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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Pheasant (n), Peasant (n)

Posted on April 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is an English usage worksheet on the nouns pheasant and peasant. I’m not sure if the former word is essential to the high school lexicon, but the latter certainly is. Any study of history will necessitate the use of the word peasant.

But these worksheets–there will eventually be a hundred or more of them on Mark’s Text Terminal–is primarily usage, not vocabulary building, though I think vocabulary building could be a corollary benefit. I wrote these to meet the Common Core standard (L.11-12.1b), to wit, “Resolve issues of complex or contested usage, consulting references, (e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Garner’s Modern American Usage) as needed.” I hope they are useful in that way.

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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Modernism

Posted on April 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Modernism: The philosophy of modern art. Nineteenth-century industrialization resulted in societal changes which radically altered institutions of patronage for artists. With the rise of museums and an expanding commercial art market, artists were freer to experiment with modes of expression. Art for Art’s Sake was the common credo as this avant-garde determined their own content, form, and medium. Movements and styles abounded, including: Cubism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. Modernist art criticism was centered on significant form. Painting (especially Abstract Expressionism) was thought to progress toward purity in its refinement of color and flatness. The deconstructive critique of such formalist emphasis exposed the ‘impurity’ of meaning, that is, the possibility of multiple interpretations and a relativization of value judgements. This decentering expanded the theoretical and artistic modes of basic importance to Postmodernism. See International Style.”

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

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A Concluding Assessment Lesson on Adverbs

Posted on April 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you search “lesson plan on adverbs” on this blog, you will find that there are a total of seven lesson plans dealing with this part of speech; here is the concluding assessment for the unit those seven lessons comprise.

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Because this lesson all but inevitably runs into a second day, here is another Cultural Literacy worksheet, this one on the idiom “six of one, a half dozen of the other.” Finally, here is the structured worksheet, which closely follows the sequence of the aforementioned seven lessons, that is the primary work of this lesson and the concluding assessment of this seven-lesson unit.

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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The Algonquin Wits: Herman J. Mankiewicz on Table Conversation

Posted on April 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Mankiewicz once explained to a round table audience: ‘You know it’s hard to hear what a bearded man is saying. He can’t speak above a whisker.’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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William Randolph Hearst

Posted on April 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on William Randolph Hearst along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If you have Netflix, the service’s recently released film Mank deals with William Randolph Hearst (played in the film with blithe and subtle villainy by the great Charles Dance), inasmuch as the subject of the film, the legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (whose friends called him “Mank” at his insistence, hence the film’s title), wrote Citizen Kane about Hearst. The film delves into one of the most hotly contested issues in film history: Who wrote Citizen Kane? Or, if Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote it, whose voice, political sensibilities, and artistic vision predominates? A great deal of ink has been spilled over this issue, including the storied book-length essay Raising Kane by the late, eminent film critic Pauline Kael, which appeared in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker early in 1971.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that this is relatively timely material, especially if you have a precocious cinephile (I knew quite a few back in the day) on your hands.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful to 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: Agreement

Posted on April 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Agreement: Syntactic relation between words and phrases which are compatible, in a given construction, by virtue of inflections carried by at least one of them. E.g. these and carrots are compatible in the construction of these carrots, because both are inflected as a plural. Likewise, in the Italian sentence Maria e Luisa sono arrivate ‘Mary and Louise have arrived,’ sono (lit. ‘be-3pl’) agrees in respect of plural number with arrivate (‘arrived-FEM.PL’) and both, or sono arrivate as a whole, agree with a subject, Maria e Luisa, which refers to more than one woman.

Also called concord. Distinctions are drawn between grammatical agreement and notional agreement; also between agreement and some similar relations of compatibility, such as the government of cases by prepositions. But this last distinction is often at best imprecise.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Itinerant (adj)

Posted on April 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

It must have popped up as a Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster at some point, so here is a context clues on the adjective itinerant.

This is, I think, probably a word educated people should know and be able to use. For high school students, it will connect well with the noun itinerary, which probably turns up in a variety of places like material about the Lewis and Clark expedition or a popular music group’s tour of the United States or, indeed, the world. Before automated digital mapping, I’ll hazard a guess that itinerary turned up in common usage more than it does now. Has itinerant suffered the same fate (if indeed itinerary has)? That’s an interesting question that could yield interesting answers to an interested student.

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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Nathan M. Pusey on Staying Abreast of Things

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

“We live in a time of such rapid change and growth of knowledge that only who is in a fundamental sense a scholar—that is, a person who continues to learn and inquire—can hope to keep pace, let alone play the role of guide.”

Nathan M. Pusey, The Age of the Scholar (1963)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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The Weekly Text, April 16, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Largest Seas from The Order of Things

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a lesson plan on the largest seas along with its accompanying combined reading and comprehension worksheet.

Like the other lessons under the rubric of The Order of Things by Barbara Ann Kipfer, this is a short lesson with plenty of room (and formatted in Microsoft Word for just that purpose) for expansion and adaptation. There’s an excursus on this material, arranged as a unit of 50 lessons (for now–it will inevitably expand when at last I return to classroom teaching) on the “About Posts & Texts” page on this site. I conceived and engineered these materials to use with students with relatively low levels of literacy and/or numeracy; it gives such students some structured materials to practice operating with two symbolic systems at the same time, namely words and numbers.

Anyway, over time, I’d like to continue building this unit, and then develop from it scaffolded, topic-specific subunits that respond to student interest, work to build literacy and numeracy, and help students feel confident in their ability to deal with what might once have seemed like insurmountably complicated material to them. What do you think?

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, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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3 Emblems Within a Crown

Posted on April 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Power * Legitimacy * Victory

The Norman conqueror William I wore his crown three times each year: at Winchester at Easter, Westminster at Whitsuntide and at midwinter at Gloucester. But, as Shakespeare tells us, ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.’ For the crown stands for the three emblems of power, legitimacy, and victory, but also for an ordained blood sacrifice as epitomized by the crown of thorns.

As an icon of power the crown has numerous lines of descent: the double crowns worn by the pharaohs of Egypt, the laurel wreaths of victory awarded to Greek heroes (and turned into the finest gold for Greek kings), the jewel-studded diadem worn on the brow by Persian and Hellenistic monarchs. The truest line of descent for the Western crown seems to have been the Greek radiant crown—Lucian’s ‘chaplet with sunbeams’—which was placed on statues of the sun god and which Constantine the Great co-opted in his fusing of the cult of the unconquered sun to the newly formed symbolism of a Christian emperor.”

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.

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