Here is an independent practice worksheet on Christianity that I wrote at some point for a freshman global studies class in New York City.
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.
“Oracle (noun): A shrine where deities were consulted for prophecies or revelations; a priest or other interpreter of supernal pronouncements or prophecies; any person thought to be a source or medium or divine communication, or one revered for his profound knowledge, foresightful wisdom, or authoritative counsel; a divinely inspired utterance, especially an enigmatic or ambiguously allegorical statement; a wise or purportedly wise opinion. Adjective: oracular, oraculous; adverb: oracularly; noun: oracularity, oracularness.
‘Presumably he prefers the anonymous ‘it’; and likes to see an expression like ‘I think that…’ replaced by ‘it is hypothesized…’ which, (apart from expurgating the dirty word “to think”) ministers to the bureaucratic underlings predilection for submissive autonomy combined with oracular authority.'”
Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Preference, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another.
An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘death is no better than life.’ It is longer.”
Ambrose Bierce
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“What was the name of Socrates’ wife? Famed for her shrewishness, the wife of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian philosopher was named Xantippe.”
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
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
This seems like as good (or the best) a time as any to post this short reading on the problem of evil and vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. This has tended to be high-interest material for the students I’ve served in my career, particularly high school juniors and seniors.
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 great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
This student self-assessment and reflection form has been kicking around my to-do folder for a couple of years now for a couple of reasons. The first is that I could never determine the best way to categorize and tag it (and I post it now because I have decided to take a much more casual attitude toward categories and gags, mostly because I realized this blog has a search function); the second is that this material, I am confident, remains solidly in the authors’ copyright.
Who are, to wit, Jay McTighe and Carol Ann Tomlinson. The book is Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2006). If you’re interested in curriculum design in general and in particular, in this case differentiating for struggling or idiosyncratic learners (or both), you probably know the names of these two distinguished experts. The book is excellent: I read it twice, taking extensive notes both times. Then I passed it along to assistant principal under whom I served. Every time I visited his office, I noticed that the book was close at hand.
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.
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.'”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged philosophy/religion
“I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.”
Socrates
Quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
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