“A worked-up, contrived form of talent of self-presentation to entertain or win attention; an idiosyncratic routine or particular forte; mannerism.
‘Rebuttal is appropriate. For what we have here is no argument but a shtick, as we used to say in Vaudeville, an antic, a bit, a thing.’”
Donald Kaplan, in Language in America
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“The great quest of medieval science was for a perfect copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest, written in Egypt in 147 AD. It was known to have thirteen sections, with the most accurate analysis of star and planetary paths ever achieved, alongside a catalogue of 1,022 starts listed on a scale of magnitude from 1 to 6. It was a key that threatened to unlock the secrets of the heavens.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged numeracy, readings/research
“This grim little story is told with all the art we have learned to expect from Updike, but the nagging question remains: what does it come to? Rabbit, Janice and Ruth are all creatures of instinct, floundering in a world they cannot understand…The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.”
Milton Crane, Chicago Tribune
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
It’s Friday the thirteenth, and so far nothing bad has happened in my tiny corner of the universe; I hope the same is true for you.
This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using adverbs of time. I begin this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on anthropomorphism. However, if the concept of anthropomorphism is too abstract for your students, or if this lesson enters a second day, then here is a homophone worksheet on the nouns profit and prophet that may well be useful to you in other areas of your practice. When teaching this lesson, I also use this learning support which might also be useful elsewhere in your classroom; it’s in Microsoft Word, in any case, so it will be easy to bend to your needs. Here is the structured, scaffolded worksheet that is the mainstay of this lesson. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet to guide you in guiding your students.
And that’s it for another week. I hope spring has sprung where you live. The first azaleas are in bloom in the New York Botanical Garden, which is pleasant indeed.
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.
“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Wealth, if you use it, comes to an end. Learning, if you use it, increases.”
Swahili saying
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Slice of Life (adj): Showing or characterized by an unselectively naturalistic rendering of day-to-day life, as in a short story portraying starkly working-class existence; depicting actual experience.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“It was as though in those last months he [Adolf Eichmann] was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ch. 15 (1963)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Originally Maria Sklodowska. Polish-born French physical chemist. Born in Warsaw, she studied at the Sorbonne (from 1891). Seeking for radioactivity, recently discovered by Henri Becquerel in uranium, in other matter, she found it in thorium. In 1895 she married fellow physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906). Together they discovered the elements polonium and radium, and they distinguished alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. For their work on radioactivity (a term she coined), the Curies shared a 1903 Nobel Prize with Becquerel. After Pierre’s death, Marie was appointed to his professorship and became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she won a Nobel Prize for discovering polonium and isolating pure radium, becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. She died of leukemia caused by her long exposure to radioactivity. In 1995 she became the first woman whose own achievements earned her the honor of having her ashes enshrined in the Pantheon in Paris.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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