“Who wrote ‘Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses’? Dorothy Parker, known for her sharp wit, writer the famous couplet in the poem ‘News Item‘ in 1926.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
On this, the second of the five Fridays in March, which is Women’s History Month, here is a reading on Emily Dickinson with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Like so many of the readings from the Intellectual Devotional series that I’ve adapted for classroom use, this is a remarkably thorough biography–at only a page in length–of Emily Dickinson and her art.
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.
“Louise Bennett: (1919-2006) Jamaican poet and folklorist. Louise Bennett is a distinctive and challenging female presence in Jamaican literature. Writing in Jamaican creole, she was one of the first to challenge the cultural hegemony of the Caribbean elite, and has been a model for the experimentation in language and rhythms of contemporary Caribbean poetry. Her celebration of African-Jamaican culture and promotion of black cultural self-confidence is apparent in her major collections (Jamaica) Dialect Verses (1942), Jamaica Labrish (1966) and Selected Poems (1983). Aunty Roachy Seh (1993) is a more recently published work.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Ottava Rima: In prosody a stanza of eight lines rhyming a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c. The form, which arose in Italy in the 14th century, was used by Boccaccio, Tasso, Ariosto, and many other Italian poets. In English is is usually written in iambic pentameters. It was used, for example, by Keats in ‘Isabella‘ (1820); in ‘Don Juan,’ Byron strikes the mock-heroic, almost burlesque note that has come to be associated with the form.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on rhyme. This is a half-page reading with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. In other words, a simple yet clear introduction to the concept.
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.
“He is, of course, a top-notch poet, and his bittersweet poems can indeed make us weak, make us feel incomplete. In 2002 he became the second living and first black poet to have his selected poems published in England in the Penguin Classics series. He is Jamaican by birth, and though he has resided for most of his adult life in England, where he took a university degree in sociology, he writes in Jamaican Creole. Not a dialect, not strictly a ‘patois,’ either, and not a mere post-colonial version of Standard English, Jamaican Creole is a language created out of hard necessity by African slaves from 17th century British English and West African, mostly Ashanti, language groups, with a lexical admixture from the Caribe and Arawak natives of the island. It is a powerfully expressive, flexible, and, not surprisingly, musical vernacular, sustained and elaborated upon for over four hundred years by the descendants of those slaves, including those who, like LKJ, have migrated out of Jamaica in the second great diaspora for England, Canada, and the United States. Fortunately, its grammar and orthography like that of pre-18th century British English, have never been rigidly formalized or fixed by an academy of notables or any authoritative dictionary. It is, therefore, a living, organically evolving language intimately connected to the lived experience of its speakers.”
Excerpted from: Banks, Russell, “Introduction,” in Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Mi Revalueshenary Fren. Port Townshend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, poetry, professional development
Moving right along with this big unit on Hip-Hop, here is the fourth lesson plan, on the West African griot tradition (which should not be confused with the Haitian dish of the same name). This is a key lesson in this process. I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun griot.
Because this lesson includes a viewing of the video for the song, here are lyrics to the Afropop song “Shaking the Tree,” a collaboration between British rock star Peter Gabriel and the Senegalese griot (he descends from a family of griots) Youssou N’Dour. Finally, at the center of this lesson is this reading and comprehension worksheet, which is also meant to spur discussion, on the griot tradition in Africa.
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.
If there is a lesson that can be omitted from this unit–and I realized this the minute I began its preparation–it is this third lesson, on the Medieval Troubadours. Yes they are part of the global oral tradition, but in a highly peculiar way. For instance, they used the Occitan language, which is now endangered. Their songs were born of the chivalric tradition and celebrate courtly love. This is a long way of saying that this material may not be of surpassing interest to teenagers.
In any event, I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a capella singing. Here is the reading and questions on the troubadours themselves, which is the principal work of this lesson.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the lyric as a form in poetry–and by extension, then, lyrics in music. This is a half-page document with a reading of three short sentences followed by three comprehension questions. A short, symmetrical introduction to the lyric form and nothing more.
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 is the second lesson plan from the History of Hip-Hop Unit. This lesson posits, proceeding from the previous two, that Home’s Odyssey and Iliad, composed to be read aloud and to glorify Greece, that these ancient epics are two of the world’s first Hip-Hop songs. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Muses so that students understand the reference in the first stanza of the Iliad. Here is the worksheet with reading and comprehension questions that is the centerpiece of this lesson.
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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