“Diatribe (noun): And abusive, often prolonged attack or denunciation; acrimonious harangue or critique.
‘Without polemic, dialectic, or diatribe, she has conveyed more clearly than anyone I’ve ever read before what it was like to be a girl in the 50’s, when one had a chance to grow up quietly and gradually.’ Susan Bolotin, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Many well-known adolescent difficulties are not intrinsic to the teenage years but are related to the mismatch between adolescents’ developmental needs and the kinds of experiences most junior high and high schools provide. When students need close affiliation, they experience large depersonalized schools; when they need to develop autonomy, they experience few opportunities for choice and punitive approaches to discipline; when they need expansive cognitive challenges and opportunities to demonstrate their competence, they experience work focused largely on the memorization of facts…”.
Excerpted from: Kohn, Alfie. What Does It Mean to be Well Educated? Boston: Beacon Press, 2007
In the fourth or fifth year of my teaching career here in New York, I put together on the fly a unit on writing reviews. The students to whom I presented it received it well. They wrote cogent, interesting reviews. I resolved to develop the unit further. Then, as with so many things floating around in my data warehouse, I never had the chance to use it again. So, it languished.
Happily, over the past couple of years, when a bit of spare time presented itself, I resumed work on developing this material. I’ve now fashioned it into a seven-lesson unit, and each lesson will be forthcoming in the next seven weeks. These lessons, in other words, will be the Weekly Texts for the next seven weeks. They’ll take the blog most of the way through the summer of 2025.
Let’s begin with the unit plan, along with a shorter simple outline of the lessons only if you find that useful.
Next up are the the worksheet template and the the lesson-plan template.
Along the way I accumulated a lot of documents that may or may not be appropriate for revising or expanding–or both–this unit. Here is the list of aesthetic criteria to drive analysis and criticism of whatever art form has chosen to review; this will turn up again in the fourth lesson on establishing aesthetic criteria. Depending on how far a student reviewing film wants to go, this glossary of critical film terms might be useful. Finally, where aggregated text is concerned, from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch, E.D., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil.New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), here is a list of terms from do-now exercises for this unit. This last document is more in the way of a learning support, I suppose.
And here is a list of all the do-now exercises I pulled aside for this unit. I haven’t included all of them, but rather pulled aside the ones I thought most vital to the focus of the unit. I’ll include the one I’ve included in the lesson, then two other freestanding posts with a do-now exercise from the list.
And that is it for this week. Everything here is formatted in Microsoft Word and open to your edits so that you can adjust this material to the needs of your students. Lesson one appears next week.
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.
“Liberal Arts: In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Biblical authority for fixing the number at seven comes from Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” Such applied subjects as law and medicine were excluded from the from the liberal arts on the grounds that they were concerned with purely practical matters. In modern times, the liberal arts include languages, sciences, philosophy, history, and related subjects. The term is a translation of the Latin artes liberales, so called because their pursuit was the privilege of freemen who were called liberi.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet and feel what they have to offer–words, mere words–must look shabby by comparison.
Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium is words. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who we are and what we are. Then we can step back and gain distance on what we’ve said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day’s end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then they can brood on what they’ve said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the possibility of new beginnings. In this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don’t permit.”
Excerpted from: Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
This week’s Text is a word-builder from the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. My understanding of linguistics is amateurish at best. Nonetheless, I would assess this document as of mid-level linguistic work, so it might not be appropriate for classroom use. It might be broken into pieces for teaching the inventory of prefixes and suffixes this document contains. Or, it might be handy to keep on one’s desk to keep all of this straight in one’s mind.
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.
“Critique (noun): A critical appraisal or commentary, especially of a literary work; an acute review or evaluation, generally with respect to an understood standard or interested public; report. Verb: critique.
‘The New Yorker recently observed, in a memorial note about the late Wolcott Gibbs, that if his written editorial opinions ‘could be released to the world (as they most assuredly can’t be), they would make probably a funnier and sounder critique of creative writing in the late twenties and early thirties than has ever been assembled.’ John Fischer, in Writing in America”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“fascism: A right-wing nationalist ideology or movement with a totalitarian and hierarchical structure that is fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism. In ancient Rome, the authority of the state was symbolized by the fasces, a bundle of rods bound together (signifying popular unity) with a protruding axe-head (denoting leadership). As such, it was appropriated by Mussolini to label the movement he led to power in Italy in 1922, but was subsequently generalized to cover a whole range of movements during the inter-war period. These include the National Socialists in Germany, as well as others such as Action Francaise, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, or the Falangists in Spain. In the post-war period, the term has been used, often prefixed by “neo,” to describe what are successors to these movements, as well as Peronism and, most recently, some movements in ex-Communist countries, such as Pamyat in Russia (see extreme-right parties). Given such diversity, does the term have any meaning?
Genuinely fascist ideologies are: monist, that is to say, based upon fundamental and basic truths about humanity and the environment which to not admit to question; simplistic, in the sense of ascribing complex phenomena to single causes and advancing single remedies; fundamentalist, that is, involving a division the world into “good” and “bad” with nothing in between; and conspiratorial, that is, predicated on the existence of a secret world-wide conspiracy by a hostile group seeking to manipulate the masses to achieve and or maintain a dominant position.
In content, these ideologies are distinguished by five main components. (1) Extreme nationalism, the belief that there is a clearly defined nation which has its own distinctive characteristics, culture, and interests, and which is superior to others. (2) An assertion of national decline—that at some point in the mythical past the nation was great, with harmonious social and political relationships, and dominant over others, and that subsequently it has disintegrated, become internally fractious and divided, and subordinate to lesser nations. (3) This process of national decline is often linked to a diminution of the racial purity of the nation. In some movements the nation is regarded as co-extensive with the race (the nation race), while in others, hierarchies of race are defined generically with nations located within them (the race nation); in virtually all cases, the view is taken that the introduction of impurities has weakened the nation and been responsible for its plight. (4) The blame for national decline and/or racial miscegenation is laid at the door of a conspiracy on the part of other nations/races seen as competing in a desperate struggle for dominance. (5) In that struggle, both capitalism and its political form, liberal democracy, are seen as mere divisive devices designed to fragment the nation and subordinate if further in the world order.
With regard to prescriptive content, the first priority is the reconstitution of the nation as an entity by restoring its purity. The second is to restore national dominance by reorganizing the polity, the economy, and society. Means to this end include variously: (1) the institution of an authoritarian and antiliberal state dominated by a single party; (2) total control by the latter over political aggregation, communication, and socialization: (3) direction by the state of labor and consumption to create a productionist and self-sufficient economy; and (4) a charismatic leader embodying the “real” interests of the nation and energizing the masses. With these priorities fulfilled, the nation would then be in a position to recapture its dominance, if necessary by military means.
Such priorities were explicit in the inter-war fascist movements, which engaged in racial/ethnic “cleansing,” establishing totalitarian political systems, productionist economies, and dictatorships, and of course went to war in pursuit of international dominance. But such parties can no longer openly espouse these extremes, and national/racial purity now takes the form of opposition to continuing immigration and demands for repatriation; totalitarianism and dictatorship have been replaced by lesser demands for a significant strengthening in the authority of the state, allegedly within a democratic framework; productionism has become interventionism; and military glory has been largely eschewed.”
Excerpted from: McLean, Iain, and Alistair McMillan, editors. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Ryukyu Islands: Island chain, Japan. It extends in an arc 600 miles (979 kilometers) long from southern Japan to the northern tip of Taiwan. The 55 islands and islets have a total land area of 870 square miles (2,254 square kilometers). In ancient times it was an independent kingdom, but Chinese and Japanese sovereignty were successively imposed on the archipelago from the 14th to the 19th centuries. In 1879 the Ryukyus became an integral part of Japan. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the U.S. took control of the islands; it returned them all by 1972. The U.S. maintains military bases on Okinawa. The islands are primarily rural, and agriculture is the dominant occupation.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“shoin-zukuri: Style of Japanese domestic architecture. The name is taken from a feature called the shoin, a study alcove with a built-in desk. Other common features included the toko-no-ma and chigai-dana (built-in shelves). The style, derived from Zen Buddhist monastic dwellings, gradually replaced the shinden-zukuri style during the Muromachi period (1338-1573). It is characterized by a new modesty of scale (forced on the aristocracy by loss of income), asymmetry and an irregular flowing together of masses, and the use of solid wall construction and sliding shoji rather than the movable partitions that divided the main living space in the shinden.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
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