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: Indo-European

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Indo-European: Family of languages including, at historically its major limit, most of those spoken in Europe and, at its eastern limit, the major languages of all but the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Usually divided into eleven main branches: in the order in which they are first attested, Anatolian (now extinct), Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (represented by the modern Romance languages), Celtic, Germanic (which includes English), Armenian, Tocharian (extinct), Slavic (Slavonic), Baltic (represented by Latvian and Lithuanian), and Albanian. Groupings larger than these are problematic to varying degrees: the safest hypothesis is that of a common Balt-Slavonic.

The comparative method has its origin in the intensive study of Indo-European, especially in the German-speaking universities, from the early 19th century. The size and complexity of the family, in comparison with many others that can be established with the same certainty, reflects in part the early date at which the forms in several branches can be compared.”

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

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Fine Art

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Fine Art: Describes solely those categories of artworks traditionally judged to be the most prominent in forms of aesthetic significance. They include architecture, painting, sculpture, and many of the graphic arts, and are contrasted with decorative and applied art, in which function is as important as aesthetic considerations. Within painting, history painting was considered most important, followed by portraiture and landscape.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Cultural Literacy: Victorian Period

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Starting another morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Victorian Period in British history.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Hippies

Posted on December 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

Even though it drives them crazy when I do it, I often address my students as “hippies.” Here, then, for all of them across the years, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on hippies if you have any use for 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.

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Term of Art: Exposition

Posted on December 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Exposition: Exposition, or expository writing, is traditionally understood as writing that aims to transmit information to presumably interested parties as distinguished from writing that aims to persuade the reader. As there will be elements of persuasive writing in expository, so also will there be elements of the expository in persuasive.

In the following discussion, however, the perspective is that of rhetorical analysis, which regards all written communication (including the note on the refrigerator door) as guided by a communicative/persuasive purpose. Exposition is, then, that type of prose writing that attempts to create, in its target audience, the attitude that the writer is objectively presenting the facts relative to a given subject. Exposition thus is not a division of prose discourse according to intent, but rather represents a tone that the writer wishes the reader to accept as ‘factual.’ The writer of exposition cultivates a tone designed to allow (encourage) the reader to think that the writer has no specific interest in, or position in regard to, the subject matter presented.

Excerpted from: Trail, George Y. Rhetorical Terms and Concepts: A Contemporary Glossary. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000.

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Term of Art: Annales School

Posted on December 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Annales School: An influential school of French historians, formed around the journal Annales: economies, societes, civilisations, which was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at the University of Strasburg in 1929. The Annales School attempted to develop a ‘total history’ as a critique of existing historical methodology which offered only a chronology of events. They turned attention away from political history towards a macro-historical analysis of societies over long time-periods. The Annales School, which included Maurice Halbwachs, Andre Siegfried, Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Georges Duby, had the following characteristics: it was interdisciplinary; it was concerned to study very long historical periods (la longue duree) and social structure; some members of the School employed quantitative methods; they examined the interaction between geographical environment, material culture, and society.

The work of the original members is represented, for example, by Block who attempted a total analysis of medieval society in his Feudal Society (1961). In the post-war period two works in particular have been very influential in the social science, namely Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1949) and Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis of fourteenth-century village life (Montaillou, 1975). The School has influenced historical sociology, especially the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (see, for example, his two-volume study of The Modern-World System, 1974 and 1980) Critics have argued that the Annales School neglected political processes. Nor is it clear how the Annales approach was fundamentally different in scope and interdisciplinarity from, for example, historical materialism, the historical sociology of Max Weber in his The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations (1924), or the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias in The Court Society (1969)–although it tends to be less abstract then all of these.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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A Streetcar Named Desire

Posted on December 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

“A Streetcar Named Desire: An intense drama (1947) by the US playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-83) about the relationship between a faded Southern belle, Blanche Dubois, and her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. It was subsequently turned into a successful film (1951), directed by Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. The play had several titles before the final one, including The Moth, Blanche’s Chair in the Moon and The Poker Night. The eventual title was inspired by a streetcar labeled ‘Desire’ (for its destination, Desire Street), which, together with another called ‘Cemeteries,’ plied the main street in the district of New Orleans where Williams lived. In the play the names are taken symbolically, Blanche contending that her sister Stella’s marriage is a product of lust, as aimless as the ‘streetcar named Desire’ that shuttles through the narrow streets. The name of the street does not denote a place of pleasure but derives from the French girl’s name Desiree. A monument, the ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ now stands on the site near the French Market. The play is a leitmotif in Pedro Almodovar’s film Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother, 1999).

‘They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, then transfer to one called Cemeteries.’

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (Blanche’s first line).”

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

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Term of Art: Anticlimax

Posted on November 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Anticlimax: According to Dr. Johnson’s definition (and he appears to have been the first to record the word) it is “a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.” In fact, a bathetic declension from a noble tone to one less exalted. The effect can be comic and is often intended to be so. A good example occurs in Fielding’s burlesque (q.v.), Tom Thumb:

King [Aruther, to his queen Dolallola]

…Whence flow those tears fast down thy blubber’d cheeks,

Like swoln Gutter, gushing through the streets?

The effect can also be unintentionally comic. There is a well-known example in Crashaw’s Saint Mary Magdelene, or the Weeper:

And now where e’er He Strays,

Among the Galilean Mountains,

Or more unwelcome ways,

He’s followed by two faithful fountains;

Two walking baths, two weeping motions;

Portable & compendious oceans.”

Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.

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Kieran Egan on Narrative as Compelling Pedagogy

Posted on November 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

“A model for teaching that draws on the power of the story, then, will ensure that we set up a conflict or sense of dramatic tension at the beginning of our lessons and unit. Thus, we create some expectation that we will satisfy at the end. It is this rhythm of expectation and satisfaction that will give us a principle for precisely selecting content…. We need, then, to be more conscious of the importance of beginning with a conflict or problem whose resolution at the end can set such a rhythm in motion.”

Kieran Egan

Teaching as Story-Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

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Term of Art: Apposition

Posted on November 20, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Apposition: Two consecutive, juxtaposed nouns or noun phrases are in apposition when they refer to the same person or thing, and when either can be omitted without seriously changing the meaning or the grammar of a sentence. Mrs. Thatcher and the British Prime Minister are in apposition in Mrs. Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, became leader of the Tory party in 1975. Here, both Mrs. Thatcher became leader…and The British Prime Minister became leader…could serve equally well alone. The term is often used when these criteria only partly apply, some grammarians using terms like partial or weak apposition to distinguish various types of lesser acceptability: ‘The heir to the throne arrived, Prince Charles’ (where only the second noun phrase can be omitted).

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

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