“Battle of Agincourt: (1415) A battle in northern France. The English army defeated the more numerous, better armed French. It is the setting for Shakespeare’s Henry V and Michael Drayton’s ‘The Battle of Agincourt‘ (c1605).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
One of the most consistently downloaded items since I published it in 2021 is this set of documents on Stephanie Ericsson’s essay “The Way We Lie.” Last year, I developed this learning support to abet deeper thinking (I hope) and further written work on this essay.
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.
“Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and police.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Once again, from the annals of Jason Zanitsch’s senior English Language Arts class, which afforded me the professional pleasure of co-teaching with Jason for several years, here is a a learning support in the form of a series questions to drive thinking and writing about human socialization processes.
I don’t know how useful this will be to users of this blog, but this again was Jason’s successful attempt to elicit deep thinking and cogent writing from our students. Rather than toss this, I post it here to add to what still seems like an amount of data storage I will never use.
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.
“Dozens (Playing the): In the culture of American blacks, a contest of mutual insults concerning relatives, especially the opponents mothers, sometimes in rhymed couplets and often graphically sexual or scatological (the ‘dirty dozens’). See also SIGNIFYING.
‘His broad cultural approach to prizefighting is also illuminating. A discussion, for example, of the style of black boxers invokes jazz, “bad n****r” folk figures and form of insult known as “the dozens.” Diane McWhorter, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
I don’t know why, but for some reason, when I published this blog post several years ago, with a trove of materials I developed to accompany a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus, I didn’t include this lexicon of Igbo words, names, and phrases. So here it is now.
This is where I usually ask for feedback on a document, especially for alerts on typos. But since I know nothing of Igbo orthography, I must ask you to trust, as I do, the unnamed author or authors of this document.
“reverbalization: A strategy in which and individual restates a message out loud to enhance memorization and ensure understanding. Similar to paraphrasing, where individuals restate a message using their own words (usually in writing); in reverbalizing, the individual repeats information out loud to promote long-term memory.
For individuals with short-term memory or auditory processing difficulties, reverbalizing information can enhance learning through rehearsal.
Diagnostically, reverbalizing can be an effective way for instructors to monitor whether students have accurately received information.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Continuing with a mishmash of documents I developed to support students, here are, again from the senior English Language Arts class I co-taught with Jason Zanitsch, some documents to support student work for a reading of Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate. Jason’s goals for this unit were twofold and well focused: to introduce students to the genre of magical realism, and to use the story to induce students to write in a lively way about food–with a goal, of course, to arouse their thinking about lively descriptive writing in general. Over the years, I enjoyed watching Jason elicit some excellent prose from students using this unit.
So, here is a graphic organizer to track chapters, a brainstorming worksheet (consisting of ten modified cloze exercises) for using lively words to describe food with a lexicon of food-related words attached. Finally, here is the lexicon of lively words to describe food as a freestanding document.
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.
“Bay Psalm Book: (1640) A metrical translation of the Biblical psalms by Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, John Eliot, and twenty-seven other ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The book—the first bound book printed in the English colonies—was published by Stephen Day in Cambridge in and edition of seventeen hundred copies. Its full title is The Whole Booke of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Metre.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Moving on through my differentiated and supported materials folder, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom dog eat dog. I suspect you can find this document, in a simpler version, elsewhere on this blog. I developed this version of this worksheet to accompany a reading of the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again” which puts this idiom to work.
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.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.