Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on carrying a torch for another person. It’s an old-fashioned expression to be sure, but not one without its charms.
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.
“Mr. Lowry is passionately in earnest about what he has to say concerning human hope and defeat, but for all his earnestness he has succeeded only in writing a rather good imitation of an important novel.”
The New Yorker
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
Here is a reading on the 1966 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship with its attending comprehension worksheet. This is a story of ending an injustice in American collegiate sports, and the undermining of racial prejudice. As such, I suspect that for the right students, this material would be of compelling high interest; in most of the classrooms I’ve overseen as a teacher, I taught a lot of such students, so I have used these documents heavily.
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 smallest distinct sound unit in a given language: e.g. tip in English realizes three successive phonemes realized in spelling by the letters t, i, and p.
Detailed definitions have varied from one theory to another, But, in general, two words are composed of different phonemes only if they differ phonetically in ways that are found to make a difference in meaning. Thus in English i and a are difference phonemes since, for example, tip does not mean the same as tap, nor pit the same as pat. The individual phonemes are then the smallest units in each word that distinguish meanings and, in addition, are realized over distinct time spans. By the same criterion, i and a are single phonemes since they cannot be analyzed into smaller units meeting the criterion, each with its own time span.
Thence phonemic; e.g. a phonemic transcription of a word, etc. is its representation as a sequence or other combination of phonemes.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
This week’s Text (after missing last week) is something I whipped up pretty much on the fly about three years ago when I was assigned an eight-meeting class conducted over eight weeks on math and science literacy. This literacy lesson on the polysemous word bond is, as I look at it now, an odd melange of stuff. Depending on what it is you want kids to understand, there are materials here for one extended lesson–I wrote this for a sixty-one-minute long period–or a couple of different short exercises.
The first document, because I worked in economics and finance-themed high school, is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on bond as a financial instrument. These two context clues worksheets on the verb and noun bond in the sense of attaching or joining follow; logically, I guess, this short reading and comprehension exercise on chemical bonds rounds out this deck. I also, for some reason, made up this learning support with three definitions of bond from Merriam-Webster’s 11th Edition.
Now that I think about it, Bronx County summoned me to jury duty before I had a chance to use this material. The coverage teacher who used it did say students received it relatively well.
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.
Day four of a new job today. Here is a worksheet on the Greek root geo. It means, as your students probably won’t take long to figure out, earth. This is another of those very productive roots in English, and it shows up in words used across the common domain in the high school curriculum, particularly in the physical sciences.
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 hard pressed to find a better day than today–election day–to post this context clues worksheet on the noun buffoon. This is a relatively commonly used noun in English, and certainly should be part of the inventory of anyone interested in talking about politicians and their ilk.
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 dark novel (1939) by the US writer Nathanael West (1903-1940). The work explores the seamy underside of Hollywood (where West himself had worked as a scriptwriter), and shows how it eats away at people’s better selves. At the end Homer, a harmless but unexciting accountant, knocks down a boy who attacks him, and is in turn overwhelmed by a group of people (like a swarm of locusts) who are waiting for the arrival of stars at a a premiere.
‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.’
Joel 2:25
John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of West’s book, with Donald Sutherland and Karen Black, was highly regarded.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
On Election Day, 2018 it is a rainy day in Springfield, Massachusetts. Don’t let that prevent you from getting to your polling place! This is one of the most consequential elections cycles in my life time. I’m an old guy now, so you know that’s really saying something.
Today seems like as good a time as any (I’d actually been saving these for a Black History Month post) to post this reading on the 13th, 14th and 15th. Amendments and its accompanying comprehension worksheet. Also, this Everyday Edit on the Voting Rights Act is an timely document to post this morning, especially in light of the attempts around the country to suppress universal suffrage. Incidentally, if you like that Everyday Edit exercise, I’ll remind you once again that the good people at Education World give away a year’s supply of them at no cost to you.
Please vote!
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.
“A ‘non-hero’ or the antithesis of a hero of the old-fashioned kind who was capable of heroic deeds, who was dashing, strong, brave and resourceful. It is a little doubtful whether such heroes have ever existed in any quantity in fiction except in some romances (q.v.) and in the cheaper kind of romantic novelette (q.v.). However, there have been many instances of fictional heroes who have displayed noble qualities and virtuous attributes. The anti-hero is the man who is given the vocation of failure.
The anti-hero—a type who is incompetent, unlucky, tactless, clumsy, cack-handed, stupid, buffoonish—is of ancient lineage and is to be found, for instance, in the Greek new comedy (q.v.). An early and outstanding example in European literature is the endearing figure of the eponymous knight of Don Quixote(1605-1615). But perhaps the first anti-heor who fits the modern image is Hylas, in d’Urfe’s very successful Astree (1627). Another notable instance is Tristram Shandy in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767). On can find isolated representatives in European from the 18thcentury onwards, for example Hasek’s Schweik in The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23). A case could be argued that Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is a kind of anti-hero. Charles Lumley in John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) is another. When Kingsley Amis created Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim (1954) the post-war anti-hero type was established, and the anti-hero Jimmy Porter of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1957) produced a succession of personalities of the same kind. Other examples are Sebastien in J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955). Herzog in Bellow’s Herzog (1964), and Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961). The principal male characters in several of Graham Greene’s novels are also anti-heroes.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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