Here is a worksheet on the Latin root retro. It means back, backward, and behind–but you probably already figured that out. You probably also already understand that this is a very productive root in English, giving us words like retroactive and retrofit.
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.
OK, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Portia’s “Quality of Mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice. I did find it interesting, when I went to check my recall of the character in the play who gave the speech (I’ve only seen the play once), and searched for “who gives the quality of mercy speech in the merchant of venice,” what I got as far as “who gives” and Google auto-filled with “a crap.”
Such cynical times we live in!
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.
“Yippie: Close contemporary of the hippy, but more actively involved in political action, particularly in protests against American involvement in Vietnam and the methods of US police. The term was coined by one of the movement’s leaders, Jerry Reuben [sic], and is derived from the initials of the Youth International Party and hippy. The Yippie movement faded in the early 1970s, possible because of the cessation of US involvement in Vietnam. ”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged readings/research, term of art, united states history
As I near the end of 2019, I’m developing new materials (e.g. look here, in 2020, for new social studies materials based in Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s The Writing Revolution method of instructional design, as well as a new type of vocabulary-building worksheet derived from the Common Core Standard on resolving issues in English usage) while cleaning out some aging folders in my toolbox for this blog.
A couple of days ago I discovered this lesson plan on argumentation that I intended as an assessment of students’ ability to assess arguments and use that assessment either to strengthen the argument or to develop a counterargument. I intended to begin this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun treatise. Finally, here is the worksheet at the center of this unit.
If you have used other of the lessons on argumentation I’ve posted over time, then you have some prior knowledge of this unit. I wrote the unit, and I think this lesson has a curiously unfinished quality about it. At some point, I will have an opportunity to review and bring great cohesion to the unit as a whole and to this lesson in particular. So, this material may show up here again in a more-developed form.
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.
“A priori: From the previous: proceeding form cause to effect, or reasoning form a premise or assumption to its logical conclusion; deductive, or according to rational consequences, rather than from the facts of experience; preliminary of prior to examination; accepted without question or examination; arbitrary or presumptive (contrasted with a posteriori). Adj. aprioristic; adv. a priori, aprioristically; n. a priori, apriorist.
‘Sometimes she went even further by insisting he had had a crisis when he thought he had merely a bad cabdriver, but when he accused of her of a priori reasoning, she simply reminded him that he was a classic wunderkind and that all wunderkinder tend to deny they have mild-life crises.’ Nora Ephron, Scribble, Scribble”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Last but not least this morning, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb impinge, which is apparently only used intransitively.
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.
“In 1955 Laurence Wylie, Harvard’s esteemed professor of French civilization, sent the manuscript of a sensitive chronicle of French country life, A Village in the Vaucluse, to Knopf. Back it came with a letter of rejection which said, ‘It is so far from being a book for the general reader that nothing can be done about it.’ Wylie did nothing ‘about’ it–he sent it on to the Harvard University Press, which published it in the next year. It became and has remained an extremely popular book for the general reader and the scholar alike.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“The next thing that the earliest people discovered was how to make pots out of clay, which they soon learned to decorate with patterns and fire in ovens, although by this time, in the late Stone Age, they had stopped painting pictures of animals. In the end, perhaps six thousand years ago (that is, 4000 BC), they found a new and more convenient way of making tools: they discovered metals. Not all of them of once, of course. It began with some green stones which turn into copper when melted in a fire. Copper has a nice shine, and you can use it to make arrowheads and axes, but it is soft and gets blunt more quickly than stone. But once again, people found an answer. They discovered that if you add just a little of another, very rare metal, it makes the copper stronger. That metal is tin, and a mixture of tin and copper is called bronze. The age in which people made themselves helmets and swords, axes and cauldrons, and bracelets and necklaces out of bronze is, naturally, known as the Bronze Age.”
Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
This lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Wedding Day” is the finale of the first of three units I wrote to accompany this material; believe it or not, I have 48 more of these lessons to post.
To teach this lesson, I generally start, after the meshugaas of a class change, with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the American idiom “Get Someone’s Goat.” You’ll need this PDF of the illustration and narrative of the case of the “Wedding Day” to guide students through it. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key that solves the case.
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.
Here are five worksheets on the homophones cue and queue. Both are used as nouns and verbs, and as verbs they can be used both intransitively and transitively. These words are in common enough use in English that I think these words ought to be able to find a place in most English classrooms, particularly for English language learners.
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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