“On two occasions I have been asked—‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ In one case a member of the Upper, and in another a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a question.”
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher ch. 5 (1864)
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
Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root circum. It means, unsurprisingly, around. This root is at the base of at least two key words–circumference and circumstance–from the high school lexicon. Moreover, because it derives from the Latin, it forms the basis of a number of cognates in the Romance languages, particularly Spanish.
-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.
“What all this means only Mr. Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non-sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts, of feelings. If the author can forget Beckett, Ionesco, and Simpson he may do much better next time.”
Manchester Guardian 1958
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
As students head off to college, teachers probably should explain to them the cognitive science research on “cramming” as a method of studying, i.e. that it is basically useless and mostly exhausting. Perhaps this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom burn the midnight oil would serve as an elegant way to kill two birds with one stone: teach students a new idiomatic expression, and urge them to pace themselves when studying.
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.
“Writing is a code for what you say, not what you think. All known writing systems code the sound of spoken language.
So, on the first day of school, before any reading instruction has begun, every child in the class has bicameral mental representations of words: the know the sound of a word (which scientists called phonology), and its meaning (which scientists call semantics).”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
Last weekend it was one of Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Day, so here is a context clues worksheet on the noun foray. The word is in common enough usage, and more importantly is a word that, for an abstraction, has strong concrete properties. It is in common enough usage that it’s a word students ought to know by the time they graduate high school, I submit.
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, moving right along, here are a reading on graphic novels and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Kids in my classrooms over the years have always asked for these documents, so I think based on my experience with them, I’ll designate this high interest material.
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.
“adjective phrase Latin. Of its own kind; peculiar, unique.
1996 Spectator Major’s rhinocerine obstinacy in putting his personal political survival before any other consideration is sui generis…”
Excerpted from: Speake, Jennifer. The Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
While I’ve posted it elsewhere as part of a lesson plan, I’ll publish this learning support on pronouns and case as a stand-alone post so it is easily searchable.
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.
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
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