“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
“In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit it is the first.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
The Weekly Text for this first Friday in August is this reading on muckraker Jacob Riis and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. New York City teachers, nota bene: Riis’s name is on parks, monuments, and buildings in your town.
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.
If you teach middle-schoolers, this reading on growth spurts and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet might be something helpful for you. The Sheltered English Immersion class I took last winter for my Massachusetts license was held in a middle-school health classroom, and I saw a lot of stuff like these materials there.
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.
[Here’s an ugly term and concept to consider in the present-day United States; we have elected representatives, alas, articulating garbage like this.]
baskaap (Afrikaan, ‘masterhood’). The underlying white supremacist ethos crudely expressing the ideology of Apartheid.
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion
“What did Zora Neale Hurston do before becoming a novelist? Hurston was a folklorist who studied with anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College. In Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), she compiled black traditions of the South and the Caribbean. Her novels include Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“code mixing: Sometimes distinguished, though not always in the same way, from code switching. E.g. where a speaker switches as frequent intervals from one language etc. to another, for no discoverable external reason.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
If July 30th isn’t high summer, I don’t know what is.
So it’s a particularly good time to post this reading on the legendary Shot Heard Around the World that decided the 1951 National League Playoffs between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. It’s a legendary moment in the history of Major League Baseball; the story aroused my interest in the game, and I am now a baseball fan. In any case, here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies the reading.
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.
“History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don’t use the stuff,–well, it might as well be dead.”
Arnold J. Toynbee on NBC (1955)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
One look at the list of vocabulary words on this worksheet on the Greek word root onym will expose just how productive this root is in English. Indeed, it shows up in a wide range of commonly used English words. It means both name and word. You find it in synonym and anonymous, two words so commonly used in English that they alone prove the need for students to know and understand this 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.
“A much-performed American musical by Leonard Bernstein (1918-90), with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930). It was first staged in 1957. The story is an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York’s West Side dockland area, with the Montagues and the Capulets being replaced by rival teenage gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The rivalry erupts into violence as a result of the love between Tony, one of the Jets, and Maria, the sister of the leader of the Sharks. The 1961 film version won an Oscar for best picture.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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