Category Archives: Independent Practice

This is material either specifically designed for or appropriate to use for what is more commonly known as “homework.”

Word Root Exercise: Extra-, Extro

Here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots extra and extro. They mean outside and beyond. This two roots are at the base of a lot of high-frequency words in English, including two adjectives commonly used in your own school–extracurricular and extramural.

Or how about the strong expository verb extrapolate? Surely something we want students to be able to do. Then of course there is always the old standby, extraordinary, literally “beyond ordinary.” Enough said.

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.

Cultural Literacy: The Great Gatsby

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on The Great Gatsby. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. In other words, the sparest of introduction what many people regard as the Great American Novel.

If you’re looking for something a bit longer on Gatsby, you’ll find it here. Likewise, if you need a reading on F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, you’ll find one here.

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.

Erasmus

Here is a reading on Erasmus along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

I don’t know if anyone teaches Erasmus of Rotterdam, as he was and is known, at the secondary level. He is by any measure an exemplary Northern Renaissance humanist. Now that I have this set of documents, I might add it to my list of biographical research assignments for global studies–provided that I ever use those materials again. Whatever the case in your classroom, this document is–as is virtually everything on Mark’s Text Terminal–formatted in Microsoft Word. In other words, these are open-source documents for you to do with what you will.

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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Genius (n), Brilliant (adj)

Here is a worksheet on differentiating the use of genius and brilliant. This document, like all documents under the title above, are informed by Paul Brian’s book Common Errors in English Usage, to which he allows full access at no charge at the Washington State University website.

The simple usage point of this worksheet consists in this: genius is a noun, and brilliant is an adjective. In other words, you can say “He is a genius” (using genius as a predicate noun), but you cannot say “He does genius work,” because genius is not an adjective and cannot modify the noun work. You can also say something like “I think Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is a work of genius.”

You can, however, say both “He is brilliant” (using brilliant as a predicate adjective), and you can say “He does brilliant work,” (using brilliant as an attributive adjective). You cannot say “He is a brilliant.” It doesn’t sound right in any case, though, does it? Brilliant, as above, is an adjective and should be used as one.

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.

Cultural Literacy: The Grapes of Wrath

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on The Grapes of Wrath. This is a half-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. In other words, a concise introduction to the novel’s basic plot, with an excursus on the origins of its title.

If you’re looking for something longer on this book, you’ll find it here. If you want something on John Steinbeck himself, here that is as 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.

Word Root Exercise: Arch, Archi, Arche/o, and Archae/o

Here is a worksheet on the Greek roots arc , archi, archeo, and archae/o. They mean rule, chief, first, and ancient. You can probably see archaeology (i.e. the study of ancient things) growing from the final of the four, but the others are a bit more obscure. There is an element of polysemy in these roots, which may make this worksheet, or at least finding the pattern of meaning in the words on it, a bit more difficult for students.

Still, when you think of words like archenemy, included in this document, archbishop, or archdiocese, suddenly chief and first come into sharper focus. Likewise monarch, archetype and hierarchy, also both present in this worksheet, reinforce those meanings. As far as rule is concerned, many of the political and social positions described by words growing from this root do indeed rule, as well as promulgate rules.

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.

Cicero

Last but not least on this cool Sunday morning in southwestern Vermont, here is a reading on Cicero along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

This is a good general introduction to the great Roman orator. I assembled this material with a variety of uses in mind, including a biographical research paper the freshman global studies curriculum in my New York City high school assigned. But Marcus Tullus Cicero is a key figure in world history, so I can think of a lot of uses for this material. For example, this summer I had the good fortune to become involved with professional development in Debate-Centered Instruction; I might open a unit on debate and rhetoric with these documents.

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.

Elvis Presley

Here is a reading on Elvis Presley along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This has tended to be high-interest material for some students, so I have tagged it as such.

For other students, Elvis may be of no interest whatsoever. I’d just like to mention that he presents an interesting case study on cultural appropriation. Did you know “Hound Dog” (which has been recorded, according to the song’s Wikipedia page, “more than 250 times”) was originally a hit for Big Mama Thornton (which was answered, humorously, by Rufus Thomas in his song “Bear Cat“) and was a number one hit for her on the R&B charts? Of that the first song (and his first hit single) he ever recorded, at Sun Studio’s Memphis Recording Service, was “That’s All Right,” composed by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup

In other words, this is a good reading to open a discussion about how white artists, especially in the 1950s, helped themselves to the work of black artists and got rich doing it. This is so well documented at this point that if you search “white artists not paying royalties to black artists” you will find a trove of information about this practice. Even gigantic media company BMG admits Black artists were cheated out of fair contracts and royalty payments. I salute Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy for calling for reparations to Black recording artists.

There is a lot to chew on here. The essential question here is something like “What is cultural appropriation and what is outright theft? What is the difference?”

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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Garner (vt), Garnish (vt)

Here is a worksheet on differentiating the use of the verbs garner and garnish, two verbs that sound alike but mean very different things (here is a context clues worksheet on garnish I wrote a few days back because it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day.) This is a full-page worksheet with a five-sentence reading and ten modified cloze exercises.

For the purposes of this worksheet, garner means “to acquire by effort,” “earn.” “accumulate”, and “collect.” Garnish, on the other hand, means “to add decorative or savory touches to (food or drink).” Both of these verbs are used only transitively, so don’t forget your direct object. You must garner something (praise, awards, evidence, sympathy) just as you must garnish something–a pork chop, a hot fudge sundae, a birthday cake).

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.

Word Root Exercise: E-

Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root e-, a tiny morpheme that means, simply, out. If you’ve used other word root worksheets on this blog, you’ll quickly see that this is not among the strongest of them I’ve assembled. At the same time, words like egress, eject, and elude–not to mention educate (in the sense of “drawing out of”) to carry connotations, if not outright denotations, of out.

Still, this is a tough inferential nut to crack.

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.