“Who was Simon Legree and where did he come from? The archetypal villain first appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as the brutal degenerate who flogs Tom to death.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“When was Dalton Trumbo summoned before the House Committee on Un-American activities? In 1947. The screenwriter and author of Johnny Got His Gun (1939) was imprisoned and blacklisted for his refusal to answer questions about his Communist affiliations.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Oedipus tearing at his eyes, Lear in his demented eloquence upon the moors, Gloucester weeping from those ’empty orbs’—these are the metaphors of cultural self-mutilation in a stumbling colossus. Eyeless at Gaza, Samson struggled to retain the power to pull down the pillars that destroyed him and his enemies together. The U.S. Bureau of the Census meanwhile sends out printed forms to ask illiterate Americans to indicate their reading levels.”
Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (1985)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
A Fable for Our Time from William S. Burroughs:
“At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb and couldn’t wait to drop it on the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks, eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician’s look about him. He told us stories by the campfire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer – East is evil, West is good.
Suddenly, a badger erupts among the boys – don’t know why he did it, just playful, friendly and inexperienced like the Aztec Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his 1911 Colt .45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing it with every shot at six feet. Finally he puts his gun three inches from the badger’s side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down the slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying.
‘You see an animal, you kill it, don’t you? It might have bitten one of the boys.’
The badger just wanted to romp and play, and he gets shot with a .45 government issue. Contact that. Identify with that. Feel that. And ask yourself, whose life is worth more? The badger, or this evil piece of white shit?”
From Burroughs’ novella “The Cat Inside“
[If you’re interested in hearing William S. Burroughs read this, click here.]
“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
English teachers, do you teach Jane Austen? I’ve worked in a couple of high schools, and I don’t recall that she was taught in either place. I put together this reading on Jane Austen and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for a student who had seen the 1995 film Clueless, discovered that it was based on Jane Austen’s novel Emma, and wanted to know more about that novel, a comedy of manners.
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.
“The Manchurian Candidate: A memorable film (1962) directed by John Frankenheimer, based on Richard Condon’s novel of the same name (1959). It tells the story of a Korean War ‘hero’ (played by Laurence Harvey) who returns to the USA as a brainwashed zombie triggered to kill a liberal politician, his ‘control’ being his ambitious mother (played by Angela Lansbury). She goes on to order him to kill the presidential nominee, so that her husband, the vice-presidential candidate, can take over. Manchuria is a region of communist China to the north of North Korea. The expression ‘Manchurian candidate’ has subsequently been used to denote a person who has been brainwashed by some organization or foreign power and programmed to carry out its orders automatically.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Alright, moving right along on this fine Vermont morning, here is a reading on The Catcher in the Rye along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is really more in the way of an introduction to the novel–and maybe a way of motivating reluctant or alienated learners to take a chance on the book.
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.
On a ninety-degree day in Vermont, here, appropriately, is a lesson plan on the Aesop’s fable “The Boy Bathing.” You’ll need this reading and inquiry questions for students to conduct the lesson. You’ll notice, as you will in all of these lessons I’ve posted on Aesop’s fables, that there is plenty of room to expand the range and nature of the questions on the worksheet. That’s by design. Aesop’s fables are miniature lessons in philosophy, and the kinds of questions they arouse can be improvised based on student perception, interest, and need.
Incidentally, this is the last of these I have to post at the moment. I could write more relatively easily. Are you using them? If so, leave a comment, and I’ll put writing a few more on my to-do list.
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.
When I taught high school in Lower Manhattan, The Canterbury Tales was in the English Language Arts curricular cycle. I have always assumed that one of the big ideas in teaching this book was continuity and change, particularly where language is concerned. After all, this book is a significant moment in the evolution of English as a vernacular language.
I worked up this reading on Geoffrey Chaucer and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to assist the kids in my classes to prepare to read and at least gain some understanding of the own of Chaucer.
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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