Monthly Archives: July 2023

Montesquieu on Authors

Posted on July 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

“A fool who, not content with having bored those who lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.”

Baron de Montesquieu

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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Common English Verbs Followed by an Infinitive: Deserve

Posted on July 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

Last and quite possibly least this morning, here is a worksheet on the verb deserve when used with an infinitive. Users of Mark’s Text Terminal deserve to find better material than this on the site.

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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The Doubter’s Companion: Participation

Posted on July 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Participation: Democracy is built and maintained through individual participation, yet society is structured to discourage it.

And ours is the most structured of civilizations. Forty-hour work weeks. Work breaks calculated to the minute. Weekends measured for recuperation. Various specific leaves for sickness and giving birth. Set holiday periods. Official days of celebration or mourning. When it’s all added up and the time to eat, copulate, sleep, and see families is included, twenty-four hours have been accounted for.

The only built-in space of time for individual participation is a fixed period for voting, which probably averages out to an hour a year. The only time society formally organizes extended participation is over matters of violence. (Military service or when a judge orders convicted criminals to do community service.)

Why is the function which makes democracy viable treated as if it were expendable? Or rather, why is it excluded by being reduced to a minor activity requiring the sacrifice of time formally allotted to other things?

Nothing prevents up from revising the schedule to build in four or five hours a week for public participation. Our failure to do something like this is a statement either about the state of the democratic ethic or about the real nature of power in our society.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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Cultural Literacy: Disenfranchisement

Posted on July 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

On an already, at 5:10 a.m., hot and muggy morning in northeastern Massachusetts, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on disenfranchisement. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one sentence–to wit, “Removal of the franchise, or right to vote”–and one comprehension question. A concise explanation of a relatively simple concept with big consequences for a democracy like ours in the United States.

And given what has happened in some of our state legislatures in the past several years, something that it is important, indeed vitally important, I would argue, that our students understand.

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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Term of Art: Sight Word Approach

Posted on July 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

“sight word approach: A method of teaching reading and spelling in which small numbers of instantly recognizable sight words are presented while the child masters them.

While many early readers naturally learn to read words through frequent exposure to them in stories, sight words often should be explicitly taught to individuals with a learning disability. Sight words can be hard to learn for these children because they frequently have trouble following common spelling and pronunciation patterns, such as are, were, been, and some, and require a strong visual memory for words.

To avoid such confusions when using the sight-word approach to teach reading and spelling, words should be carefully selected initially to follow consistent spelling patterns.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

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The Weekly Text, 7 July 2023: A Pair of Context Clues Worksheets on the Nouns Deficit and Surplus

Posted on July 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

OK, this week’s Text, at the end of the the first full week of summer vacation, is a pair of context clues on the nouns deficit and surplus. For the purposes of these worksheets, deficit means “an excess of expenditure over revenue”  and “a loss in business operations”; surplus means “the amount that remains when use or need is satisfied” and “an excess of receipts over disbursements.” If you think it would be helpful, I prepared this lexicon on deficit and surplus for classroom use.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I served for ten years in an economics-and-finance-themed high school in Lower Manhattan. Therefore, the definitional range of these worksheets is narrow when viewed in the broader context of the meanings of these words. The lexicon is edited for simplicity (mostly by removing the etymology and some of the diacritical marks) but contains full definitions of both words. In any event, these documents are, like almost everything you’ll find on Mark’s Text Terminal, formatted in Microsoft Word. In other words, you can edit them for your classroom’s needs.

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, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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