Tag Archives: readings/research

Rubenisme

“Rubenisme: Artistic theory in France in the second half of the 17th century and the early 18th century, championing the primacy of color over line. Rubenistes opposed the Poussinistes, who favored line. Adherents of the two sides were named after Rubens and Poussin, who in their paintings had emphasized color and line, respectively.”

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

Erie Canal

United States history teachers, here is a reading on the Erie Canal and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet if you need them.

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.

Independent Practice: African Slave Trade

Wrapping up for today, here is an independent practice worksheet on the African slave trade. I find myself struggling to post this catalogue of indignities that Americans of African descent have endured. I’m down to the last few of them, and I begin to see why I have hesitated to post them over the years.

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.

Charles Waddell Chestnutt

“Charles Waddell Chestnutt: “(1858-1932) American novelist. Chestnutt, sometimes referred to as the first black American novelist, was a teacher, newspaperman, and lawyer. His first story, ‘The Goophered Grapevine,’ appeared in The Atlantic in 1887. His first book, The Conjure Woman (1899), centered on Uncle Julius McAdoo, a character with similarities to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. His later books dealt with race prejudice, the best known being The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). In 1928, Chestnutt received the Spingarn gold medal for his pioneer work in depicting the struggles of African Americans.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart: The first novel (1958) by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (born Albert Chinualumogo, 1930). Its theme is the mutual incomprehension between Ibo tribal communities and white officials in the 1890s. The title comes from the poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1921) by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939):

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”

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

Dr. King on Government Action and Inaction

“Government action is not the whole answer to the present crisis, but it is an important partial answer. Morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.”

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story ch. 11 (1958)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Battle of Antietam

OK, social studies teachers, here is a short reading on the American Civil War Battle of Antietam along with a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to go with 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.

Timothy Mofolorunso Aluko

“Timothy Mofolorunso Aluko: (1918-2010) Nigerian novelist. Aluko’s novels deal with the conflicts and dilemmas attendant upon social change in a comic manner. Unlike his fellow Nigerian, Achebe, Aluko focuses on the more contemporary clash of values which accompany modernization. Aluko’s style is lightly ironic, preferring to reveal the corruption of the educated African elite in seemingly neutral tones. His novels are One Man, One Wife (1959), One Man, One Matchet (1964), Kinsman and Foreman (1966), Chief the Honorable Minister (1970), His Worshipful Majesty (1973), Wrong Ones in the Dock (1982) and A State of Our Own (1986).”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Term of Art: Metalanguage

“Metalanguage: A language used to refer to statements made in another language, called in this context the object language. If the statements being referred to are in French and the statements referring to them are in English, for example, then the distinction between object language (French) and the metalanguage (English) is clear, but if the object language and metalanguage are both expressed in English, or both in a formal language such as the predicate calculus, then confusion can arise. Quotation marks can sometimes help, as in the sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true if an only if snow is white, in which the statement belonging to the object language is enclosed in quotation marks. Many paradoxes, including debatably the liar paradox, arise from a failure to distinguish object language from metalanguage: expressions involving true and false, when applied to a sentence, must always be expressed in a metalanguage and not in the object language of the sentence, The ideas behind the concept of a metalanguage are traceable to an article ‘On Denoting’ by the Welsh philosopher Bertrand (Arthur William) Russell (1872-1972) in the journal Mind in 1905, and the concept was fully developed by the Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski (1902-1983) in his monograph De Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen (The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages) in 1933.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

A Lesson Plan on Fitness

Here’s a lesson plan on fitness along with its short reading and accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you want slightly longer versions of these documents, they’re under that hyperlink.

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.