Category Archives: Reference

These are materials for teachers and parents, and you’ll find, in this category, teachers copies and answer keys for worksheets, quotes related to domain-specific knowledge in English Language Arts and social studies, and quotes on issues of professional concern. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Iroquois

Posted on November 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Iriquois: Any member of the Iroquois Confederacy or more broadly, any speaker of Iroquoian languages. Iroquoian-speaking peoples were semisedentary, practiced agriculture, palisaded their villages, and dwelled in longhouses that lodged many families. Women worked the fields and, in matrilineal groups, helped determine the makeup of village councils. Men built houses, hunted, fished, and made war. Iroquoian mythology was largely preoccupied with supernatural aggression and cruelty, sorcery, torture, and cannibalism. Their formal religion consisted of agricultural festivals. Warfare was ingrained in Iroquois society, and war captives were often tortured for days or made permanent slaves, Today the various Iroquois tribes include about 20,000 members.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Nietzsche on Faith and Madness

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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Term of Art: Semantic Knowledge

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

“semantic knowledge: Data stored in long-term memory regarding general information and concepts.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Ambition

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.”

Ambrose Bierce

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

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Emerson on Post-Secondary Education

Posted on October 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

“We are shut up in schools and college education recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Copy Editing

Posted on October 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Copy Editing: The reading and correcting of manuscripts before setting of type, usually entailing attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, style and format consistency, and factual particulars such as names and places mentioned. Noun: copy editor; Verb: copy edit. ALSO COPY READING”

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

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12 Signs of the Zodiac

Posted on October 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

Aries (Ram) * Taurus (Bull) * Gemini (Twins) * Cancer (Crab) * Leo (Lion) * Virgo (Virgin) * Libra (Scales) * Scorpio (Scorpion) * Sagittarius (Archer) * Capricorn (Goat) * Aquarius (Water Carrier) * Pisces (Fish)

The Zodiac is a very old concept, which has impregnated our thought patterns for thousands of years. In essence it was the observation of the sun’s circular path through the heavens (as viewed from the earth) and the division of this into twelve equal sections of 30 degrees to make a complete circuit of 360 degrees. Like so much of our world, the start date is spring, the vernal equinox of 21 March, so Aries (21 March-20 April) must always start the cycle.

The symbols chosen by the Sumerian astrologers and their imaginative pattern-making of sacred shapes from the most prominent stars passed seamlessly into Babylonian, Egyptian, Hindu, and Greek thought—notably through the teachings of a pair of well-traveled Greeks, Eudoxus of Cnidus and from the Egyptian-Greek scholar Ptolemy, whose Almagest colonized the imagination of both Islam and Christendom.

But just to read the Sumerian names is to stand in witness of an impressive piece of 5,000-year-old living continuity: Luhunga (Farmer) is Aries; Gu Anna (Bull of Heaven) is Taurus; Mastabba Bagal (Great Twins) is Gemini; Al-Lul (Crayfish) is Cancer; Urgula (Lion) is Leo; Ab Sin (virgin land) is Virgo; Zib Baanna (scales) is Libra; Girtab (Scorpion) is Scorpio; Pabilsag (soldier) is Sagittarius; Suhurmas (goat-fish) is Capricorn; Gu La (‘Great One) is Aquarius, the water bearer during the winter rains; and Dununu (fish cord) is Pisces.

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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Jacobo Arbenz Guzman

Posted on October 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Jacobo Arbenz Guzman: (1913-1971) Soldier and president of Guatemala (1951-54). The son of a Swiss émigré, Arbenz joined the leftist army officers who overthrew the dictator Jorge Ubico (1878-1946) in 1944. Elected president in 1951, he made land reform his central project. His efforts to expropriate idle land owned by the United Fruit Company and his alleged Communist links led to an invasion sponsored by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. When the army refused to defend Arbenz against what appeared to be a superior force, he resigned and went into exile, and the CIA installed the leader of the proxy army, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1914-1957), as president.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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The Labyrinth of Solitude

Posted on October 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

“The Labyrinth of Solitude (El laberinto de la soledad, 1950; tr 1961): A book by Octavio Paz. This penetrating essay on Mexican history has probably been more widely read and is thus more influential than any of Paz’s other essays or poetry. In search of the meaning of the Mexican and, by extension, the Latin American experience, Paz singles out the conquest of the Indians by Spanish invaders as the moment the true Mexico became isolated and obscured by masks. Silence, dissimulation, machismo, hermeticism, violence, and the cult of death are the masks adopted by the Mexican to disguise his fundamental historical solitude. Paz argues, however, that solitude has become a universal part of the human condition and that all men, like the poet himself, must become conscious of this condition in order to find, in the plentitude of love and creative work, a glimpse of the way out of the labyrinth of solitude.

In the revised and supplemented edition of 1985, Paz clarifies his view of Mexican culture and history, and deals with U.S.-Mexico relations. He also reexamines the dichotomy between the “two Mexicos,” the “developed” and the “underdeveloped,” and finds that the distinction is itself an imposition of the former upon the latter. He discusses the “other” Mexico as not only a tradition and a culture, but as representing a philosophical “Other,” like the other within.

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Spanish Language

Posted on October 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Spanish language: Romance language spoken in Spain and in large parts of the New World. It has more that 332 million speakers, including over 23 million in the U.S. Its earliest written materials date from the 10th century, its first literary works from c.1150. The Castilian dialect, the source of modern standard Spanish, arose in the 9th century in north central Spain (Old Castile) and spread to central Spain (New Castile) by the 11th century. In the late 15th century, the kingdoms of Castile, Leon, and Aragon merged, and Castilian became the official language of all Spain, with Catalan and Galician (effectively a dialect of Portuguese) becoming regional languages and Aragonese and Leonese reduced to a fraction of their original speech areas. Latin-American regional dialects are derived from Castilian differ from it in phonology. Spanish has almost completely lost the case system of Latin. Nouns and adjectives show masculine or feminine gender, and the verb system is generally regular, but complex.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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