Here, on a rainy, warm Tuesday morning, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Puritans, the zealots who settled this country, and whose intellectual and spiritual descendants are still trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.
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.
“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.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a short worksheet on the Greek word root hepat/o. It means liver. This is another word root from which many words used in the health care professions: you want to avoid hepatitis, and pay attention when your doctor orders a hepatic panel.
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.
“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.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, philosophy/religion
“(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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research
Here, on a chilly Thursday morning in Manhattan, is a Cultural Literacy Worksheet on the Nuremberg Trials. I can think of a number of places and subjects in which a high school teacher could use this short worksheet.
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.
[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.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, readings/research
“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.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a short exercise on the Greek word root erythr/o; it means red. This is another of those roots that grows a lot of words used in the health professions.
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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