Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on conciseness. This is a full-page worksheet, although it could certainly be made more, uh, concise by turning it into a half-page worksheet by removing a question or two–there are four, total. Especially because the reading is only two sentences.
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 caricature. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. This is a word and concept that would be useful in certain kinds of reviews, either as a noun (a caricature of) or a transitive verb (The critic caricatured the intentions of the author).
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.
OK, moving right along with this Writing Reviews unit, here is the first lesson plan, which aims to introduce students to the concept of the review. The do-now exercise for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom having an axe to grind. I think any reviewer has by definition an ax to grind, hence this document. Finally, here is the structured analytical worksheet on the concept of reviews that is the mainstay of this lesson.
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 is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of the archetype, should you find it helpful in teaching about writing reviews. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. As I have come to expect from the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, this is both cogent and thorough.
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.
“Diatribe (noun): And abusive, often prolonged attack or denunciation; acrimonious harangue or critique.
‘Without polemic, dialectic, or diatribe, she has conveyed more clearly than anyone I’ve ever read before what it was like to be a girl in the 50’s, when one had a chance to grow up quietly and gradually.’ Susan Bolotin, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
OK, as promised in last week’s Text regarding additional do-now exercises to accompany this unit on writing reviews, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on allusion, should it be helpful to your conception or interpretation of these lessons. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. This material introduces the concept of allusion with both brevity and thoroughness.
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 the fourth or fifth year of my teaching career here in New York, I put together on the fly a unit on writing reviews. The students to whom I presented it received it well. They wrote cogent, interesting reviews. I resolved to develop the unit further. Then, as with so many things floating around in my data warehouse, I never had the chance to use it again. So, it languished.
Happily, over the past couple of years, when a bit of spare time presented itself, I resumed work on developing this material. I’ve now fashioned it into a seven-lesson unit, and each lesson will be forthcoming in the next seven weeks. These lessons, in other words, will be the Weekly Texts for the next seven weeks. They’ll take the blog most of the way through the summer of 2025.
Let’s begin with the unit plan, along with a shorter simple outline of the lessons only if you find that useful.
Next up are the the worksheet template and the the lesson-plan template.
Along the way I accumulated a lot of documents that may or may not be appropriate for revising or expanding–or both–this unit. Here is the list of aesthetic criteria to drive analysis and criticism of whatever art form has chosen to review; this will turn up again in the fourth lesson on establishing aesthetic criteria. Depending on how far a student reviewing film wants to go, this glossary of critical film terms might be useful. Finally, where aggregated text is concerned, from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch, E.D., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil.New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), here is a list of terms from do-now exercises for this unit. This last document is more in the way of a learning support, I suppose.
And here is a list of all the do-now exercises I pulled aside for this unit. I haven’t included all of them, but rather pulled aside the ones I thought most vital to the focus of the unit. I’ll include the one I’ve included in the lesson, then two other freestanding posts with a do-now exercise from the list.
And that is it for this week. Everything here is formatted in Microsoft Word and open to your edits so that you can adjust this material to the needs of your students. Lesson one appears next week.
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 is a worksheet on the verb need when used with an object and an infinitive.
The teacher needs a better idea to prepare more cogent lessons.
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.
I rather doubt there will be a huge amount of demand for this Cultural Literacy worksheet on treasury bills, though perhaps there should be. I developed it when I worked in a economics-and-finance-themed high school in Manhattan a number of years ago, then never used it.
In any case. this is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. The second two of the three sentences are longish compounds separated by semicolons which might be best broken up and rewritten as simpler clauses for students who struggle with these kinds of sentences.
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.
This week’s Text is a word-builder from the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. My understanding of linguistics is amateurish at best. Nonetheless, I would assess this document as of mid-level linguistic work, so it might not be appropriate for classroom use. It might be broken into pieces for teaching the inventory of prefixes and suffixes this document contains. Or, it might be handy to keep on one’s desk to keep all of this straight in one’s mind.
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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