Category Archives: English Language Arts

This category contains domain-specific material–reading and writing expository prose, interpreting literature etc.–designed to meet the Common Core standards in English language arts while at the same time being flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse and idiosyncratic learners.

Cultural Literacy: Nile River

If you teach freshman global studies, especially here in New York City, you may find this Cultural Literacy Worksheet on the Nile River useful this fall.

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.

Rotten Reviews: Honore de Balzac

“Little imagination is shown in invention, in the creating of character and plot, or in the delineation of passion… M. de Balzac’s place in French literature will be neither considerable nor high.”

Eugene Poitou, Revue des Deux Mondes 1856

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Annotate (vi/vt)

Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb annotate, which is used both intransitively and transitively. I worked in a school in which students were regularly assigned annotation work without understanding what this act is.

Needless to say, it never went well.

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.

Mark Twain on Civil Liberties

“In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.”

Mark Twain

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

A Short Exercise on the Greek Word Root Pseud/o

This worksheet on the Greek word root pseud/o seems to me de rigeur for the high school classroom. It is a very productive root which means, of course, false. This root is easily appended to many nouns, which makes it possible for us to call someone like the presidential advisor “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka a pseudointellectual.

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.

Rotten Reviews: James Russell Lowell Reviews Thoreau’s Walden

“I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver complaint…(Thoreau’s) shanty life was a mere impossibility so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows his axe; his boards, his nails, his fish hooks, his plough, his hoe–all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry David Thoreau should exist at all.”

James Russell Lowell, 1865, from Literary Essays, 1890

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Cultural Literacy: Pax Romana

Here, if you happen to need it for your global studies class, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Pax Romana.

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.

Appease (vt)

Several years ago, a couple of my colleagues analyzed the results of the New York State Regents Exam in Global Studies. They wanted to understand why an entire cohort of juniors missed the same question on Neville Chamberlain, et al, and the Munich Pact. They didn’t need to look far at all: students reported that they didn’t understand the word appeasement. 

Here then is a context clues worksheet on the verb appease, which is only used transitively. The sheet itself would be relatively simple to change to appeasement, if you prefer to teach the noun.

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.

Kaiser (n)

You might find this context clues worksheet on the noun kaiser useful, especially if you’re teaching a global studies class that addresses German politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, and, of course, World War I. Please do remember that this is a derivation of the Latin cognomen Caesar, appended to Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Assisting students in taking that knowledge a step further you can demonstrate to students how far this word traveled by pointing out that the Russian emperor’s title Czar also derives from Caesar.

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.

Rotten Reviews: Edmund Wilson on W.H. Auden

Mr. Auden himself has presented the curious case of a poet who writes an original poetic language in the most robust English tradition but how seems to have been arrested in the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy.”

Edmund WilsonThe Shores of Light  1952

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.