Finally, on this warm and rainy Thursday morning in Springfield, Massachusetts, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the epic as a literary genre. If you’re teaching Homer, this might be just the squib for introducing the conceptual foundations of the epic genre.
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.
I’m not sure if it makes it into the social studies curriculum anywhere now, but if it does in your classroom, here is an independent practice worksheet on the Hundred Years War.
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.
“If the book had plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell.”
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, Worksheets
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
It was Merriam-Webster’s word of the day a while back, so I wrote this context clues worksheet on the verb regale. It is used both intransitively and transitively. I’m not sure high school students need to use it at all; if you think they do, or at least might, then it’s yours for the taking.
It means “to entertain sumptuously : feast with delicacies” and “to give pleasure or amusement to <regaled us with tall tales>.”
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.
“(1947) A long poem by W.H. Auden. It concerns men and women who meet by chance in a New York bar in wartime; all are suffering from the modern malaise and feel guilty, isolated, and rootless. In a common dream, they set out on a quest through a barren wasteland. Hope in Christianity is presented as the solution to their problems. The title has frequently been used as a name to describe the mid-20th century.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, readings/research
Here’s a reading on steroids and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet if you want them. I hope that there isn’t a real need for these documents–because that could mean kids are using steroids, a scary thought.
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.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton (1834-1902)
Letter to Mandell Creighton, 3 April 1887
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion
These two learning supports on helping verbs have been a staple for for struggling readers and writers in my classroom. They’ll probably turn up again on Mark’s Text Terminal when I post lessons on this area of English usage.
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 we are at Blog Post 2000. I have a number of documents to post, all from the first third of my career, when I was just figuring out how to assess students’ abilities and design instruction that challenged them, but didn’t frustrate them.
So, for starters, here is a learning support on the kinds of questions that drive research projects.
Next, here is a learning support on writing notecards for research papers. I don’t know if teachers still require students to keep analog note-cards in the real world, but the social studies teacher with whom I taught sophomore global studies in Manhattan at the beginning of this (2018-2019) school year still–to his credit–required them. Whatever you do in your classroom, perhaps this structured note-card blank will help students learn and master this task essential to the craft of research.
This sample outline learning support and this style sheet on using structured outlining blanks, you will notice, are basically the same material. The style sheet accompanies these structured outlining blanks.
Finally, here is a document I call the research paper in miniature. I use this document to show students, in essence, what a research paper is, why the authors of these kinds of papers must cite sources, and even ask them to infer the argument (i.e. the origins of rock and roll are in the blues and other African musical forms) from the paragraph they read. As I write this, I realize that I have a lesson plan to rationalize the research paper in miniature, so I’ll post that as a Weekly Text sometime over the summer when I have a chance to revise it.
That’s it. I emptied out the folder for Blog Post 2000. Now to start working on my next thousand posts.
“A painting (1937), perhaps the most famous of the 20th century, painted by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in 1937 in horrified protest at a notorious atrocity in the Spanish Civil War. On 27 April 1937, bombers of the German Kondor Legion, in support of Franco’s nationalists, destroyed the ancient Basque capital of Guernica, causing many civilian casualties. Picasso’s stark monochromatic painting has become a symbol of the barbarity of modern warfare. There is a (probably apocryphal) story that while Picasso was living in Paris in the Second World War, a Gestapo officer visited his studio. Looking at the canvas of Guernica, the Nazi asked, ‘Did you do that?’ ‘No,’ Picasso replied, ‘you did.'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
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