Category Archives: English Language Arts

This category contains domain-specific material–reading and writing expository prose, interpreting literature etc.–designed to meet the Common Core standards in English language arts while at the same time being flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse and idiosyncratic learners.

On the Road

Here is a reading on Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Kerouac, and particularly this novel, influenced me greatly as a very young man. I probably read On the Road five times, and The Dharma Bums another five.

I recently listened to some recording of William S. Burroughs on the streaming music service I use, and some of Kerouac’s recordings popped up as recommendations. So I listened, and realized that Jack Kerouac (and all the Beats, really) will probably always be in my life.

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.

H.L. Mencken on Morality

“Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.”

H.L. Mencken

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

Cultural Literacy: Conspicuous Consumption

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of conspicuous consumption–an idea which requires attention, I submit, in our benighted age. This is a simple, half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions.

Which includes a reference to Thorstein Veblen, the progenitor of the idea of conspicuous consumption, as well as conspicuous leisure. Veblen is, I think, an important figure in the history of American thought. I’ve posted several quotes from him on this blog, which you can find simply by searching his name in the search bar above.

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.

Prolixity

“Prolixity (noun): Speech or writing that is wordy or lengthy, sometimes tediously; a tendency to long-windedness; verbosity. Adjective: prolix; adverb: prolixly.

Mann writes in a manner inimitable by anyone else; the density and prolixity of his novels would be intolerable in a writer who did not also possess his extraordinary sweep and complexity of mind.’ Robertson Davies, One Half of Robertson Davies.”

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

Word Root Exercise: Fid

Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root fid. It means faith, but as it made its way into English words, it began to connote “truth” as well. You’ll find this root in such commonly used words as confide, fidelity, affidavit, and confidant.

In fact, when you see the United States Marine Corps motto Semper Fi, what you see is an abbreviation of semper fidelis, the Latin for “always faithful.”

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.

Write It Right: Claim for Affirm

“Claim for Affirm. ‘I claim that he is elected.’ To claim is to assert ownership.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

Common Errors in English Usage: God, god (n)

Here, once again informed by Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, is a worksheet on knowing when to capitalize the noun god and when not to. This is a full-page worksheet with a short, informative reading and ten modified cloze exercises.

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.

 Rotten Reviews: 10:30 on a Summer Night

“…has the proud air of saying in her every painful, glottal line, ‘Hup for prose.’”

Hortense Callisher, The Nation

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.    

Supersede (vt)

Because it kept showing up in a social studies course one year I co-taught that subject, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the verb supersede. It means, variously, “to cause to be set aside,” “to force out of use as inferior,”   2 “to take the place or position of,” and “to displace in favor of another.” The clues embedded in the context of the sentences on this worksheet seek mostly to elicit from students the latter two meanings.

Nota bene, please, that this is a transitive verb only, so don’t forget your grammatically required direct object. Something must supersede something else, syntactically speaking.

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.

Summerhill

“Summerhill: A private English boarding school founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill to implement his belief in the value of eliminating all compulsion from children’s lives. The school was initially opened under a different name in Germany in 1921; in 1923, the school moved to a house called Summerhill in Lyme Regis in the south of England, where it enrolled five pupils. Enrollment was never more than a few dozen students, but the school gained an international reputation because of its radical belief in children’s freedom and Neill’s widely read publications. His book Summerhill was a bestseller in the United States in the 1960s and became required reading in hundreds of universities. Neill was a spokesman for the most permissive wing of the progressive education movement, proposing that children should be free to decide how to live, what to learn, and whether they wanted to learn. Neill believed that ‘the function of the child is to live his own life—not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.’”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.