OK, I’m drawing down to the last couple of posts for this morning. Here is a high-interest (depending on whom you’re teaching, I guess) reading on John Lennon along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
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.
“Social Realism: A trend in 20th-century art before 1950. Often political in nature, social realism is distinctive in its realistic depictions of the ills of society. The influence of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros was felt by North American social realist and WPA artists. Some North Americans emerged from the Ashcan School, while others, like Ben Shahn, evolved separately.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Mesopotamia: An ancient region of southwest Asia in present-day Iraq, lying between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Its alluvial plains were the site of the ancient civilizations of Akkad, Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, now lying within Iraq.”
Excerpted from: Wright, Edmund, Ed. The Oxford Desk Encyclopedia of World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Baghdad or Bagdad: City, capital of Iraq. Located on the Tigris River, the site has been settled from ancient times. It rose to importance after being chosen in AD 762 by Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754-775) as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty. Under Harun ar-Rashid it achieved its greatest glory, reflected in the Thousand and One Nights, as one of the world’s largest and richest cities. A center of Islam, it was second only to Constantinople in trade and culture. It began to decline when the capital was moved to Samarra in 809. It was sacked by the Mongols under Hulegu in 1258, taken by Timur in 1401, and captured by the Persian Suleyman I in 1524. It was a shadow of its former self in 1638, when it was absorbed by the Ottoman empire. In 1921 it became capital of the kingdom of Iraq. In 1958 a coup d’etat in Baghdad ended the monarchy. Severely damaged by bombing in the Persian Gulf War, it has since suffered under international trade sanctions.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Who is Scheherazade? She is the narrator or the Arabian Nights (c. 1450), who tells stories night after night to keep her husband, the Sultan Schahriah, from strangling her at dawn. Scheherazade tells her stories to her sister Dinarzade in the Sultan’s hearing.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Finally, today, here is a high-interest reading on Super Bowl III along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
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 lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Incident at the Ferry.”
I use this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the American idiom “Every dog has his day” to open this lesson. You’ll need this PDF of the illustration and questions surrounding the case so that your students may conduct their investigation. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key to solve this heinous crime.
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.
“Dido and Aeneas * Helen and Paris * Layla and Majnoun * Antara and Bala * Prince Khosrow and Shirin * Pyramus and Thisbe * Romeo and Juliet * Abelard and Heloise * Tristan and Isolde
Only the saddest stories live forever.
Aeneas would betray his lover, Dido, the queen of Carthage (who had generously offered hospitality to his refugee-party from Troy) in order to follow his political destiny, while Paris would unwittingly start the whole gory cycle of the Trojan War by receiving the love of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, as reward from the Goddess Aphrodite.
The love of Majnoun (literally the ‘possessed’ or ‘mad one’) for his beloved friend from school, Layla, is perhaps the most influential of all the Arab world’s tales. The pair were separated by a family feud and after his beloved had been given to another man, Majnoun wasted his life away in the desert, a virgin ascetic composing love songs to his impossible dream. Scholars have traced fifty-nine variations of this tale, including the cycle of Antara and Abla; the Persian story of this love of Prince Khosrow for Princess Shirin; Pyramus and Thisbe; and the most famous spin-off of all—Romeo and Juliet(‘A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Do with their death bury their parents’ strife’).
Medieval European love was equally unpromising. The story of Abelard and Heloise begins with the elderly male canon-scholar seducing his brilliant but poor young pupil in twelfth-century Paris. Once pregnant she is sent away to give birth in Brittany and then tricked with a ‘secret and private’ marriage before being consigned to a nunnery. Only after Heloise’s many admirers take their revenge on Abelard by castrating him does his proper love grow, and it is as chaste monk and nun that they enjoy the correspondence that would later be published.
Tristan and Isolde has inspired countless tellings, including Sir Thomas Malory’s creation of L’Morte d’Arthur. It has been traced to a twelfth century text but clearly looks back to a much older Celtic tradition in which the dashing young Tristan is sent to Ireland to bring back the beautiful Isolde for his uncle Mark, King of Cornwall. However, during their journey the two mistakenly drink a love potion destined to be consumed during the marriage ceremony. Thereafter their lives are full of deceit and romping adventure as they aspire to be good and dutiful to King Mark, yet stay true to their love. They can only break out of their fateful destiny by taking their own lives.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“Black Elk: In a work entitled Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (1932; repr 1988), Black Elk (1863-1950) recounted his life to John G. Neihardt (1881-1973), conveying important insights into Native American culture, religion, and life on the Plains, as well as a firsthand account of the destruction of that way of life. Black Elk witnessed both Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, in which the U.S. Army killed over a hundred men, women, and children. The massacre marked the end of the Indian Wars.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“White-Collar Crime: A term introduced by Edwin Sutherland in the 1940s in order to draw attention to the illegalities and misdeeds of ‘captains of industry’ and other middle-class members of the business world (see his ‘White-Collar Criminality,’ American Sociological Review, 1940, or White-Collar Crime, 1949). The great value of the idea was to redress the imbalance in criminology’s obsession with crimes of the working class. The concept tends to be used very broadly, to include both activities carried out by employees against their employer (embezzlement, pilfering), and activities undertaken by corporate executives on behalf of the corporation itself (such as violation of anti-trust regulations or stock-market rules). Strictly speaking the latter should more accurately be designated corporate crime.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences, Worksheets
Tagged readings/research, term of art, united states history
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