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.

The Algonquin Wits: George S. Kaufman on Raymond Massey’s Method Acting

Posted on September 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

“‘Massey won’t be satisfied until he’s assassinated.’ Kaufman remarked about actor Raymond Massey’s heralded performance in Abe Lincoln in Illinois.”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference

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Raku (n)

Posted on September 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Coarse-grained, low-fired, and soft-glazed pottery ware developed by the Japanese for articles used in the tea ceremony. It is notable for its refined rusticity.”

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

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Opiate

Posted on September 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

“An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads to the jail yard.”

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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Master List of Latin Cognates

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

Over the years, I’ve worked steadily at engineering a vocabulary building curriculum that uses Greek and Latin word roots to help students develop the active academic lexicons they need to succeed in school. Early on, because I work with so many Spanish-speaking students, I started to work up cognate lists of words that were similar or even identical across the Romance Languages.

One of the results of that effort is this master list of Romance Language cognates. Over the summer I copied and pasted all these lists into the word root worksheets that proceed from a given root.

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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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Reference, Social Sciences

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Book of Answers: Robinson Crusoe

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Was there a real Robinson Crusoe? Daniel Defoe based The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719-20) on the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), a Scottish sailor who survived for more than four years on the desert island of Juan Fernandez off the Chilean coast. He became a celebrity after his rescue and homecoming in 1709.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Term of Art: Scaffolding

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Coaching or modeling provided by a teacher to increase students’ likelihood of success as they develop new skills or learn new concepts. Scaffolding in education is analogous to scaffolding in construction: just as a building’s scaffolding is a temporary framework that is withdrawn when the structure is is strong enough to stand on its own, so too is scaffolding on the classroom removed when students achieve competence in the targeted area. In any classroom, the teacher’s goal is to enable students to perform tasks on their own, with a minimum of adult aid. Effective scaffolding occurs when the teacher explains an assignment, brings the task to an appropriate level of difficulty, breaks the task into a doable sequence of operations, provides feedback, and helps students gain mastery of new knowledge. Good teachers have always employed scaffolding, even if they never heard of the term.”

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

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Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Andrew Wyeth: Christina’s World

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

“One of the best known and most popular works of the US artist Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). Painted in 1948, it depicts an eerily lit, sharply delineated but featureless farm landscape, with two farm buildings on the high horizon, while in the foreground is the mysterious figure of Christina, a thin-limbed girl propping herself up on the grass. Christina, whose view of the landscape we share, was a crippled neighbor of Wyeth’s in the Brandywine Valley, Pennsylvania.”

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

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Rotten Reviews: Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks

Posted on August 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

[It’s worth mentioning here, I think, that Thomas Mann was the Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1929. These Rotten Reviews refer, as above, to Buddenbrooks, published in 1901]

“Very few Americans will take the trouble to read this book ot the end. It contains no climaxes, no vivid surprise…. Interesting as the story may be it is too loosely constructed, and for many readers that will prove a barrier.”

Boston Evening Transcript, 1921

“Nothing but two thick tomes in which the author describes the worthless story of worthless people in worthless chatter.”

Edward Engel, in The Art of Folly 1961

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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The 11th Hour

Posted on August 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Significant 11s punctuate modern history. The First World War, after consuming some twenty million lives, ended with an armistice on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Eleven is also strongly associated with American and rocket power, for it was Apollo 11 from which Neil Armstrong made the first landing on the moon, The attack on the World Trade Centre was made by American Airlines flight 11, on 11 September 2001, an event now chronicled throughout the world as 9/11. Eleven also has strong numerological connotations as the union of 5 and 6 in the works of Pythagoras and his many followers.”

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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Moore’s Law

Posted on August 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

“The complexity of minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year…. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.

Electronics, 19 Apr. 1965. This statement became known as ‘Moore’s Law‘ of integrated circuits and computers, predicting that the number of transistors the computer industry would be able to place on a chip would double every couple of years.”

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

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