“Pier: Massive solid masonry that functions as vertical structural support. Also, often used to designate Romanesque and Gothic pillars of noncylindrical form.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“A critical term, the first recorded definition of which comes from Dr. Samuel Johnson: ‘a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.’ It is often used deliberately for comic effect to create an ironical letdown by descending from a noble tone or image to a trivial or ludicrous one. For example, in Henry Fielding’s burlesque The Tragedy of Tragedies (1931), Lord Grizzle addresses Huncamunca: ‘Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, Oh!/ Thy pouting breasts, like Kettle-Drums of Brass,/Beat everlasting loud Alarms of joy….’ Bathos is an unintentional anticlimax.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, fiction/literature, term of art
Here is a reading on the United States Constitutional Convention along with a comprehension worksheet to accompany it. This is basic material in United States history, so I can think of a lot of places, times, and manners in which to use it.
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.
“As poet James Russell Lowell put it, ‘books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.'”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel. The Reading Mind. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017
You might find this context clues worksheet on the verb desist helpful in teaching kids a basic legal concept, i.e. cease and desist. It is a word–or at the very least, a concept–that students should understand. Either way, it is used only intransitively.
It might accompany nicely the “no means no” teaching on sexual encounters and consent.
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.
“Optimism: The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.”
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
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on narcissism has been on my desktop as I await the right time to post it; I’m not sure when that will be, so now seems as good a time as any.
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.
“In the summer of 1928, Aleck Woollcott invited Harpo Marx to spend the summer with him on the French Riviera. Harpo refused, protesting, ‘I can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock.’
(An interesting postscript: On Saturday, May 19, Aleck Woollcott, Beatrice Kaufman, novelist Alice Duer Miller, and Harpo sailed for Europe.)”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Can you, by any chance, use these five homophone worksheets on the nouns peace and piece? These are pretty commonly misused; if nothing else, these documents will clear up the use of these two nouns for English language learners.
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.
“In the Indo-Aryan West, 9 was always a most propitious number, for each aspect of a ruling trinity could be multiplied by 3 to create a pantheon of 9. It is not difficult to see that this was the likely origin for our choirs of nine angels, nine heavenly spirits and nine muses. The number also has an innate reference to the nine months in which a child is created within the womb.”
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
Tagged numeracy, readings/research
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