Late spring cleaning continues at Mark’s Text Terminal, and I’ll take a moment here to post the last of my short word root exercises, this exercise on the Greek root xanth/o. It means yellow. It will turn up at the base of many words in the sciences.
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.
“(1915) A volume of verse epitaphs by Edgar Lee Masters. The men and women of Spoon River narrate their own biographies from the cemetery where they like buried. Realistic and sometimes cynical, the free-verse monologues often contradict the pious and optimistic epitaphs written on the gravestones. The poems made their first appearance in Reedy’s Mirror in 1914 and 1915, and William Marion Reedy himself was partly responsible for their inception: he gave Masters a copy of J.W. Mackall’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology. And the style of the Greek poems impressed Masters deeply. New Spoon River (1924) was a less successful sequel.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, readings/research
“We don’t want so much to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.”
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, women's history
Here is a word root worksheet on the Greek root rhod/o. It means red. Now you know why, even though they are often purple, those beautiful plants are called rhododendrons.
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.
“Traditionally, a story belonging to any culture that is derived from primitive beliefs, presenting supernatural episodes to explain cosmic forces and the natural order. Regardless of the culture in which they originate, myths are generally concerned with the same themes and motifs: creation, divinity, the significance of life and death, natural phenomena, and the adventures of mythical heroes.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
The end of the school year is right around the corner, and it couldn’t come a moment too soon for me. After next week, we here in New York City (and the state as well, I guess) are looking at two weeks of high-stakes testing, which is akin to slow-motion nightmare.
Anyway, one of the things I’ve noticed when I analyze the page-view statistics here at Mark’s Text Terminal is that people fairly heavily traffic the word root worksheets I have posted over the past three years. As it happens, last summer, after several months of deliberation, I took some of those worksheets and formed them into a year-long, one-instructional-period-per-week unit for building basic academic vocabulary in the students it is my privilege to serve.
So, here is the lesson plan that accompanies this worksheet on the Latin word roots ann and enn–they mean year. Finally, here is a context clues worksheet on the adverb yearly. One of the things you’ll notice about these word root lessons, if you choose to use the do-now exercise to start the lesson, is that the do-now worksheets contain a hint to the meaning of the root. I wrote all the context clues worksheets for these lessons specifically for them, to show students, even within the confines of a 44-minute long class period, that prior knowledge (i.e. that gained from work on the do-now exercise) is useful in understanding the mainstay of the lesson (i.e. the word root worksheet itself).
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.
On the final day of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month for 2018, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Mao Zedong (aka Mao Tse-Tung).
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Ganges River. Any study of or discussion of India or Indian culture would by definition require, I would think, knowledge of this river that is sacred to Hindus.
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.
“Japanese novelist, playwright, and essayist. Mishima elicits very strong reactions among Japanese, for whom his celebrated ritual suicide has raised very large and troubling questions that remain unanswered.
As a young author, Mishima quickly earned a reputation for intellectual and artistic genius. As revealed in his essay Taiyo to tetsu (1968; tr Sun and Steel, 1970), he was deeply troubled about the dichotomy between mind and body that afflicted modern civilization. This and other philosophical concerns are treated in works such as Kamen no kokuhaku (1949; tr Confessions of a Mask, 1958), which is also noteworthy as Japan’s first homosexual autobiography, and Hojo no umi (1965-71; tr The Sea of Fertility, 1971-74). The latter, Mishima’s final work, is a tetralogy of daunting intellectual density. Perhaps his best-known work is Kinkakuji (1956; tr The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1959), a brilliant philosophical novel.
Yet this is the same author who wrote reams of cheap fiction, starred in gangster movies, and was a fixture of the popular press, where he even appeared seminude in photos. Mishima’s narcissism was a match for his genius. His was not an ordinary literary career: Mishima lived the life of a jet-set socialite and achieved an international celebrity status unheard of in the context of a traditionally inward looking and self-effacing Japanese literary community.
Like many post war Japanese writers and intellectuals, Mishima was deeply concerned about modern Japan as a spiritual wasteland. But unlike his contemporaries, Mishima did not only express his concerns in writing. He also acted upon his beliefs, launching a personal crusade to restore traditional Bushido values and imperial majesty to what he felt had become a nation of drones.
In a feat of self-dramatization that some called inspired and others spurned as madness, Mishima became commander of a small, ultrarightist organization, the Tatenokai (Shield Society). Then, on November 25, 1970, in one of the defining moments of modern Japanese history, Mishima and several of his lieutenants occupied the Japanese Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo. And in full view of a stunned nation and the world, Japan’s greatest living writer disemboweled himself. This single stroke, whose meaning has been endlessly debated, instantly elevated Yukio Mishima to a mythic stature.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Because Shinto is a Japanese religion that is essentially a form of animism, I think I can offer, as part of Mark’s Text Terminal’s observation of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on animism.
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.
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