“Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.”
H.L. Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.”
H.L. Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of conspicuous consumption–an idea which requires attention, I submit, in our benighted age. This is a simple, half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions.
Which includes a reference to Thorstein Veblen, the progenitor of the idea of conspicuous consumption, as well as conspicuous leisure. Veblen is, I think, an important figure in the history of American thought. I’ve posted several quotes from him on this blog, which you can find simply by searching his name in the search bar above.
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, once again informed by Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, is a worksheet on knowing when to capitalize the noun god and when not to. This is a full-page worksheet with a short, informative reading and ten modified cloze exercises.
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.
“Summerhill: A private English boarding school founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill to implement his belief in the value of eliminating all compulsion from children’s lives. The school was initially opened under a different name in Germany in 1921; in 1923, the school moved to a house called Summerhill in Lyme Regis in the south of England, where it enrolled five pupils. Enrollment was never more than a few dozen students, but the school gained an international reputation because of its radical belief in children’s freedom and Neill’s widely read publications. His book Summerhill was a bestseller in the United States in the 1960s and became required reading in hundreds of universities. Neill was a spokesman for the most permissive wing of the progressive education movement, proposing that children should be free to decide how to live, what to learn, and whether they wanted to learn. Neill believed that ‘the function of the child is to live his own life—not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.’”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
Here is a reading on anarchism along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
This is a relatively short reading, but nonetheless a good general introduction to anarchist philosophy. It also effectively introduces some key figures in the history of anarchism, and allows that this was a political movement that often used violence as a means to achieve its ends. Because many of the teenagers I have served over the years have been what I guess I would call “natural anarchists,” certain students in my classes have taken a relatively high interest in this material.
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.
“Theodore Adorno: (1903-1969): German philosopher, one of the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School. With Max Horkheimer, he attacked the philosophical premises of the Enlightenment tradition. Steeped in Marxist theory, Adorno believed that capitalism turned culture into a ‘fetish,’ an instrument of repression; but contrary to Marx, he took a strongly pessimistic view of the long-term course of history. Instead of progress toward the freedom and fulfillment of all individuals, he saw increasing cultural and political enslavement to the capitalist economic system, aided by technology and ‘instrumental reason.’ He called this process the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment.’ Adorno was haunted by the question of how intellectuals could perform a critical social role without being co-opted by exactly the forces that they sought to criticize; he worried that social criticism might become a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution.
Adorno, who studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg, also wrote extensively about music. Some of his more important works in English translation include Negative Dialectics (1966), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), Minima Moralia (1974), and Aesthetic Theory (1984).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Not that demand for it is likely to be great, but here, nonetheless, is a reading on Friedrich Nietzsche along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
I wrote this material for a student I worked with at the very beginning of my teaching career. After he used it, I don’t believe I ever printed another copy of it. I have some history with Nietzsche, so I can tell you that this is a workmanlike, mostly superficial account of his philosophy. But how, really, to deal with a thinker of Nietzsche’s range, depth, and insight in one page? Impossible, I say.
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.
“An educated man…is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself, and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.”
Alan Simpson on becoming president of Vassar College (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Here is a reading on Erasmus along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
I don’t know if anyone teaches Erasmus of Rotterdam, as he was and is known, at the secondary level. He is by any measure an exemplary Northern Renaissance humanist. Now that I have this set of documents, I might add it to my list of biographical research assignments for global studies–provided that I ever use those materials again. Whatever the case in your classroom, this document is–as is virtually everything on Mark’s Text Terminal–formatted in Microsoft Word. In other words, these are open-source documents for you to do with what you will.
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.
“relevant: An adjective usually attached to an activity or reading assignment to show that it has some relationship to students own lives. Relevance has become very important in modern education, on the assumption that students want to learn mostly about ideas, events, and processes that they can connect to their personal experiences. The belief that whatever is studied must relate directly to students’ own lives ignores the fact that students need extensive background knowledge on which to build new understandings. If students learn only what is directly connected to their own lives, their universe of learning will be severely limited and dependent on their family and community resources.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
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