[This botched assessment refers to Bernard Malamud’s second novel, published in 1957, produced as a movie, and included in Time’s All-TIME 100 Novels.]
“Despite its occasional spark of humanity and its melancholy humor this is on the whole too grim a picture to have wide appeal.”
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 literary oddities, readings/research
The second post immediately below this one is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on pandemics. In that post I mention that one can discern the Greek word root dem within that noun, and that dem–or, as in the case of this Greek word root worksheet, dem/o and demi–means people. That said, I must make note of, and offer caution on account of, the fact that in Latin the root demi means half or less than. Now you know why espresso is served in a demitasse.
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 character in writing which represents a word as a whole. Distinguished especially from a phonogram, which represents a sound or group of sounds; also from a pictogram or an ideogram, which represent an object or idea independently of words.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art
Teachers working in social studies or science may find this Cultural Literacy worksheet on pandemics useful. For a literacy connection, nota bene the Greek root dem in this word; it means people, and shows up in other words like democracy and demography, both words related to people. If you look at the post two above this one, you’ll in fact find a word root worksheet on that Greek word root.
Pan, another Greek root, simply means all. You can see that these two word roots, which meet in the noun pandemic, give students an opportunity for some synthetic thinking about these two roots and the words in English they produce.
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.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun evidence which I would imagine could find its way into a variety of lessons across domains–and probably across grade levels, depending on one’s students.
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.
“Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
Bertrand Russell, “Mathematics and Metaphysicians” (1901)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Here are four parsing sentences worksheets for conjunctions that might be useful as short exercises on days when students struggle to sustain attention.
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.
“Richly sweet and smooth in speech or tone; resonant and flowing; honeyed. Adverb: mellifluously; noun: mellifluousness.
‘The best American essay on him, in my opinion, was by Edmund Wilson, dry and to the point, There was not mellifluous English nonsense about the ‘inimitable’ and ‘incomparable.’”
V.S. Pritchett, The Tale Bearers
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
At my school, teachers in all four common branch subjects assign research papers as a matter of academic routine. Unfortunately, as far as I’ve seen and therefore know, nobody on the faculty has developed explicit instructions and materials teaching the numerous skills involved in assembling research, let alone judging, organizing and synthesizing it. Nor does anyone teach argumentation (I assume it goes without saying that we have no debate or forensics team), a key skill for composing a synthetic research paper.
For years, this rankled me as the bad practice it clearly is. Last year, I finally resolved to do something about it: I wrote this unit plan on argumentation, which I titled “Arguing Your Case.” All of this work is adapted, as the unit plan explains in its “Methods and Materials” section, from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s excellent manual They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2017). As I write this, the Third Edition lies before me on my desk; this is a textbook, evidently, that will go into numerous editions.
But the gravamen of the book–using basic rhetorical figures to structure argumentative discourse–will certainly remain the same. I’ve already posted the first two lessons from this unit (you’ll find them here and here). Here is the third lesson plan from the “Arguing Your Case” unit, this one on using the “They say” and “Standard views” procedure for laying out, in one’s argument, the current research, conventional wisdom, or what have you, on a particular subject. I use this context clues worksheet on the noun discourse to open this lesson, Finally, here is the combination of a learning support and worksheet that students use to get a sense of how to perform the academic task at hand.
I wrote this unit for more advanced students than I usually teach. If you plan to use this material with struggling learners, particularly kids with low levels of general or academic literacy, you will almost certainly need to edit the texts in the worksheet, which, frankly, I cribbed from The New York Review of Books.
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.
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