“…evidence of a diseased mind and lacerated heart.”
John Dunlop, The History of Fiction 1814
“A counsel of despair.”
George A. Aitken, Gulliver’s Travels 1896
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, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, readings/research
As I’ve previously mentioned, the Crime and Puzzlement material I post on this site quickly became, and remains, among the most popular and therefore heavily downloaded items here. So, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Buck Shot.”
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining” opens the lesson as a do-now exercise to get students settled, engaged, and thinking after a class change. You’ll need the PDF of the illustration and questions in order to conduct the investigation; to solve it, here is the typescript of the answer key.
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.
Acheron * Cocytes * Phlegethon * Lethe * Styx
Which is to say: the river of sorrow, the river of damnation, the river of fire, the river of oblivion, and the river of hate, upon whose waters even the gods swore.
Some classical writers imagined Lethe as a pool of oblivion and added the pool of Mnemosyne (memory) beside it. Others envisaged flat, featureless misty land beside the rivers which they named the fields of Asphodel. The Plain of Tartarus was reserved for more active punishment just as the Fields of Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed were reserved for blameless heroes. But even for such a proud hero-warrior as Achilles, it would be better to be the meanest ploughboy on its green earth than Emperor of all the Dead. That monarch was Hades Plouton—rich in lost souls and mineral wealth and married for all eternity to Persephone, the iron queen.
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.
Here is a worksheet on the Greek word roots the and theo. They mean god. You can find them in many key conceptual words in the high school curriculum, particularly pantheism and monotheism.
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.
“Bicameral Parliament with two chambers or houses, such as the US Congress with its Senate and House of Representatives, and the British Parliament with its house of commons and House of Lords.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, term of art
OK, here is a reading on the Bill of Rights and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The Bill of Rights is, of course, the name we citizens of the United States give to the aggregated first ten amendments to our Constitution. They are, both hermeneutically and politically, some of the most hotly contested language in our founding documents.
Therefore, conceptually, there is a lot to unpack here if you want to dilate on this material: continuity and change, citizens and the law, historical perspective (particularly the Third Amendment, on quartering troops), the spirit and letter of the law, the Supreme Court’s function in our republic–you get the picture.
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.
“Marginalization: A process by which a group or individual is denied access to important positions and symbols of economic, religious, or political power within any society. A marginal group may actually constitute a numerical majority—as in the case of blacks in South Africa—and should perhaps be distinguished from a minority group, which may be small in numbers, but has access to political or economic power.
Marginalization became a major topic of sociological research in the 1960s, largely in response to the realization that while certain developing countries demonstrated rapid economic growth, members of these societies were receiving increasingly unequal shares of the rewards of success. The process by which this occurred became a major source of study, particularly for those influenced by dependency, Marxist, and world-systems theories, who argued that the phenomenon was related to the world capitalist order and not just confined to particular societies.
Anthropologists, in particular, have tended to study marginal groups. This stems in part from the idea that, by looking at what happens on the margins of a society, one can see how that society defines itself and is defined in terms of other societies, and what constitute its key cultural features.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, term of art
OK, folks, here is the last post for today, a lesson plan on Watson, Crick, and DNA. The work of this lesson is simply this short reading and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I wrote this lesson last fall for the Personal Development class the school in which I served required its students to take. I wanted the material, and its presentation, to arouse the big essential question, “Is biology destiny?”
However, if you’re more interested in teaching this material as a science lesson, here is a slightly longer version of the reading and worksheet. If you want to amplify this lesson, especially for girls interested in science, the reading does mention Rosalind Franklin, whose story is a cautionary tale by any standard I recognize.
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.
“Hudson River School: Group of American realist landscape painters active between about 1820 to 1880 whose favorite subjects were scenes of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains. Famous members were Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Church.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Ok, folks, here is a set of five worksheets on the homophones eminent, imminent, and immanent. They’re all adjectives; the first two are in quite common use in English. The third, immanent, I’ve really only encountered as a term of art in philosophy and theology. Perhaps it’s not a word high schoolers need to know, but it certainly won’t harm them–other than possibly to arouse an interest in being a philosophy or theology major.
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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