Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Stolen Bases”

Alright, here is another lesson plan on a Crime and Puzzlement case, to wit, “Stolen Bases.”

This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun and idiom raison d’etre, derived from the French, obviously, opens the lesson if you are inclined to use it. Otherwise, moving right along, to conduct your investigation you’ll need this scan of the illustration, reading, and questions that are the circumstances of the case. Finally, to solve the case and bring the accused to the bar of justice, you’ll want the typescript of the answer key.

Best of luck, inspectors!

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.

Term of Art: Modifier

“Modifier: A word or phrase that qualifies, describes, or limits the meaning of a word, phrase or, clause. Frayed ribbon, dancing flowers, worldly wisdom.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

Forte (n)

Over the years, I’ve set out several times to write a context clues worksheet for the noun forte, and then never finished. So when it popped up as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day a few days back, I resolved to finally complete what should be a fairly mundane task. After all, forte is in fairly common use, isn’t it?

So I’m not sure why I heretofore struggled with writing this context clues worksheet on the noun forte. It means “one’s strong point” for the purposes of this worksheet and it’s the only way I use it in speech. But it has other meanings, including, as a noun, “the part of a sword or foil blade that is between the middle and the hilt and that is the strongest part of the blade.” Also as a noun, in the context of music, it means “a tone or passage played forte : a musical tone or passage played loudly.” So it is subtly polysemous.

I’ve always pronounced it “for-tay.” But there is contention about that. I’ll spare you the details, other than the topic sentence from a lengthy excursus from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, on pronouncing forte: “In forte we have a word derived from French that in its ‘strong point’ sense has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation.”

Whatever the case, this is a word educated people use in discourse, so our students should learn it for that reason alone.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Terrorism

Since it will remain perennially relevant, I’m afraid, today is a good a day as any to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on terrorism. It’s a full-page worksheet, so it works of independent practice–i.e. homework.

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.

Adapted Research Papers 6: Jesse Owens from A to Z

Here’s yet another adapted research papers, this one on legendary Olympian Jesse Owens. Mr. Owens, you may remember, was the four-time gold medalist at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As he was of African descent, Adolf Hitler refused to shake Mr. Owens’  hand after his victories. Incidentally, that was far from the only indignity Jesse Owens endured both as an Olympian and representative of the United States.

I remember two things about preparing and using this assignment: I wrote it to follow closely and clearly the Wikipedia article on Jesse Owens, and for two students who worked on this together, I also prepared, at their request, this additional research assignment on Adolf Hitler because they wanted to understand fully Jesse Owens’ experience in the 1936 Olympics. The Hitler assignment also follows the article on Adolf Hitler on Wikipedia. Both of these assignments are titled, with the name of their subjects, “from A to Z.” You’ll notice that there are 26 vocabulary words and 26 questions, i.e. A to Z in the outline structure.

The two young women for whom I wrote this material made the connection with Joe Louis on their own, which was inspiring to watch–the kind of thing a teacher hopes to see happen, I suppose. I imagine one could put together a short but compelling cross-disciplinary unit on racial and ethnic mythologies (something badly needed, I submit to you), white supremacy, with the experiences of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as a critical lens.

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.

Adapted Research Papers 5: Darfur and the Government of Sudan

I’m fairly certain that I intended that this structured research assignment on Darfur would be informed by the Wikipedia page on “The War in Darfur.” To be honest, though, I am not entirely certain about that. Part of the problem with the series of research papers I was adapting was that some of them were highly dynamic, changing situations.

In any case, this is a seven-page document that can, as everything else in this series of Adapted Research Papers posts, be manipulated (it’s in Microsoft Word) to the needs of you and your students.

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.

Adapted Research Papers 3: Apartheid

As below, here is another adapted research paper, this one on Black and white people in South Africa. So, for documents, here are several readings on Apartheid, the official South African ideology of ethnic segregation and oppression, along with its research questions and citation blanks.

Again, there is plenty of room for improvement in these documents. They’re in Microsoft Word, so they can be exported into other word processing software otherwise manipulated to suit your needs.

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.

Adapted Research Papers 2: Children During the Industrial Revolution

As below, this adapted research paper assignment includes this readings on children in the Industrial Revolution along with its questions and structured citation blanks. The material works together, but if students are able, they might be better served, in order to develop the kinds of procedural knowledge for research and writing this assignment aims to inculcate, to find their own sources to answer these questions.

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.

Adapted Research Papers 1: Supporting Documents

By 2008, when I started my third and final job working in the New York City Department of Education, I was (or at least I thought I was) beginning to hit my stride in preparing differentiated instruction for struggling learners. When I arrived at my new posting, however, I found I needed to create some sort of differentiation for a research paper project that was a joint requirement of the global studies and English departments.

So, I got right to it. The theme of this research paper assignment was oppression, and there were at least a dozen topics from which to choose. I chose three, made adapted research papers for them, and worked with students on them.

The next year, the scope and content of the assignment changed; the following year, it changed again. I tried to keep up, but in the end I thought it best just to write a set of broad assignments and use those. I’ve posted those in slightly different formats elsewhere on this blog.

Anyway, here are two documents I prepared as supports and instructions for working on these assignments: the first is a learning support that explains research topics and the second is the rules for completing these differentiating assignments. The five posts above this one are the assignments themselves. Let me forewarn you that this is not some of my best work; but rather than throw away these assignments, I’ll post them here in the possibility that someone might be able to use them. Like everything here, these are formatted in Microsoft Word, so you can edit, rewrite, and manipulate them to suit you and your students’ needs.

This series of documents continues for six posts above.

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.

Adapted Research Papers 4: The Holocaust

Moving right along, here is another pair of documents that together, once upon a time, composed an adapted research paper for my struggling students. So, here are several readings on the Holocaust along with their research questions and citation blanks for organizing the information for this assignment.

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.