“We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation…. Fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in The Dunciad, and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day.”
Saturday Review, 1858
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
OK: tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I am thankful for the day off, and for the short break of which it is a part. Here is a word root worksheet on the Latin word root ver; it means true. As you can see on the worksheet itself, ver is at the root of several key words in the academic lexicon.
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.
Oh–and Happy Thanksgiving!
“We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled that enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.”
Children’s Books
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
We hosted parent-teacher conferences last evening, which means we were here until almost eight o’clock. Long day, to put it succinctly if in agrammatical style.
A couple of hundred years ago, when I was studying Russian in college, I fell into confusion when my professor introduced the accusative case; nouns used as direct objects in Russian are inflected differently–there are five oblique cases–i.e. cases other than the nominative in Russian–than they are as subjects. For example, kniga, the word for book, becomes knigu when it is the direct object of a verb, as in “I am reading a book.” My ignorance at that moment felt legion to me (I was in my early thirties as an undergraduate). Discovering that I didn’t understand the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs only exacerbated the extent of my ignorance.
Students in high school really ought to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs for a variety of reasons, and studying inflected languages is certainly one of them. For that reason, this week’s Text is two Cultural Literacy worksheets on transitive and intransitive verbs. These are short exercises that I use at the beginning of lessons on recognizing these verbs and understanding how to use them.
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.
You might find this reading on Renaissance bluenose Girolamo Savonarola timely, as well as the reading comprehension worksheet to accompany 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.
“History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.”
James Joyce
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Some time ago, I posted the first lesson from my unit on nouns. I believe very strongly in teaching the parts of speech as a pathway to greater literacy in the students I serve, and I have had good luck using these units with them. So, for this week’s Text, I offer the second lesson plan of this unit, on common and proper nouns.
I begin this lesson, right after the second bell rings, with this do now exercise adapted from The Elements of Style. After settling students with that short exercise, I move on to the mainstay of the lesson, which is this structured worksheet on common and proper nouns. Finally, you might find useful the teacher’s copy of the worksheet with the correct answers.
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.
By any standard I recognize, the 2016 presidential election season is hands down the most appalling in my lifetime–and I am not a young man. If it is true (as I believe it is), that the election of Barack Obama, the first President of the United States of African descent, exposed latent racism and bigotry in the United States, then this election has in every respect put the icing on that ugly cake. Moreover, it appears that the specter of a Trump administration has aroused anxiety in children and that in general there is “Trump Anxiety” among adults as well. I don’t much care for either candidate, but it is undeniable that the Republican candidate has engaged in dog-whistling bigotry, sexism and misogyny, general vulgarity, and a combination of grotesque vanity and whining self-pity that really ought to put off anyone with reasonably stable mental health.
So this week, less than two weeks before the general election, seems as good a time as any to post a reading on George Washington’s famous letter on toleration for today’s Weekly Text. Finally, here is a reading comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
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.
Unlike leading software companies, I try not to publish or release material that I haven’t tested repeatedly in the classroom for effectiveness with students. This week’s Text, a learning support on clauses and correlating conjunctions, is an exception to that rule. I’ve only used this once, for a unit I designed on writing stylish sentences for advanced students. As I reformatted it yesterday, and generally tried to clean it up, it occurred to me that it might be rewritten into two different supports for struggling students.
Of course, there are probably a number of ways to make it more effective. For that reason, there is a distinct possibility that I will revise it and repost it sometime in the future.
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.
It’s the final Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month, 2016, and so here is the final Weekly Text in observance of this month. I offer this week a a reading on Che Guevara, one of the most instantly recognizable icons of Hispanic–and Latin American–history. To accompany this reading here is a a reading comprehension worksheet. And that’s it for this week.
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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