Finishing up on this unutterably beautiful morning in Southwestern Vermont, here is a reading on the classic film The Wizard of Oz along with its accompanying worksheet for building vocabulary and comprehension.
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.
What year was Stephen Crane born? The author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895) was born in 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War. He died in 1900.
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Moving right along on this Friday morning, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb acquaint, which is only used transitively.
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.
Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the legal concept of double jeopardy. Given that this is an important Constitutional principle in the United States, I think this document is probably relevant in a high school classroom.
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.
“Bribe, n. That which enables a member of the California Legislature to live on his pay without any dishonest economies.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
At this point, I’ve settled sufficiently into my new job to begin publishing a round of blog posts beyond the Weekly Text. So, as I sit in my classroom first thing in the morning, long before students arrive, I’ll offer these five homophone worksheets on the noun ascent and the verb assent. The verb, apparently, is only used transitively; that said, it’s worth mentioning that assent can also be used as a noun. An exemplary sentence might be something like “Mike gave his assent to the zombies to crash in his garage for one night only.”
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.
For my erstwhile colleagues at the High School of Economics & Finance in Lower Manhattan, I offer as this week’s Text this reading on the joint-stock company and its role in colonizing North America, along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.
“What is evident in this first novel is an eagerness and a sincerity which ought to have been served by an able and understanding editor. Mr. Styron however had no Maxwell Perkins to guide him, with the result that he has written here a serious work of fiction which should not have exceeded 300 pages in length, and which need not have been done in so turgid and often confused a manner…Mr. Styron leaves his readers curiously unsympathetic.”
August Derleth, Chicago Tribune
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
Ok, to finish up this Sunday morning, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Back to the Classroom.”
I begin this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “If the Shoe Fits, Wear It.” To proceed in solving this case, you and your students will need the illustration and questions that drive the lesson. Finally, here is the answer key that interprets the evidence in the illustration for students and teachers.
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.
“Dante was a keen follower of Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC Greek philosopher and mathematician who sought to explain the world, both spiritual and material, by numbers. Pythagoras believed that the mathematical principles that underlay the universe, gave it harmony, literally a music of the spheres. Dante, in his great work, Divine Comedy, sought to create the divine song.
The key number for Dante was 11—the union of 5 and 5—and its multiples. The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, have thirty-three cantos each, and the poem is written in hendecasyllabic rhyme (eleven syllables long). Dante twice provides dimensions of Hell, stating that that circumference of the ninth bolgia (ditch) in the Eighth Circle is 22 miles (miglia ventidue), and the tenth bolgia is 11 miles. There is nothing accidental about this mention of 11 and its multiple 22; twenty-two forms part of the well-known fraction 22/7 which expresses the Pythagorean value of pi.
Three and nine also figure prominently in Dante’s numerology. The three books of the Divine Comedy delineate the nine circles of Hell, the nine rings of Mount Purgatory and the nine celestial bodies of Paradise.”
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, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, poetry, readings/research
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