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.

Folk Art

“Folk Art: The arts of peasant societies, both past and present. Characterized by naïve subject matter and a vivacious style, folk art both perpetuates very ancient decorative traditions and draws selectively from art forms of sophisticated cultural traditions, e.g. the adaptation of 18th-century Rococo motifs in European folk art. Paintings, sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, costume, needlework, implements and tools all may be folk art. See NAÏVE and OUTSIDER ART.”

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

A Lesson Plan on Using the Predicate Adjective

Here is a lesson plan on using the predicate adjective in short, declarative sentences. The syntax of these kinds of short sentences, which is subject-linking verb-adjective, is one of the most common constructions in English speech and prose. For that reason, I have included a lesson on the predicate adjective on each of the first three units on parts of speech, to wit nouns, verbs, and adjectives, that I wrote about ten years ago and have revised ever since.

That’s a long way around explaining that you will see lessons on using the predicate adjective in grammatically complete declarative sentences at least a couple of more times.

In any case, I open this lesson with this worksheet on the homophones compliment and complement. Because the noun complement is often used as a synonym for predicate in grammar manuals, and I think it’s important that students know how to use grammar manuals, I want them to know this word. This scaffolded worksheet is the mainstay of this lesson; here is the teachers’ copy of it. Finally, here is an adjectives word bank. Please notice  that this document has four copies of the same word list–it’s meant to be cut in four pieces in a paper-saving measure.

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.

Term of Art: Atypical Learner

“atypical learner: A general term for a child who is different from the typical student in physical, intellectual, social, or emotional development, and who differs in mental characteristics, sensory abilities, communication abilities, or social behavior to the extent that special education services are required for that child to develop.”

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

Term of Art: Case

“case: Inflectional category, basically of nouns, which typically marks their syntactic function in relation to other parts of a sentence. E.g, in Latin vidi puellam ‘I saw a girl,’ puellam ‘(a) girl’ has the ending of the accusative case (puella-m), which marks it as the object of the verb (vidi ‘I-saw’).

Thence of various more abstract constructs. Thus the function of Mary in I saw Mary is like that of puellam in the example from Latin. Therefore, it too is traditionally ‘accusative,’ in opposition to the same word as a ‘nominative,’ in Mary saw me. Hence abstract cases, posited in principle in all languages, regardless of whether they are realized, as in languages such as Latin, by inflections.”

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

Historical Term: Activists

activists Members of a political group prepared to take action as opposed to those whose membership is passive, involving only, for example, payment of membership fees. In the 1960s and early 1970s the term was applied widely to those members of left-wing and youth ‘movements’ who attended demonstrations and rallies, usually against US involvement in Vietnam, or more generally against various aspects of Western capitalism.

In the 1980s, the term has been used in the UK mainly to describe members of constituency Labour parties who have sought to reform the party’s procedures and inject a more socialist element into its policies.”

Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.

Mark Twain on Profanity (in Our Current Circumstances)

“There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.”

Mark Twain

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

Term of Art: Dative

Dative: Indicating indirect object (action or feeling toward) or the object of certain prepositions, e.g., ‘He gave me the leftovers,’ ‘The scarf is for her.’”

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

Theodor Adorno, Famously, on Poetry after Auschwitz

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Theodor Adorno

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

Term of Art: Meritocracy

“Meritocracy: A social system in which status is achieved through ability and effort (merit), rather than ascribed on the basis of age, class, gender, or other such particularistic or inherited advantages. The term implies that the meritorious deserve any privileges which they accrue. In practice it is difficult to find reliable measures of merit about which social scientists can agree.

The term was coined by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) to refer to government by those identified as the most able high achievers, with merit defined as intelligence plus effort. His fantasy attempted to foresee the extreme consequences of a society which fully implemented the goal of equality of opportunity through the educational system, with the most able rising to the upper echelons, leaving intellectual dullards to carry out the humble manual work. The book warned that the new focus on intelligence and ability in the educational system merely institutionalized inequality of intellectual ability in place of inequality based on social class. Since judgements about what constitutes effort are inescapably moral (does a lazy genius merit rewarding? And, if so, why not reward a hard-working dullard?) the term remains highly contested (see, for example, John Goldthorpe, ‘Problems of “Meritocracy’) in Robert Erikson and Jan O. Jonsson (eds.). Can Education be Equalized?, 1996).”

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

Site Specific

“Site Specific: Artwork created, designed, or selected for a specific indoor or outdoor site. It may take shape as publicly displayed monumental sculpture commissioned by either city arts agencies or private corporations, or as earth art, often located away from urban centers. Beverly Pepper’s Fallen Sky, located in Barcelona, merges park with sculpture. This undulating earthen mound covered in multi-colored tiles is a recent tribute to Gaudi and the city’s art nouveau heritage. See also INSTALLATION, PUBLIC ART.”

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