Even though it drives them crazy when I do it, I often address my students as “hippies.” Here, then, for all of them across the years, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on hippies if you have any use for it.
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.
“cabal: The name given to the ministry which took power in England in 1667 (when Charles II dismissed his chancellor, Clarendon), taken from the initials of its members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. The term is also used to mean any close-knit group of persons, particularly those involved in intrigue.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
His name is now a corporate brand, so perhaps this reading on Nikola Tesla and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet will help students understand the significance of that fact–and learn something about the plot of the recent film The Current War.
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.
“Exposition: Exposition, or expository writing, is traditionally understood as writing that aims to transmit information to presumably interested parties as distinguished from writing that aims to persuade the reader. As there will be elements of persuasive writing in expository, so also will there be elements of the expository in persuasive.
In the following discussion, however, the perspective is that of rhetorical analysis, which regards all written communication (including the note on the refrigerator door) as guided by a communicative/persuasive purpose. Exposition is, then, that type of prose writing that attempts to create, in its target audience, the attitude that the writer is objectively presenting the facts relative to a given subject. Exposition thus is not a division of prose discourse according to intent, but rather represents a tone that the writer wishes the reader to accept as ‘factual.’ The writer of exposition cultivates a tone designed to allow (encourage) the reader to think that the writer has no specific interest in, or position in regard to, the subject matter presented.
Excerpted from: Trail, George Y. Rhetorical Terms and Concepts: A Contemporary Glossary. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000.
“Reading V. is like listening to a scholarly but erratic documentation of hell by a disinterested onlooker, while verbal sewage and vignettes of all that is most disgusting in mankind alternates with with sociological asides, sardonic and blasphemous attacks on Christianity, Freudian tidbits…. To attempt to convey a sense of how completely boring all this melee finally is would tax the capabilities of better reviewers then myself.”
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Excerpted from: Bernard, 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 fiction/literature, literary oddities
This worksheet on the Greek Word roots pan and panto–they mean all–guides students through an extremely productive root in English. You’ll find this root at the basis of words like panorama and pantheism–relatively commonly used words.
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.
“commodification: A term derived from Marxist analyses of the social forces that guide the production and sale of products, or commodities. Since the Renaissance, artworks have been commodities paid for by religious or royal patrons. By the 20th century, art production had become entangled in a complex web composed of collectors, auction houses, galleries, and museums. In the tradition of Dada, 1960s artists feeling constrained by increasing commercialism sought to create unmarketable works, giving rise to conceptual, political, performance, and earth art. Recent artists concerned with issues of originality, authorship, and camp, are indirectly addressing issues of commodification and canon formation.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Moving right along, here is a complete lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Boy Scout.”
I open this lesson, after the relative chaos of a class change, with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the American English idiom bone to pick. This PDF of the illustration and questions of the case is the centerpiece of the lesson. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key to finish the lesson by solving the case.
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.
“Annales School: An influential school of French historians, formed around the journal Annales: economies, societes, civilisations, which was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at the University of Strasburg in 1929. The Annales School attempted to develop a ‘total history’ as a critique of existing historical methodology which offered only a chronology of events. They turned attention away from political history towards a macro-historical analysis of societies over long time-periods. The Annales School, which included Maurice Halbwachs, Andre Siegfried, Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Georges Duby, had the following characteristics: it was interdisciplinary; it was concerned to study very long historical periods (la longue duree) and social structure; some members of the School employed quantitative methods; they examined the interaction between geographical environment, material culture, and society.
The work of the original members is represented, for example, by Block who attempted a total analysis of medieval society in his Feudal Society (1961). In the post-war period two works in particular have been very influential in the social science, namely Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1949) and Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis of fourteenth-century village life (Montaillou, 1975). The School has influenced historical sociology, especially the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (see, for example, his two-volume study of The Modern-World System, 1974 and 1980) Critics have argued that the Annales School neglected political processes. Nor is it clear how the Annales approach was fundamentally different in scope and interdisciplinarity from, for example, historical materialism, the historical sociology of Max Weber in his The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations (1924), or the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias in The Court Society (1969)–although it tends to be less abstract then all of these.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Ok, teachers in Boston and environs, if not the entire state of Massachussetts, I’m hard-pressed to imagine that this reading on legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet wouldn’t be of high interest in you educational marketplace, so to speak. I conducted a brisk trade in these documents when I taught in Springfield, Massachusetts, last year.
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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