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.

Aesopian Language

Posted on January 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Aesopian Language Political double-talk or euphemism that has a special meaning to its advocates or initiates; a vocabulary of stock phrases, code words, and value judgments; dissembling or propagandistic jargon (from the early language of fables, in which chiefly slaves were conversant).

‘Soviet writers occasionally use Aesopian language, as writers did under the Czar, to convey hidden thoughts in disguise. Defenders of the regime, while attacking those writers for the use of Aesopian language, are now couching their attacks in Aesopian language.’ Leon Lipson, quite in Israel Shenker, Words and Their Masters.”

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

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Santayana on America

Posted on January 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

“America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.”

George Santayana

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

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Joseph Addison on Intellectual Humility

Posted on January 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

“The utmost extent of man’s knowledge is to know that he knows nothing.”

Joseph Addison, Essay on Pride (1794)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Brewer’s Curious Titles: All Quiet on the Western Front

Posted on January 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

“(German title Im Westen nichts neves). A novel (1929) of the First War by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970). Brutally realistic, and written in the first person, it is prefaced by a statement:

‘This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have accepted its shells, were destroyed by the war.’

In 1933 the book was publicly burned by the Nazis as being ‘defeatist,’ and Remarque was deprived of his citizenship. The title is ironic. It refers to the fact that a whole generation of his countrymen was destroyed while newspapers reported that there was ‘no news from the west.’ The film version (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone, was a landmark of American cinema.

The title, together with that of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), is played on in All Quiet on the Orient Express, a novel (1999) by Magnus Mills (b. 1954) about a man who doesn’t take a train to India.”

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

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The Weekly Text, January 19, 2018: A Complete Lesson Plan on Using Coordinating Conjunctions

Posted on January 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

OK, it’s Friday again, and like everybody else, I guess, I anticipate the weekend with relief.

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using coordinating conjunctions. I begin this lesson with this homophone worksheet on the the noun council and counsel used as both noun and a verb. If this lesson runs into a second day (I always plan for a variety of contingencies in a class period), here is–courtesy of the generous folks at Education World, where you can get a year-long supply of these exercises–an Everyday Edit exercise on Banned Books Week. The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet that guides students through the use of coordinating conjunctions. Finally, you’ll probably find helpful the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.

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.

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Rotten Rejections: Northanger Abbey By Jane Austen

Posted on January 18, 2018 | Leave a comment

“We are willing to return the manuscript for the same (advance) as we paid for it.”

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

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Lest We Forget (Spiro Agnew)

Posted on January 17, 2018 | 4 comments

[In my lifetime, political discourse in the United States has moved along a continuum from barely civil to openly hostile. Our current presidential administration is different only in that it uses barnyard epithets openly–you may, if you are so inclined, review the vile things one may find on Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes–in a variety of places around the Internet. It was Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, who impugned the patriotism and loyalty of those guilty of nothing more than disagreeing with his positions. If this sounds familiar, look at the headlines, because it is.]

“A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

Campaign speech, Detroit, Michigan, New Orleans, Louisiana, 19 October 1969

“Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.”

Speech at Illinois Republican meeting, Springfield, Illinois, 10 September 1970

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Address to California Republican state convention, 11 September 1970.

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

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Free-Trade

Posted on January 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Free-trade, n. The unrestricted interchange of commodities between nations—not, it must be observed, between states or provinces of the same nation. That is an entirely different thing, so we are assured by those who oppose free-trade, although wherein the difference consists is not altogether clear to anybody else. To all but those with the better light it seems that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for any part of the goose, and if a number of states are profited by exclusion of foreign products, each would be benefited (and therefore all prosper) by exclusion of the products of the others. To these benighted persons, too, it appears as if high duties on imports are beneficial, their absolute exclusion by law would be more beneficial; and that the former commercial isolation of Japan and China must have been productive of the happiest results to their logical inhabitants, with the courage of their opinions. What defect the Protectionist sees in that system he has never had goodness to explain—not even their great chief, the unspeakable scoundrel whose ingenious malevolence invented that peerless villainy, the custom house.”

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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6,585 Days of the Saros Cycle

Posted on January 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

“There are 6,585 days between one solar eclipse and another, which is 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours. This has been known, observed, and calculated for many thousands of years, but was probably first chronicled in ancient Babylon (in Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq). It would later be disseminated by the Greeks as the Saros Cycle.”

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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Education as Parenting

Posted on January 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Education is the mother and the father.”

Motto of the “Lost Boys of the Southern Sudan,” as seen on 60 Minutes (2001)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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