“Magic Realism: Deriving from the metaphysical period of Giorgio de Chirico (see METAPHYSICAL ART) and related to surrealism, magic realism translates everyday experiences into disturbing images by curious juxtapositions of sharply painted elements. Balthus and Peter Blume are magic realists. Also called precise realism, sharp focus realism.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Moving right along, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Good Ship Contessa.”
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on perhaps the best-known of Aesop’s Fables, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Here is the scan of the illustrations and questions with which to conduct the investigation of this case. Finally, 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.
Given current history, now seems like a good time to post this reading on autoimmune disease 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.
The amount of research on reading is voluminous. Even after reading what I consider and exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) amount of this material across a period of 15 years, I still barely scratched the surface of this body of literature. At the classroom level, however, teaching practice demands keen attention to two things: decoding–i.e. recognizing the correspondence between letters and their sounds, known as phonemic awareness, and comprehension–i.e. understanding the meanings of words and applying that understanding, in synthesis, to the entire body of a text to understand it.
English is a tough language to decode. One person who recognized this and wanted to do something about it was the Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was sufficiently concerned about the odd vagaries of English spelling that he actually bequeathed money in his estate for spelling reform. Indeed, there is a form of orthography known as the Shavian Alphabet (Aside: Shavian is both an adjective and a noun meaning, basically, related to George Bernard Shaw and his writings.)
In any case, one of the well-known representations of the challenges of English phonics, often erroneously (it first appeared, apparently, in a letter from Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt) attributed to Shaw, is the word ghoti. It is possible, using English phonics, to pronounce this word as fish: take the gh from tough (i.e. f), the o from the plural women (i.e. short i), and the ti from action (i.e. sh).
Over the years, when I had a few minutes left in a class period, generally at the beginning of the school year, I would trot this out for the struggling readers and English language learners I served. After explaining–in summary of course–much of the foregoing in this essay, I would point out to students that if they struggled with English phonics and their representation in orthography, they were in very good company: George Bernard Shaw, Nobel prizewinning author whose plays are still routinely performed today.
This year, I finally wrote out this lesson plan on ghoti for use in a full class period. Here is the accompanying worksheet and the teacher’s copy of same. I added a few words, which I grabbed somewhere along the line. Now it’s yours if you can use it.
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.
“When did the Iranian government condemn writer Salman Rushdie to death? Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence against the author of The Satanic Verses on February 15, 1989. Rushdie has been in hiding since.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
[Over the years in my classrooms, it was hard to miss the fact that students who struggled with reading, particularly the students of Asian Pacific descent I served, would nonetheless exhaust my school library’s supply of anime. In researching this post, I learned that Bakin’s best-known book, Hakkenden, has been adapted to anime. For that reason, I have tagged this as high-interest material.]
“Kyokutei Bakin: (1767-1849) Japanese fiction writer of the late-Tokugawa period. Bakin was among the most gifted writers of his time, and succeeded in establishing himself as a serious writer in an age dominated by the lowbrow entertainment genre of Gesaku. Bakin is best known for an extraordinary tour-de-force, Hakkenden (1814-1832), whose title translates, improbably, as “Eight Canine Biographies.” This high-flown historical romance of noble vengeance, with its thickly applied Confucianist morality of virtue rewarded and vice punished, ranks as Japan’s longest literary narrative. Hakkenden has retained its popularity in contemporary Japan, albeit in abridged modern editions.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
As I mentioned the previous posts in which I published these documents (and you can learn more about these materials in the “About Posts & Texts” page on the homepage of this blog, just above the banner photograph), I began to contrive lessons from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book The Order of Things just about the time I left public education last month. So, because I have only used these materials in the classroom a couple of times, they remain somewhat tentative.
Nonetheless, I wrote 30 of them, and have the document templates prepared to write 30 more–at least. If you’ve ever considered commenting on Mark’s Text Terminal, I would be very much obliged to hear what you think of these lessons. I intended them for emergent and struggling readers as a means to experience directly the task of reading and comprehending two symbolic systems (i.e. numbers and letters) at the same time.
So, here is a lesson plan on admission (and readmission after the Civil War) of states to the Union, along with its reading and comprehension worksheet. The worksheet is relatively short; like most other things on this blog, however, it is in Microsoft Word and therefore easily manipulable to your needs. I suppose, as I look at these, they have the potential for transfer into cross-disciplinary instruction.
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.
OK, while Jimmy Rushing (“Mr. Five by Five“) sings the blues in the background, let me offer this high-interest reading on Larry Bird along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Bird, in my experience over the years, remains of interest to students who are likewise interested in professional basketball.
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.
“Nine has always been respected by the Chinese, for it has tonal resonance with ‘long lasting’ and was also associated with the Emperor, who had nine dragons embroidered on his robe and ruled over a court divided between nine ranks of courtiers who could gain nine sorts of reward. This respect for the power of 9 led to many social listings of 9, often charged with an observant sense of humor, as well as the more serious concept of how individuals were bound ninefold to their family, clan, and community.
Here are the 9 Admirable Social Habits:
*Relieving tension * Courteous attention. * Discreet
Mention * Tenacious retention * Assiduousness *
Wise abstention * Calculated prevention * Truthful
Intervention * A sense of dimension
The 9 Virtues—as defined for the near legendary Emperor Yu (2205-2100. BC) by his chief minister Kao-Yao:
*Affability combined with dignity * Mildness with
firmness * Bluntness with respectfulness * Ability with
reverence * Docility with boldness * Straightforwardness
with gentleness * Easiness with discrimination * Vigo
with sincerity * Valor with goodness
The 9 Follies:
*To think oneself immortal * To think investments are
secure * To mistake conventional good manners for
friendship * To expect any reward for doing right * To
imagine the rich regard you as an equal * To continue to
drink after you have begun to declare that you are sober
* To recite your own verse * To lend money and expect
its return * To travel with too much luggage
The 9 Jollities of a Peasant:
*To laugh * To fight * To fill the stomach * To forget
* To sing * To take vengeance * To discuss * To boast
* To fall asleep
The 9 Deplorable Public Habits:
*Drunkenness * Dirtiness * Shuffling * Over-loud voice
* Scratching * Unpunctuality * Peevishness
* Spitting * Repeated jests
And the 9 Final Griefs:
*Disappointed expectations * Irretrievable loss
* Inevitable fatigue * Unanswered prayers
* Unrequited service * Ineradicable doubt
* Perpetual dereliction * Death * Judgement”
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.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged asian-pacific history, literary oddities, numeracy, readings/research
This is the fifth of five posts on origami; as I said in the last one, blink, of you’ll miss it. I scanned the documents in these posts from two different origami books I bought for use in my classrooms. None of this intellectual property, needless to say, is mine to give away. Desperate times call for bold measures, which is why I’m here putting up one more of these posts.
First, here are the folding terms and directions for the documents in this and the previous (i.e. Origami IV) post. And here are the directions of the origami figures themselves:
origami 42 magnolia blossom; origami 43 rose; origami 44 leaf; origami 45 swan; origami 46 butterfly; origami 47 crane; origami 48 frog; origami 49 chinese wheel; origami 50 koi.
Here is a wikiHow article on how to make origami paper. Finally, once more, here are a trove of videos on origami from YouTube.
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| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
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