Tag Archives: readings/research

The Weekly Text, March 27, 2020, Women’s History Week Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Victoria Woodhull

Here’s the last post of the day and for the final Friday of Women’s History Month 2020, a short reading on the fascinating Victoria Woodhull and 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.

A Lesson Plan on the Admission of the First 13 of the United States from The Order of Things

Here is something new at Mark’s Text Terminal: a reading and analysis lesson plan derived from the text of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book The Order of ThingsI’ll be writing up a summary of this work and its purpose on the “About Posts & Texts” page, which you can click through to just above the banner photograph. I am still thinking through how to describe the object of these lessons (I have 30 of them outlined at this point), but I can say this much: these worksheets are an attempt to provide students practice, as a road to developing their own understanding of what former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called the work of “symbolic analysts.”

This first lesson plan is on the admission of the first 13 of the United States. The worksheet for this lesson calls upon students to read and analyze both language and numbers (two sets of symbols, in other words) in order to answer a series of relatively simple comprehension questions. There is a lot of room to alter this material to you and your students’ needs; as always, these documents are in Microsoft Word, so they are easily manipulable.

More of these are forthcoming, as is a more extensive explanation of them and rationale for their use, as above, on the “About Posts & Texts” page.

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.

Impressionism

Impressionism: The 19th-century movement, well developed by the time of the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, that is now regarded as the culmination of realism. The impressionist painters analyzed natural effects with devoted intensity. They devised the spectrum palette and relied on optical mixing to capture the impression of light at a given moment. The most important of them include Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Rotten Reviews: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

“…evidence of a diseased mind and lacerated heart.”

 John Dunlop, The History of Fiction 1814

“A counsel of despair.”

George A. Aitken, Gulliver’s Travels 1896

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998. 

A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Buck Shot”

As I’ve previously mentioned, the Crime and Puzzlement material I post on this site quickly became, and remains, among the most popular and therefore heavily downloaded items here. So, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Buck Shot.”

This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining” opens the lesson as a do-now exercise to get students settled, engaged, and thinking after a class change. You’ll need the PDF of the illustration and questions in order to conduct the investigation; to solve it, here is the typescript of the answer key.

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.

5 Rivers of Hades

Acheron * Cocytes * Phlegethon * Lethe * Styx

Which is to say: the river of sorrow, the river of damnation, the river of fire, the river of oblivion, and the river of hate, upon whose waters even the gods swore.

Some classical writers imagined Lethe as a pool of oblivion and added the pool of Mnemosyne (memory) beside it. Others envisaged flat, featureless misty land beside the rivers which they named the fields of Asphodel. The Plain of Tartarus was reserved for more active punishment just as the Fields of Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed were reserved for blameless heroes. But even for such a proud hero-warrior as Achilles, it would be better to be the meanest ploughboy on its green earth than Emperor of all the Dead. That monarch was Hades Plouton—rich in lost souls and mineral wealth and married for all eternity to Persephone, the iron queen.

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.

Bill of Rights

OK, here is a reading on the Bill of Rights and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The Bill of Rights is, of course, the name we citizens of the United States give to the aggregated first ten amendments to our Constitution. They are, both hermeneutically and politically, some of the most hotly contested language in our founding documents.

Therefore, conceptually, there is a lot to unpack here if you want to dilate on this material: continuity and change, citizens and the law, historical perspective (particularly the Third Amendment, on quartering troops), the spirit and letter of the law, the Supreme Court’s function in our republic–you get the picture.

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.

A Lesson Plan on Watson, Crick, and DNA

OK, folks, here is the last post for today, a lesson plan on Watson, Crick, and DNA. The work of this lesson is simply this short reading and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I wrote this lesson last fall for the Personal Development class the school in which I served required its students to take. I wanted the material, and its presentation, to arouse the big essential question, “Is biology destiny?”

However, if you’re more interested in teaching this material as a science lesson, here is a slightly longer version of the reading and worksheet. If you want to amplify this lesson, especially for girls interested in science, the reading does mention Rosalind Franklin, whose story is a cautionary tale by any standard I recognize.

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.

Hudson River School

Hudson River School: Group of American realist landscape painters active between about 1820 to 1880 whose favorite subjects were scenes of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains. Famous members were Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Church.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt

A Man for All Seasons: A play (1960), later a film (1967), by Robert Bolt (1924-95) about the Tudor statesmen Sir Thomas More and his opposition to Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The title was derived by Bolt from a description of More by his contemporary Robert Whittington (c. 1480 – c. 1530), who wrote:

 ‘More is a man of angel’s wit and singular learning; I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes; and sometimes of as sad a gravity: as how say: a man for all seasons.’

Vulgaria (1521)

 Whittington in turn borrowed the tag from Erasmus, a friend of More’s, who had described More in his preface to In Praise of Folly (1509) with the words omnium horarum hominem (‘a man for all hours’).”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.