Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the “act of god” as a legal concept. Since there is a pretty good chance that your students will purchase insurance some time in their lives, this is a term–and concept–they definitely should know.
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.
“Heart of Darkness: A tale or short novel by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), published in 1902. The story is told by Marlow, who captains a river boat in the Congo and slowly sails upriver into the ‘heart of darkness,’ which is both Africa, the ‘dark continent,’ and the heart of evil. Marlow’s mission is to reach Kurtz, the most successful of the company’s agents. He finds that the charismatic Kurtz, once a man of culture and civilization, has turned himself into an omnipotent ruler by the use of unimaginable cruelty, hinted at by the row of heads impaled beside his compound. Kurtz’s dying words are ‘The horror! The horror!’ The story ends:
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
When he was a child in Poland, Conrad had jabbed his finger at the centre of a map of Africa and declared that one day he would go there. In 1890 he did, when he took command of a river boat in the Congo Free State. The Congo was then the private fiefdom of the Belgian king, Leopold II, and was exploited with the utmost barbarity. Eventually, in 1908, international outrage led the Belgian government to take over the colony.
Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, and the words ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’ follow the title of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Given the current state of journalism (with few exceptions, in fairness), this context clues worksheet on the noun boilerplate seems especially timely. I think it is a word students ought to know by the time they graduate high school.
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.
“Woollcott enjoyed a close relationship with Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and occasionally visited them at the White House. In a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, the purpose of which was to solicit the First Lady’s hospitality for an approaching vacation, he wrote: ‘I would like to come for a week or so. If you haven’t room for me, there are plenty of other places for me to go. I prefer yours.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
If you need a lesson plan on smoking, this one features the least equivocal short reading I’ve ever seen on this filthy, dangerous, and expensive habit. Here’s the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies the reading. Also, if you’d prefer slightly longer versions of the reading and worksheet, you can find them here.
I’ve seen 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.
“Matronym, Matronymic (noun): A name derived from that of one’s mother or a maternal ancestor, usually by addition of a suffix or prefix. Adjective: matronymic, matronymical; adverb: matronymically. Also METRONYMIC”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Here is a reading on World War II on the Homefront and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet if you teach this period of global history.
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.
Mark’s Text Terminal is undergoing a cleaning of its digital storage locker. A couple of weeks ago I posted a trove of materials for teaching Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart; two weeks hence, I’ll post another cache of documents for teaching William Golding’s Hobbesian nightmare, Lord of the Flies.
This week’s Text is an assortment of documents I wrote between ten and twelve years ago for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night. I’ve not used these materials in ten years, so I am moving them off my hard drive and onto Mark’s Text Terminal for storage–and to offer them to others for their use.
I’ll start by uploading this reading on Night (from the Intellectual Devotional series) and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve definitely posted these documents elsewhere on this website; since they are in this unit’s folder, I’ll include them here because it makes sense to do so.
As I write this post, I realize that when I walked into a new job at the High School of Economics & Finance in Lower Manhattan in the fall of 2008 (exciting times at that moment in the Financial District, as the world economy was about to fall off a cliff on account of worthless mortgage securities peddled fraudulently–and you who did this know who you are), I came into a situation in which my co-teacher, whom I’d not met, was out, and I needed to get some materials together right away to keep busy those young people whose education I was charged with delivering. For that reason, my first move was to write this prelude for group work to furnish kids with some context for understanding the Holocaust, and therefore for understanding Night.
Somewhere in this process I wrote this unit plan, which looks incomplete to me. I also wrote these eight lesson plans, only the first three of which, I regret, are complete. Still, the other five are solid templates, and wouldn’t be hard to finish.
Here are eight context clues worksheets, one for each chapter of Night, along with their eight sets of definitions for your class linguist.
Finally, here are the eight comprehension worksheets I used to guide the reading of the book.
Every document attached to this post is in Microsoft Word, so they are at the disposal of you and your students.
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.
“Encoding: Converting information into a different form or representation, especially (in psychology) the process whereby physical information is transformed into a representation suitable for storage in memory and subsequent retrieval.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Here is a lesson plan on panic disorders with the short reading and vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Also, if you prefer, here is a slightly longer version of the reading and worksheet.
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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