Category Archives: Essays/Readings

This category often, but not always, designates a piece of my own writing on a topic on a variety of topics. So, if you are interested in listening to me bloviate, click on this category! The Essays/Readings category may also include extended quotes from books, particularly on pedagogy, literacy, terms of art, and philosophy.

Term of Art: Rhetorical Question

“Rhetorical Question: A question that expects no answer. The answer may be self-evident (If she doesn’t like me why should I care what she thinks?) or immediately provided by the questioner (What should be done? Well, first we should…). The question is often asked for dramatic effect. Rhetorical questions are sometimes announced with such a phrase as I ask you (when nothing is in fact being asked): ‘Garn! I ask you, what kind of a word is that? / It’s Ow and Garn that keep her in her place / Not her wretched clothes and dirty face’ (Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady, 1956).”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Cultural Literacy: Acid Rain

You don’t hear much about it anymore–perhaps because we have much bigger, more threatening environmental catastrophes on our civilizational plate–but if you can use it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on acid rain.

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.

Term of Art: Pastiche

“Pastiche (noun): A literary work that draws on styles, formats, etch., of other sources and thus is eclectic and derivative, and often whimsical or irreverent (but not with humor as a primary intent); book or story made up of borrowings from other writers; hodgepodge; stylistic imitation of a writer at work; parody. Noun: pasticheur.

‘His novels were pastiches of work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Daniel Willingham on Circularity and Hermeneutics

Most of us have this experience at one time or another. You consult a dictionary to get a word definition, perhaps ‘condescending.’ The dictionary defines it as ‘patronizing,’ which is no help because you don’t know the meaning of that word, either. So you look up ‘patronizing’ and find that it is defined as ‘condescending.’

That’s an example of a circular definition, and it’s kind of funny, especially when it happens to someone else. But wait a minute…. Words seem defined by their features (watermelon is the red-on-the-inside, juicy, sweet, fruit), but how are the features defined? By other words. So doesn’t the model amount to a bunch of circular definitions, even if the circles may be bigger than the condescending-patronizing loop.

The way out of this problem is to consider the possibility that some representations are grounded. That means that some mental concepts derive meaning not from other mental concepts, but more directly from experience. For example, perhaps the definition of red is not rooted in language. Indeed, if you look up ‘red’ in the dictionary, the definition is pretty unsatisfying. Perhaps the mental definition of red should be rooted in the visual system; when you see the word ‘red,’ its referent is a memory of what it’s like to actually see red.

In the last twenty years, much evidence has accumulated that some representations are grounded—they are defined, at least in part, by our senses or by how we move. For example, when you read the word ‘kick,’ the part of your brain that controls leg movements shows activity, even though you’re not moving your leg. And the part of your brain that controls mouth movements is active when you read the word ‘lick,’ and that which controls finger movements is active when you read ‘pick,’ Part of the mental definition of kick, lick, and pick is what it feels like to execute those movements.

Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

Term of Art: Affective Education

“affective education: schooling that helps students deal with their emotions and values. This term is used to distinguish such schooling from cognitive education, which refers to academic knowledge and studies. Some would argue that the two are actually intertwined and that affective education increases students’ readiness to learn by addressing their emotional problems.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness: A tale or short novel by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), published in 1902. The story is told by Marlow, who captains a river boat in the Congo and slowly sails upriver into the ‘heart of darkness,’ which is both Africa, the ‘dark continent,’ and the heart of evil. Marlow’s mission is to reach Kurtz, the most successful of the company’s agents. He finds that the charismatic Kurtz, once a man of culture and civilization, has turned himself into an omnipotent ruler by the use of unimaginable cruelty, hinted at by the row of heads impaled beside his compound. Kurtz’s dying words are ‘The horror! The horror!’ The story ends:

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

When he was a child in Poland, Conrad had jabbed his finger at the centre of a map of Africa and declared that one day he would go there. In 1890 he did, when he took command of a river boat in the Congo Free State. The Congo was then the private fiefdom of the Belgian king, Leopold II, and was exploited with the utmost barbarity. Eventually, in 1908, international outrage led the Belgian government to take over the colony.

Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, and the words ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’ follow the title of T.S. Eliot’sThe Hollow Men.’”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

Term of Art: Etymology

“etymology: The study of the historical relation between a word and the earlier from or forms from which it has, or has hypothetically, developed. Thus the etymology of sheep relates it, with German Schaf and others, to a reconstructed Common Germanic skoepa; that of street relates it, through Old English straet, to a borrowing into Germanic of Latin (via) strata ‘paved road.’

Loosely described as a study of the ‘origins of words’; but any form may have an earlier prehistory, over many thousands of years, of which we can know nothing.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Term of Art: Rationalization

“Rationalization: The act of justifying discreditable actions after the event, or a justification or excuse put forward in this way. In psychoanalysis, a defense mechanism in which a false but reassuring or self-serving explanation that in reality arises from a repressed wish. The term was first used in the narrower psychoanalytic sense in 1908 by the Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones (1879-1958) in an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology entitled ‘Rationalization in Everyday Life.’”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

The Weekly Text, January 17, 2020: A Trove of Documents for Teaching Night by Elie Wiesel

Mark’s Text Terminal is undergoing a cleaning of its digital storage locker. A couple of weeks ago I posted a trove of materials for teaching Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart; two weeks hence, I’ll post another cache of documents for teaching William Golding’s Hobbesian nightmare, Lord of the Flies.

This week’s Text is an assortment of documents I wrote between ten and twelve years ago for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night. I’ve not used these materials in ten years, so I am moving them off my hard drive and onto Mark’s Text Terminal for storage–and to offer them to others for their use.

I’ll start by uploading this reading on Night (from the Intellectual Devotional series) and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve definitely posted these documents elsewhere on this website; since they are in this unit’s folder, I’ll include them here because it makes sense to do so.

As I write this post, I realize that when I walked into a new job at the High School of Economics & Finance in Lower Manhattan in the fall of 2008 (exciting times at that moment in the Financial District, as the world economy was about to fall off a cliff on account of worthless mortgage securities peddled fraudulently–and you who did this know who you are), I came into a situation in which my co-teacher, whom I’d not met, was out, and I needed to get some materials together right away to keep busy those young people whose education I was charged with delivering. For that reason, my first move was to write this prelude for group work to furnish kids with some context for understanding the Holocaust, and therefore for understanding Night.

Somewhere in this process I wrote this unit plan, which looks incomplete to me. I also wrote these eight lesson plans, only the first three of which, I regret, are complete. Still, the other five are solid templates, and wouldn’t be hard to finish.

Here are eight context clues worksheets, one for each chapter of Night, along with their eight sets of definitions for your class linguist.

Finally, here are the eight comprehension worksheets I used to guide the reading of the book.

Every document attached to this post is in Microsoft Word, so they are at the disposal of you and your students.

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.

Alfred Adler on Male Domination

“All our institutions, our traditional attitudes, our laws, our morals, our customs, give evidence of the fact that they are determined and maintained by privileged males for the glory of male domination. These institutions reach out into the very nurseries and have a great influence on the child’s soul.”

Alfred Adler

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.