Category Archives: English Language Arts

This category contains domain-specific material–reading and writing expository prose, interpreting literature etc.–designed to meet the Common Core standards in English language arts while at the same time being flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse and idiosyncratic learners.

Know-Nothings

Given the recent outbreak of bigotry in this country (I guess we were all aware of this persistent latent tendency in the American mind, but yeesh, you know?), I’m hard-pressed to think of a better time to post this reading on the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party and its accompanying 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.

Independent Practice: The Roman Catholic Church

This independent practice worksheet on the Roman Catholic Church is the last from the folder containing all the homework I developed for freshman global studies classes in New York City. That means there are almost eighty of them here on Mark’s Text Terminal.

Use the “independent practice” tag link, embedded in the word cloud on the homepage to find these.

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.

Ted Sizer on Public Education and Public Engagement

“Few citizens really know what’s going on in their schools. They settle for the familiar and ignore the substance.”

Theodore R. Sizer (1932-2009)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Big Ideas and Planning Questions for Global Studies

While cleaning out the last of some social studies folder, I stumbled across this list of big ideas and planning questions for the freshman global studies classes I taught for several years in New York City. The form and content of this document clearly derives from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s book Understanding by Design, which continues to inform my approach to planning lessons. This looks like something I started brainstorming one day, but then never returned to.

Maybe you can do something with it?

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.

The American Language by H.L. Mencken

“(1919, 1921, 1923, 1936; Supplement One, 1945; Supplement Two, 1948; 4th ed, abridged with supplements annotations, and new material by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1963) A philological treatise by H.L. Mencken. Believing at first that the American language and English were diverging, Mencken found that, by 1923, American English had become the more powerful tongue and was leading British English along with it. He set out to examine the two streams of language and their differences in vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. His study gave particular attention to American slang, proper names, and the incorporation of non-English dialects in America. Ironically, Mencken’s work won him a place among the scholars he had attacked and scorned.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Cultural Literacy: Saladin

While it’s not very long, and therefore not very thorough, here nonetheless is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Saladin, a figure worthy of more than cursory study. Perhaps this document will serve to introduce him, and therefore start a discussion on why this worksheet doesn’t serve his legacy well, even as an introduction to it.

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.

Rotten Reviews: Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

“…In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Negotiate (vi/vt)

Since it is a word that students probably ought to know by high school, but if they don’t, I offer this context clues worksheet on the verb negotiate, which is used both intransitively and transitively. When I have English language learners in the mix of a class, I’ll often use this to get it into their lexicons at their earliest convenience.

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. Lawrence Lowell on the Accumulation of Knowledge

“[On why universities have so much learning] ‘The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, to it accumulates through the years.”

A. Lawrence Lowell

Quoted in Reader’s Digest, May 1949

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

The Weekly Text, July 26, 2019: A Lesson Plan on Citing Sources in Synthetic Research Papers

While I have used the materials in this week’s Text in a variety of configurations, including, most often in a unit on the procedural knowledge necessary to produce research papers, I also keep it around as a standalone, which I call the “Research Paper in Miniature Lesson Plan” I wrote this several years ago after observing, in the school in which I worked, that teachers assigned synthetic research papers without any explicit instruction on the how and, perhaps more importantly, the why of citing sources when preparing such a document.

Today’s Text is, then, basically, a lesson plan on citing sources. I have opened this lesson, for reasons I think I can safely assume are obvious, with this context clues worksheet on the noun evidence; if, for some reason, this lesson runs into a second instructional period, I keep nearby this second context clues worksheet on the noun bibliography in case I need it. Finally, the mainstay of this lesson is this worksheet on the why and how of citing sources.

As I’ve worked with this lesson over the years, I have come to regard it (and you might find this a useful way of thinking about it as well) as an outline or template for a series of such lessons. Depending on what you’re working on in your classroom, an hour or so of editing and reconfiguring would transmute this lesson for use with a variety of short readings. In other words, whatever your domain is, and whatever content you are teaching, it could be adapted to work with this lesson and vice versa.

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.