Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on conquistadores in Mark’s Text Terminal’s ongoing observation of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs annually between September 15 and October 15.
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.
“Ten Days that Shook the World: A book (1919) by the US journalist John Reed (1887-1920), an eyewitness account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Reed, who came from a wealthy background, was one of the leading radical figures in the USA, became a friend of Lenin and helped to found the US Communist Party. Accused of treason in the USA, he fled to Soviet Russia, where he died of typhus. After his death the US Communist Party established many ‘John Reed’ clubs for writers and artists in US cities. His life is the subject of the film Reds (1981), directed by and starring Warren Beatty.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Moving right along this morning, as a Mozart piano concerto (Malcolm Bilson at the fortepiano–exquisite) plays in the background, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun aficionado.
In context? “The proprietor of Mark’s Text Terminal is an aficionado of Mozart’s piano concerti.”
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.
“…too long, too static, too repetitious, too ponderous and a long list of other negative ‘toos’…he has no novelistic sense whatever; he just tells you every blessed thing the characters said and did and thought in the the order in which it occurred…most of the time it is solidly, monumentally boring.”
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
Ok, before I leave for a faculty meeting, here is a reading on Joe Namath and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. Once students understand who Namath is and was, these documents tend to self-transmute into high-interest materials.
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.
“Badinage (noun): Lighthearted, teasing talk; playful conversation; banter.
‘The movie is blatantly cartoonish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t saying anything. I think we’re meant to believe that its profane badinage and even its most exaggerated racial animosity have a deep, gritty truth in them, and that because it’s a comedy it can go deeper than “serious” movies.’” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here, at the end of an unbelievably dismal, pointless day of work, is a set of five homophone worksheets on the noun canvas and the verb–used both intransitively and transitively–canvass.
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.
“cognate: (Languages, words, etc.) that have developed from a common ancestor. E.g. English beam is cognate with German; likewise English beam is cognate with German Baum ‘tree.’”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
I’m not sure it it’s something high-schoolers need to know, though I’ll confess that I would have liked to have known about the concept of the zero-sum game as an adolescent. There is a Cultural Literacy worksheet under that hyperlink on the zero-sum game.
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.
“blitzkrieg (Germ., lightning war). Penetration in depth by armoured columns, usually with preceding aerial bombardment to reduce enemy resistance; a technique perfected by Gen. Guderian in France in 1940. In Britain the term was abbreviated to ‘blitz’ and used to describe the massive air attacks on London and other cities between September 1940 and May 1941.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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