wide swath through the social and economic fabric of this fine state. So, for any young person who thinks that trying opioids won’t necessarily lead to personal disaster, here is a reading on morphine along with 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.

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