“…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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, readings/research
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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
“blockade: Action to prevent supplies reaching an enemy, either by placing ships outside its ports, troops outside a city or cutting off traffic across a country’s borders. Under international law a neutral merchant vessel attempting to breach a blockade may be confiscated by the blockading country. The tactic was first attempted in the Napoleonic wars when Britain’s navy blockaded France, Portugal, and Spain. A recent naval blockade was imposed on 12 April 1982 by Britain on the Falkland Islands to cut off supplies to Argentine troops occupying them; it was lifted following the retaking of the islands by British forces in May and June 1982.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
[N.B.: As he was almost constantly wont to do, Ambrose Bierce ironizes heavily here, using part of the United States Declaration of Independence to pun on the fact that Cromwell signed the death warrant that separated King Charles I from his head.]
“Abridge, vt. To shorten. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. –Oliver Cromwell“
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, readings/research
Over the years, I have produced a number of documents based on the interest of one student. This reading on the prisoner’s dilemma and its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are one such set of documents.
My own first exposure to the prisoner’s dilemma came from a friend who encountered it as an undergraduate in what, if memory serves, was a history course. This same friend went on to law school, so he may have encountered it there. In any case, the prisoner’s dilemma is part of a broader study of mathematical models of human cognition and resultant conduct called game theory. I actually started to develop a unit on game theory when I realized two things: the first was that the student for whom I prepared the material offered in this blog post wasn’t as interested in it as he thought; the second was that I was woefully unqualified to teach a single lesson on game theory, let alone a whole unit.
If you have the time–I didn’t–a unit on game theory might be just the thing for a certain kind of student. However, it is a complicated field, and even adapting it for struggling or alienated high school students is no small task.
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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