Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Gordie Howe

Last year, while working in Springfield, Massachusetts, I was interested to learn that many of my students were interested in and followed hockey. This was partly due, I guess, to the presence of the Springfield Thunderbirds, a minor league hockey team; it was also due to the fact that several girls I taught actually played the game themselves.

So, one of the things I developed for these students is this reading on hockey legend Gordie Howe and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I have several more hockey-related readings and worksheet, so if this sport is of interest to your students, be on the lookout here.

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.

Jerome Bruner on Narrative

“A ‘story’ (fictional or actual) involves an Agent who Acts to achieve a Goal in a recognizable Setting by the use of certain Means. What drives the story, what makes it worth telling, is Trouble: some misfit between Agent, Acts, Goals, Settings, and Means.”

Jerome Bruner

The Culture of Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

The Weekly Text, November 8, 2019: A Lesson Plan on the Art of Summarizing

Alright, this week’s Text is a lesson plan on the art of summarizing which is part of a bigger unit on argumentation that I wrote–but used only once–a couple of years ago.

This context clues worksheet on the verb concede (which is used transitively, but can be used intransitively, according to Merriam-Webster’s, by writing to make concession) opens the lesson. I use this exemplar of a summary, drawn from the book that informs this unit, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2018) as a learning support and model text. This learning support on the verbs used in the rhetorical figures of argumentation supplies students with the vocabulary they require to postulate and write sound arguments. Here are the two exercises for summarizing that are at the center of this lesson. Finally, here is the worksheet for this lesson that contains the full text of the exemplar linked to above.

And that’s it for another week at Mark’s Text Terminal. Enjoy the weekend.

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.

Prodigious (adj)

Moving right along, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective prodigious, a word that students probably ought to know before they graduate high school. As I post this, I realize I probably ought to write a worksheet on the noun, prodigy, as well.

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.

Term of Art: Euphony

“euphony: Literally the property of ‘sounding well.’ But used at one time of principle equivalent to that of ‘ease or articulation’: thus it was for reasons of ‘euphony’ that one consonant undergoes assimilation to another, or that successive syllables are matched in vowel harmony.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

The Three Stooges

Because one seldom has a chance to see real genius at work, this reading on The Three Stooges and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet might be a salutary antidote to that deficit.

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.

Word Root Exercise: Nom-o and Nomy

This worksheet on the Greek roots nom-o and nomy can, if necessary, familiarize your students with this very productive root in English, particularly in the world of teaching and learning; it means law, system of laws, management, and rule. Taxonomy obviously grows from this root, and it is just as obviously a word learners really ought to know.

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: Sparta

If you can use it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Sparta–you know, the ancient Greek city-state known for its, uh, Spartan characteristics.

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.

Black Sabbath

In the early- to mid-1970s, they were all the rage among certain of my peers, but I mostly listened to Bob Dylan in those days. If you have students who are fans of heavy metal music, then this reading on Black Sabbath and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it will be, I expect, of high interest to those students. After all, Ozzy Osbourne still occupies a relatively prominent place in the culture.

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.

Polyglot (n)

I don’t know if high school students really need to know the word (though it wouldn’t hurt, I submit), but if you think they do, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun polyglot for you.

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.