Term of Art: Striving Reader

Posted on July 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

“striving reader: A student whose reading skills are below grade level.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

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Cultural Literacy: Kitsch

Posted on July 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on kitsch. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and two questions and nicely introduces this concept. It’s not hard to see how the words kitsch or kitschy would find their way into a review–especially of, say, a visual arts exhibition.

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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Affect

Posted on July 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

“affect: Loan-word borrowed from the German Affekt. In nineteenth-century psychology the term is synonymous with emotion or excitement. Borrowing from that tradition, psychoanalysis defines affect as a quantity of psychic energy or a sum or excitation accompanying events that take place in the life of the psyche. Affect is not a direct emotional representation of an event, but a trace or residue that is aroused or reactivated through the repetition of that event or by some equivalent to it. Like libido, affect is quantifiable and both drives and images are therefore said to have a quota of affect.

In Freud’s theory of hysteria (the so-called Seduction Theory), the blocking of the affect corresponding to a traumatic event has a causal role; because it cannot be expressed or discharged in words, it takes the form of a somatic symptom. In his later writings Freud consistently makes a distinction between affect and representations, which may be either verbal or visual. The verbalization of the talking cure thus becomes an intellectualized way of discharging affects relating to childhood experiences.

One of the criticisms leveled at Lacan by certain of his fellow psychoanalysts is that he tends to pay little attention to affect.”

Excerpted from: Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2001.

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The Weekly Text, 11 July 2025: Lesson Three of a Unit on Writing Reviews

Posted on July 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

OK, moving right along, here is the third lesson plan of the Writing Reviews Unit, this one on gathering and judiciously using evidence in a piece of argumentative writing. The do-now exercise for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on genre: This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four simple sentences four questions. Finally, this structured note-taking and outlining worksheet is the primary work of this lesson.

The worksheet is longish by design, and can, as can all the documents in this post, can be easily edited. Like just about everything on this blog, these documents are formatted in Microsoft Word, so fully manipulable.

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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Mural

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Mural: A large painting or decoration applied directly on a wall surface or completed separately and later affixed to it. Early Italian Renaissance examples include church frescoes, while in this century Expressionist and Social Realist murals have been commissioned for public buildings in postrevolutionary Mexico.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Cultural Literacy: Irony

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on irony. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions–just the basics, in other words. This is useful word and concept in particular for reviewing books and movies.

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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Discursive

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Discursive (adjective): Covering a range of topics or discoursing freely and broadly, moving from subject to subject; characterized by rational analysis rather than intuition. Adverb: discursively; noun: discursiveness.

‘He published some of the best reporting—of an unofficial and personal kind—that was written about the war, and he elicited from Augustus John his delightful discursive memoirs, in which history is unimportant and chronology does not exist.’ Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Cultural Literacy: Euphemism

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on euphemism, which I think might be useful in writing reviews, especially since reviews often use euphemisms so soften harsh judgments. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the first of which is a compound separated by a semicolon, and may be best shortened for emergent readers and users of English as a second language) and three comprehension questions.

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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The Doubter’s Companion: Bees

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

Bees: In his Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire points out that bees seem superior to humans because one of their secretions is useful. Nothing a human secretes is of use; quite the contrary. Whatever we produce makes us disagreeable to be around.

The bee’s social organization also invites comparisons. If the queen were to be removed and the drones were able to convince the worker bees to go on working while they stepped in as managers, what would happen to our supply of honey?

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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The Weekly Text, 4 July 2025: Lesson Two of the Writing Reviews Unit

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

The second lesson plan of the Writing Reviews Unit is about argumentation, which any review will need to do well to convince its readers. In fact, when I first began working on these materials in 2006 or so, I conceived them as an introduction to the kind of academic writing kids really need to know how to do before they graduate high school.

So this scaffolded worksheet seeks to assist students in developing their own understanding of the difference between a quarrel and an argument in order to clarify the rhetorical and epistemological purpose of an argument. You might find the the teacher’s copy of the worksheet useful.

This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of to damn with faint praise, the use of which in a review I will take as a given.

Happy Fourth of July! I bid you a restful day and evening.

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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