Here is a short independent practice worksheet on Athens that I’ve had good luck using with struggling and emergent readers. It’s short, punchy, very easy to edit or adapt, and covers the key concepts about the center of the ancient Greek world.
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.
On a very chilly morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” This expression remains in sufficiently common usage that students probably ought to learn it somewhere along the way–if they don’t hear it in social contexts, didactic teaching may be called for. This document might help.
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.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States; this holiday, to me at least, given the political and cultural atmosphere in this country, feels especially important this year. If you ever feel a need to do something to make the world a more just place, today is the day to take action. As soon as the temperature rises to its balmy high of six degrees here in Springfield, Massachusetts, I’ll make the two-block trek to the Salvation Army Donation Center to deliver a couple of bags of things I can with which I can afford to part.
To celebrate the day, here is a reading on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and a vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet to attend it. As a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Justice Marshall did the work to bring about Dr. King’s version of a just society for all, regardless of skin color, in the United States. While he argued a number of significant cases that led to ethnic justice, his crowning achievement by most standards must be his triumph in the Kansas desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
If you find these materials useful, let me remind you that at this point in January, we are on the eve of Black History Month 2019. Mark’s Text Terminal will feature a full month of posts on Black History–as it does every year.
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.
Over the years I have been intermittently interested in the Trivium as a way of helping students to think in a linear manner. Anyone dealing with this medieval division and taxonomy of knowledge will quickly come into contact with Scholasticism, and, working backward chronologically, Aristotle. I still haven’t decided if a teacher could or should return to medieval categories of knowledge, but I do think there is a case to be made for teaching rhetoric in high school English Language Arts class.
Because I have some old-fashioned ideas about the equality of opportunity in society, I have made working in struggling, inner-city schools my office for my entire career. Last November, I made the move from one of these schools in New York City to one in Springfield, Massachusetts. One of the first documents to cross my purview in the service of a student was a writing assignment for a work of fiction in an English Language Arts class. My talented colleague, and I thank her for this, asked her students to use one of three rhetorical strategies in this assignment. It was a treat to see.
Anyway, along the way in trying to develop instructional materials related to rhetoric, I transcribed the gravamen of Aristotle’s analysis of rhetoric (from this edition of his treatise) for use in planning a unit on the it. If you can use it, there is a several-page Word document under that hyperlink
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.
Students everywhere, I expect, are thoroughly assimilated into digital culture and not especially interested in its origins and folklore–of which, as it turns out, there is a great deal. Take, for example, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a nineteenth-century polymath who is arguably the father of the computer. The amount of human error involved in mathematical work troubled Babbage, so he set out to invent the difference engine, a steam powered mechanical computer engineered to produce error-free mathematical tabulations.
Babbage’s invention has fascinated people since its inception, and unless I miss my guess, you will see in the course of your teaching career at least a few students interested in the history of computer technology. If so, then this reading on Charles Babbage and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it should serve as a short but thorough introduction to this obscure but important and fascinating historical figure.
If your students are up to and for it, you might also consider putting William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s (they are, incidentally, the progenitors of cyberpunk) work of alternate history and speculative fiction, The Difference Engine, in front of them. I like Gibson’s early work (his Neuromancer is a defining text of the cyberpunk genre, and a masterpiece in any case), don’t know much about Sterling, but found the novel fascinating.
Addendum: Please see the comments below from my esteemed high school chum Terry on the role of Ada Lovelace in creating the “software” to make Babbage’s engine actually perform more than basic mathematical tasks.
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.
These five worksheets on the homophones lead and led are not exactly the most cogent ever to issue from my pen. They do stand on their own, I think, and with some tinkering (which I may get to in the future, and since these are in Microsoft Word and can be manipulated, you can get to whenever you see fit) they might increase in cogency and therefore effectiveness.
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.
“Anagram: (Greek ‘writing back or anew’) The letters of a word or phrase are transposed to form a new word. For instance, the word ‘Stanhope’ can be turned into the word ‘phaetons.’ A common feature of crosswords. Samuel Butler’s title Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere.'”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
There are several places along the continuum of English Language Arts instruction, I would think, where this Cultural Literacy worksheet on allusion could come in handy.
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.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the noun teetotaler; there is probably an argument to be made to teaching this word to high schoolers, though the reasons, for me late on a Friday afternoon, look in my mind’s eye like pretty thin gruel. I haven’t worked with many students interested in the concept teetotaler and the lifestyle it represents.
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 complete lesson plan on using coordinating conjunctions. I open this exercise with this homophone worksheet on the homophones desert and dessert; while I realize that these two words, properly pronounced, aren’t really homophones, these are nonetheless words that students (and adults for that matter) frequently confuse, so I think it’s worth taking a moment to help them sort out these two words. Should this lesson stumble into another day for any reason, here is an everyday edit on Ludwig van Beethoven–and if you like Everyday Edit worksheets, the generous people at Education World have a yearlong supply of them posted as giveaways.
This structured worksheet of modified cloze exercises is the mainstay of this lesson; here too (contrived for the teacher’s ease of use) is the the teacher’s copy and answer key for the worksheet.
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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