Here is a lesson plan on oppositional-defiant disorder along with the short reading and vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that comprise its work. If you want a slightly different–and a bit longer–version of these materials, you can find that here.
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.
Before I walk out the door on this gray Monday afternoon, here is a reading on Mark Spitz and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Only one student–for whom I produced it–asked for it in 18 years of teaching. Still, Mr. Spitz remains a swimming and Olympic legend, and I suspect somewhere there is still demand for these materials. For my needs, at the moment, supply exceeds demand.
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.
“Perfectionist * Giver * Achiever * Tragic/Romantic * Observer * Contradictor * Enthusiast * Leader * Mediator
The nine-sided enneagram was popularized by the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff (1866-1949) as a way of both analyzing and then reforming character—for the final goal is to achieve a balance of all these aspects. It is also associated with the Kabbalah, while the attributes are close to those of the ideal god-loving Muslim, who is both reformer, helper, achiever, individualist, investigator, loyalist, enthusiast, challenger, and peacemaker.
Gurdjieff’s enneagram was developed by the psychologists Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo to create a personal character map, which you can do easily enough for yourself. By marking your characteristics (on, say, a scale of 1 to 10) you can chart your particular strengths and weaknesses, and then see how these compared to those drawn for you by your friends or a counselor.
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.
“Fiddler on the Roof: A stage musical (1964) and film (1971), with a book by Joseph Stein, score by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Set in pre-revolutionary Russia, and culminating in a pogrom, it relates the story of Tevye, a Jewish father (memorably played by Topol in the film), and his disapproval of the matrimonial choices made by his daughters. The musical is based on the Yiddish short story collection Tevye and His Daughters by the Russian-born US writer Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916). The significance of the title is obscure: it may be based on the proverbial expression meaning to ‘eat, drink and be merry,’ but it may be taken generally to signify a person who cheerfully makes the best of things, whatever the circumstances.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, film/television/photography, music, readings/research
“Novel (noun): A work of prose fiction, usually an extended narrative but often idiosyncratic in structure, that tells a story or uses incident and setting to dramatize human experience and individual character, whether through imagination, re-creation of real-life existence, intricate or rich plot, the author’s particular vision or persona, or all of these; the genre of this type of prose writing. Adjective: novelistic; adverb: novelistically; verb: novelize.
‘At this late date—partly due to the New Journalism itself—it’s hard to explain what an American dream the ideas or writing a novel in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever. It belonged in the glossary to A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, somewhere between Narcissism and Obsessional Neuroses.’”
Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
This reading on Tycho Brahe and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet have turned out, to my surprise, to be surprisingly high-interest materials for a certain kind of student I have served over the years. If you can persuade students that Brahe, like Galileo and Johannes Kepler, was in rebellion against the established authorities (church, but also, where they were closely aligned, state as well) of his time, well, what adolescent isn’t interested in acts of rebellion?
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.
“Angles: A Germanic people first heard of on the Baltic coasts of Jutland. On the evidence of their pottery found at a number of late Roman settlements in England, they were probably present as Foederati in the later c4 AD. In c5 they took part in the Anglo-Saxon migrations across the North Sea to settle the eastern parts of England after the breakdown of Roman rule. The archaeological evidence is treated under Anglo-Saxons since by this period the distinction between the two peoples had all but disappeared. Their names survives in East Anglia and England.”
Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Now is a good time for posting this reading on James Bond along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. In general, this has been relatively high-interest material for the students I’ve served over the years.
Roll theme, eh?
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.
“Bierce, Ambrose [Gwinett] (1843-1914?) American journalist, short-story writer, and poet. Emerging from a sternly religious Ohio family, Bierce fought with distinction in the Civil War, then settled in San Francisco, where he became writer-editor of the San Francisco News-Letter and made his reputation as a scathing satirist who could make or break a writer with his acid comments. He began publishing stories of his own and, with his friends Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, formed an important literary circle. Following marriage to a wealthy miner’s daughter, Bierce took his bride to England, where they stayed for four years. There Bierce published Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874), Back in San Francisco with a freshly polished wit, he began to write his famous column “The Prattler” (1887-1906). a mixture of literary gossip, epigrams, and stories. Later, as Washington correspondent for the Hearst newspapers, he also wrote for Cosmopolitan and prepared his collected works (12 vols, 1909-12). Divorced in 1904, he broke completely with his family and gradually lost touch with his friends. In 1913, he disappeared into Mexico. His fate remains unknown.
Bierce’s fame rests on three volumes: In the Midst of Life, Can Such Things Be (1893), and The Devil’s Dictionary (1911; first published as The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906). He had a peculiar knack for establishing an atmosphere of horror. His wit was sardonic, cruel, and brilliant; his style crisp and incisive. He was a clever epigrammist and a forerunner of such American realists as Stephen Crane. His contemporaries felt in him a force of genius that was never fully realized.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
In June of 2003, I began what would turn out to be my woefully inadequate summer of training in the New York City Teaching Fellows. I’d already had a fair amount (13 years, to be exact) of experience working with kids, but I’d never really served, other than substituting, as a teacher. Needless to say, I had a lot to learn. The one thing I took away from that summer was this: it is the duty, responsibility, obligation and job of the special education teacher to adapt the curriculum to the needs, abilities and interests of struggling learners.
2008 was my fifth year of teaching. Year five is something of a milestone for most educators: they either leave the profession (even by the most conservative estimates, an alarming number do just that) or begin to hit their stride as proficient teachers.
When I began work in the fall of 2008 at the High School of Economics & Finance–or “Eco” as its constituents have it–in Lower Manhattan I’d like to think that I was in that latter cohort (though it’s not really for me to say). It was that year, however, that my interest in curricular design, particularly on behalf of the students I served, really began to take hold. I started reading more deeply about ways to help kids for whom school was a struggle.
For the first two years I worked at Eco, I co-taught a sophomore English class. The curriculum included Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart. I set to work immediately creating adapted materials to accompany the reading of this novel. Over two years I created documents to (I hope!) foster comprehension of the literal meaning of the novel, and thereby plumb the depths of its allegorical content.
Somewhere along the way I developed this reading and comprehension worksheet on Nigeria to begin this unit. Because Chinua Achebe took his title from it, here is a reading on “The Second Coming“, the famous poem by W.B. Yeats, along with its accompanying (and longer than usual, if you’ve taken any of the numerous Intellectual Devotional materials posted here, you’ll notice this immediately) vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Here are twenty-five context clues worksheets and twenty-five reading comprehension worksheets–in other words, one for each chapter of the novel. Finally, here are three quizzes that cover all twenty-five chapters of the novel. Nota bene please, that there are no lesson plans to accompany all of this; I was co-teaching, learning myself how to structure lessons, and trying to figure out, as above, how to adapt the curriculum for the students in front of me. I balanced a very complicated workload and the lack of lesson plans rationalizing this material indicates the extent to which I was spread thin.
In preparing these documents for publication here, I reformatted and generally spruced them up a bit. That said, I recognize this as, well, frankly, not some of my best work. Fortunately for you, gentle reader and user, like virtually everything else on Mark’s Text Terminal, this material is in Microsoft Word and therefore very easily manipulable.
Finally, if you’re not familiar with Things Fall Apart, here is synopsis from Benet’s Readers’ Encyclopedia (Bruce Murphy, ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1996): “Things Fall Apart (1958) A novel by Chinua Achebe. Set in eastern Nigeria during the British expansion into Igboland, the novel recounts the tragedy of Okonkwo and his clansmen under British colonialism. When Okonkwo, a respected tribal leader, accidentally kills one of his clansmen, he is banished from his village for seven years. On his return, he finds his village subject to colonial laws and his tribal beliefs replaced by Christianity. Okonkwo opposes these new practices but finds the villagers divided. In a moment of rage, he kills a messenger from the British District Officer, only to find that his clansmen will not support him. He hangs himself in despair. The first novel by an African to attain the status of a contemporary classic, Things Fall Apart has been translated into many languages.”
This is the point at which I usually plead for users of this blog to notify me if they find typos in any of the documents included in a post. In this case, I’m not so concerned about that, since I will most likely not use these documents again. However, I remain interested in peer review; if you use these materials, I would be very interesting in hearing how, why, and whether or not they were effective.
Post Scriptum: Memo to WordPress: how about making it possible to use different typefaces in blog post titles? I don’t like to put titles in quotes! I want italics in the title box….
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