Here’s a reading on Edwin Hubble and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. He is the scientist for whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named–and not, if this reading is believable, well respected by his colleagues.
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, last but not least this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Fugitive Slave Act, another law designed to dehumanize and keep in bondage Americans of African descent. Not your proudest hour, United States.
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.
Ama Ata Aidoo: (1940-) Ghanaian dramatist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Aidoo’s career as a writer began while still an undergraduate at the University of Ghana with the 1964 performance of The Dilemma of a Ghost (pub 1965). Her work, consistently engaged with women’s issues, uses Africa’s oral traditions and styles to place these concerns in the larger context of the African struggle against colonialism, neocolonialism, and exploitation. Aidoo’s second play, Anowa (1970), is set in the late 19th, and is an adaptation of an old Ghanaian legend. In her collection of short stories, No Sweetness Here (1970), Aidoo turns her critical yet compassionate attention to the postindependence era, demonstrating her ability to as a storyteller and witty social critic. Our Sister Killjoy (1979) is an innovative novel which examines, through an interplay of prose and poetry, the maturation of a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Germany and England. Her second novel, Changes: A Love Story (1991), which won the 1992 Africa Section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, recounts the trials and tribulations of the Esi Sekyi, a young educated career woman. In Aidoo’s sensitive depiction of Sekyi’s second marriage to a polygamous man, she explores the uses of Africa’s past to women and men who are attempting to create more meaningful personal and public lives. Aidoo’s other works include her two volumes of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime (1985) and An Angry Letter in January (1991), and The Eagle and the Chicken and Other Stories (1987) and The Eagle and the Chicken and Other Stories (1987) and Birds and Other Poems (1987), both written for children. Aidoo is one of the most important African writers today.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, drama/theater, fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research
Yesterday I posted eleven short research worksheets on famous photographers which I wrote for some students interested in the art of photography. Here is a twelfth, this one on the great Gordon Parks.
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.
At the end of Week II of Black History Month 2020, here is a short reading on Oprah Winfrey 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 an Everyday Edit worksheet on African-American music. This is the last Everyday Edit worksheet I have that’s appropriate to post for Black History Month. However, if you’d like more of these worksheets, you can find them at Education World, where the generous proprietors of that site give away a yearlong supply of them.
If you find typos in this document, your students should fix them! That’s the point of this exercise….
“Mongo Beti: (Real name Alexandre Biyidi, 1932-2001) Cameroonian novelist, writing in French. Biyidi used the pen name Eza Boto for his first novel, Ville Cruelle (1953). Thereafter, as Mongo Beti, he published Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956; tr. The Poor Christ of Bomba, 1971), Mission terminee (1957; tr Mission to Kala, 1964) and Le Roi miracule (1958; tr King Lazarus, 1971). Taken together, his novels present a picture of social life and attitudes during the French colonial period in Africa. On the surface, Biyidi’s novels are inventive and ribald, but they are also an insistent, satirical attack on colonialism, the misunderstandings it occasioned, and the tragic waste it produced. After a period of silence, Biyidi returned to publishing. Only this time, his work focused on the postindependence rulers and the terrible price ordinary Africans have had to pay under these regimes. The tone of these recent novels has become more serious, fabulous, and allegorical. These works include Perpetue ou l’habitude du Malheur: roman (1974; tr Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness, 1978), Remember Ruben (1974; tr 1980) and La ruine presque cocasse d’un polichinelle (1979), which is a sequel to Remember Ruben and has yet to be translated.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“In 1969 Steps, a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, won the National Book Award. Six years later a freelance writer named Chuck Ross, to test the old theory that a novel by an unknown author doesn’t have a chance, typed the first twenty-one pages of Steps and sent them out to four publishers as the work of “Erik Demos.” All four rejected the manuscript. Two years after that he typed out the whole book an sent it, again credited to Erik Demos, to more publishers, including the original publisher of the Kosinski book, Random House. Again, all rejected it with unhelpful comments–Random House used a form letter. Altogether, fourteen publishers (and thirteen literary agents) failed to recognize a book that had already been published and had won an important prize.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
OK, wrapping up on a Wednesday afternoon, here is a lesson plan on obsessive-compulsive disorder. You’ll need this short reading and this vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to teach this material. If you want slightly longer versions of the reading and worksheet, they’re under that hyperlink.
Nota bene that this has tended to be high-interest material among the students I’ve taught over the years, which is why I tagged it as such.
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.
“Go Tell It on the Mountain: The first novel (1953) of the black US writer James Baldwin (1924-1987). The book has autobiographical undertones, and the climax is the religious conversion of a 14-year-old Harlem boy. At the center of the book are the boy’s troubled relations with his stepfather, a preacher of the storefront Temple of the Fire Baptized. Aspects of the slave era and of life in a dysfunctional family are recounted in flashbacks. The phrase ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ appears in the refrain of an African-American spiritual:
‘Go, tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere
Go, tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is born’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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