“Periodic Sentence: A sentence that expresses the main idea at the end. With or without their parents’ consent, and whether or not they receive the assignment relocation they requested, they are determined to get married.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
It’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster’s, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective limpid. It means “marked by transparency,” “clear and simple in style,” and “absolutely serene and untroubled.” I’ve used it in the first two senses, but not in the third, in this worksheet.
I understand that this is a word students can probably live without. But what would it look like if we asked them to live with it? This is a word commonly used in poetry. If you read any amount of fiction, or even the blurbs on novels, you’ve almost certainly encountered the locution “limpid prose,” as in “In limpid [and feel free to add ‘crystalline’ here] prose, Hiram Famauthor tells the story of Stanley, who overcomes adversity to triumph in life.” So, if you have advanced English language arts students, or kids struggling with literacy, there are at least of couple of reasons to teach them this word.
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.
Some time ago, I put up a series of independent research assignments I’d developed for students whom I sought to reach with differentiated instruction. This work had everything to do with motivating students by supplying them with high interest material. All of these documents represent my first efforts at developing differentiating instruction for as many students as possible.
However, I held back two from that original release of documents, to wit this independent research assignment on the Bloods as well as this one on the Crips. I can’t remember now why I didn’t throw them up with the rest, and that leads me to believe I had some misguided notions of propriety. So, let me say that one of the things that animated the development of these documents was the 2008 Independent Lens documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America. The film does an excellent job of tracing the history of the Crips and the Bloods, explaining along the way the complex sociological and economic forces that move young men to join gangs.
These assignments are structured to follow closely the Wikipedia articles about the Bloods and about the Crips.
Another thing that moved the creation of these documents was the fact that I was working with some students who were themselves either considering joining either the Crips or the Bloods, were already involved, or had family members involved in either group. In any case, if one lives or works (or both) in a tough neighborhood in one of New York City’s Five Boroughs, there is a good chance one sees members of the Crips or Bloods operating daily in one’s neighborhood.
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.
“Arawak: At the time of Columbus, Arawak speakers inhabited the Greater Antilles and parts of mainland South America. Since languages of the Arawakan family are not found in North or Mesoamerica, it is likely that these people reached the islands from the south. In support of this view, pottery of the Saladoid type is found in a great arc from western Venezuela to the West Indies, and in the northern islands there seems to be a ceramic continuity from Saladoid ware to insular Arawak. Spanish sources describe the island Arawaks as settled farmers with an elaborate religion based on a Zemi cult.”
Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Today begins National Hispanic Heritage Month 2020. For the next four Fridays, for The Weekly Text, Mark’s Text Terminal will observe the month by posting readings and comprehension worksheets related to the history of LatinX people in the United States and Elsewhere.
Here is Cultural Literacy worksheet on colonialism to start off the month. As I said to an interview committee the other day, we live in a pregnant moment that can, with (if you’ll allow me to play out this metaphor ad nauseum) proper prenatal care, yield real social change. If we are going to talk seriously about the injustices visited on non-white people the world over, we need to discuss colonialism seriously. In just about every respect, we are all dealing with the legacy of colonialism–and the time has come–now–to reckon with it. We neglect to do so at our intellectual and moral peril.
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 bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, united states history
OK, folks, there is a lot of traffic on Mark’s Text Terminal today (which is cool!), so I’ll publish one more post before moving on to other things for the afternoon. From Barbara Anne Kipfer’s fascinating book (to me, anyway), The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on the Big Bang sequence along with its reading and comprehension worksheet.
This is a relatively short exercise. However, like just about everything here, these are Microsoft Word documents, so you may manipulate them for your students’ 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.
“Acting out: 1. In psychoanalysis, the enactment rather than the recollection of past events, especially enactments relating to the transference during therapy. It is often impulsive and aggressive, and it is usually uncharacteristic of the patient’s normal behavior. The concept was introduced by Sigmund Freud (1856-1839) in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938/40): the patient ‘acts it [the past event] before us, as it were, rather than reporting it to us’ (Standard Edition, XXIII, pp. 144-207, at p. 176). 2. A defense mechanism in which unconscious emotional conflicts or impulses are dealt with by actions, including parapraxes, rather than thought or contemplation. act out vb.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the verb purport, which is used only transitively. Don’t forget your direct object: what is the subject of your sentence purporting? Arcane knowledge? Expertise in neurosurgery? A conscience?
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.
“Do * Re * Mi * Fa * So * La * Ti
As early as the seventeenth century, European musicians believed that this mnemonic for teaching musical pitch was derived from a Muslim source, though we now think this may itself lead back to a Sanskrit Bronze Age hymn. There is an equally strong tradition that it came from the first letters of each phrase of an eighth-century hymn to Saint John which goes: ‘So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips, O Saint John’—or, rather, in Latin, ‘Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve pollute labii reatum, Sancte Ioannes.’
However, for most of us the whole seven-not mnemonic is intrinsically bound up in Julie Andrews’ teaching the Von Trapp children to sing in the film The Sound of Music. This is one of the most beloved propaganda films of all time, creating an emotional case for excluding the inhabitants of the beautiful mountain scenery from any complicity with the war crimes of Nazi Germany. ‘Doe a deer, a female deer, Ray, a drop of golden sun, etc.’”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Quotes, Reference
Tagged asian-pacific history, music, readings/research
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