What is Daisy Miller’s real name? Annie Miller. She appears in Henry James’s short novel Daisy Miller (1878).
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Moving right along with differentiated material I developed for the 11th-grade English class I co-taught over the past two years, here is a sample annotations for “Henry Trafton’s Independence,” a short story by Horatio Alger. My father, who taught Alger at the University of Wisconsin, taught me, alas, to ridicule Alger’s contrived and even precious rags-to-riches stories. Nonetheless, this story showed up in this English class.
Incidentally, in researching this post, I learned that Horatio Alger, in his role as a Unitarian clergyman in Brewster, Massachusetts was found to have engaged in “the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys.” I think, in this post-Catholic-clergy-scandal era, you know what that means. My father had a great deal to say about Richard “Dick” Hunter, the protagonist of Alger’s “Ragged Dick” stories. Dick’s name, my father told me, suggested a great deal about Horatio Alger himself.
I myself am agnostic on all of this.
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.
“History would be a wonderful thing—if it were only true.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
OK, moving right along this morning. Several years ago, I became quite interested in the history of mortgage lending in the United States, particularly the practice of redlining. I read Richard Rothstein’s excellent book The Color of Law, which I highly recommend to you, particularly if you are interested in cities and social justice. The topic of redlining came up in one of the 11th-grade English classes I co-taught, so I worked up this questions to inform thinking on redlining to distribute to 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.
“Refugee Intellectuals: (1930-1940) During the 1930s, a galaxy of European intellectuals–authors, artists, scholars, scientists–fled European totalitarianism and found refuge, permanent or temporary, in the United States. Their contributions to the nation’s cultural life–and later to its war effort–were incalculable. The hundreds of refugee intellectuals included:
Excerpted from: Rosenbaum, Robert A. The Penguin Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Penguin, 2003.
I am very quickly headed to retirement. Do you know I’m relieved? As I remove myself and my possessions from my final school, I realized I have some odds and ends in my folder that I developed for classes I co-taught over the past couple of years.
For the past couple of years, in the autumn, the teacher for the Junior English Language Arts class I co-taught started the year with a unit on Arthur Miller’s play on the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible. So, here are a list of questions to drive discussion of the play as well as to arouse ideas for writing essays; this list of sentence stems similarly aims to get students thinking about the play as well as how to write about it. Finally, since The Crucible is an allegory on the McCarthy Era, here is a list of analytical questions to accompany an article on the Red Scare.
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.
Here is a worksheet on the use of meantime and meanwhile. As Paul Brians, the author of Common Errors in English Usage (to which he generously allows access at no charge at his Washington State University web page), from which this worksheet is adapted, observes, most people use these words interchangeably. Merriam-Webster appears to think so, identifying them as synonyms to each other in the electronic version of its Collegiate Encyclopedia (11th Edition). At the same time, Merriam-Webster designates both words, when separated by dashes (i.e. mean-time and mean-while) as nouns.
Yet, as Professor Brians also points out, some usage experts designated specific uses for each of these adverbs and nouns. It is that designation that drives this worksheet, which is a full page and features a reading of two longish sentences and five modified cloze exercises. This might be a useful exercise for opening a discussion about, well, English usage; that in turn might lead to a review of a usage manual to familiarize students with the, well, usefulness, of such a book.
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.
“Disclaimer (noun): A specific denial or disavowal, especially an explicit public statement of nonresponsibility or nonaffiliation; protective explanation; waiver. Adjective: disclamatory; verb: disclaim.
‘She turns on “Heated Topics,” a feminist talk show so controversial that it begins with viewer-discretion warning and ends with a disclaimer.’ Mary Cantwell, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
As below with the counterpart to this document, a Cultural Literacy worksheet on regular verbs, I am confident that this document appears elsewhere on this blog. Nonetheless, I think it’s not a bad idea to have this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the irregular verb adjacent to a run of 17 lessons on writing sentences.
This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions.
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’s Text Terminal offers you the sixth lesson plan, from the Introduction to Writing Sentences unit, as the Weekly Text for 17 July 2026, this one on writing the declarative sentence. This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the intransitive verb. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and three comprehension questions.
And here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the primary work of this lesson.
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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