Tag Archives: readings/research

Animal Farm

“A satire in fable form by George Orwell (1903-1950) published in 1945 and depicting a totalitarian regime like that of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The story describes how the animals, accompanied by the slogan ‘Four legs good, two legs bad,’ overthrow their human oppressors. However, the pigs, by cunning treachery and ruthlessness, come to dominate the more honest, gullible, and hard-working animals. Their ultimate slogan is: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ The leader of the pigs is Napoleon, representing Stalin, and at the end the pigs are in cahoots with the humans, even beginning to totter around on two legs. An animated film of the novel appeared in 1955.”

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

A Philosophical Take on Concepts

A concept is that which is understood by a term, particularly a predicate. To possess a concept is to be able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: the ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applied, and being able to tell the consequences of its application. The term “idea” was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its associations with subjective and mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of a concept. In the semantics of Frege, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by as subjective term.”

Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Rotten Reviews: For Whom the Bell Tolls

“At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War…Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux…”

Commonweal

“This book offers not pleasure but mounting pain; as literature it lacks the reserve that steadies genius and that lack not only dims its brilliance but makes it dangerous in its influence.”

Catholic World

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

John Wooden

Because the weekly mandated “professional development” sessions at my school are at bottom an intellectually vacant bureaucratic ritual, I’ve spend a fair amount of time over the years seeking inspiration to teach in my own, self-directed professional development. Any time I hear John Wooden’s mentioned I pay attention.

A legendary basketball coach, Mr. Wooden was every inch a teacher, and produced real results. He ought to be of interest to our students, it seems to me. To that end, here is a reading on John Wooden with a comprehension worksheet to accompany 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.

Rotten Rejections: Ambrose Bierce

[After viewing the film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in middle school, I became fascinated with Ambrose Bierce, and have been ever since. Regular readers of this blog will know that I often excerpt from The Devil’s Dictionary. The squib below is from a rejection  of Bierce’s collection of short stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, which the Grolier Club named “one of the 100 most influential books printed before 1900….”]

“…uniformly horrible and revolting. Told with some power, and now and then with strokes of wonderfully vivid description, with plots ingenious in their terror and photographic in their sickening details, we must pronounce the book too brutal to be either good art or good literature. It is the triumph of realism–realism without power or symbolism.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Homer’s City of 100 Gates

Homer’s chosen image for power was to describe Thebes, the capital of ancient Egypt, as a city of 100 gates; and from out of each one, at any moment, might pour 200 men riding chariots. Egyptian Thebes was known by its inhabitants as Waset. It should not be confused with Thebes in central Greece, a small but ancient Bronze Age city locked into an unprofitable rivalry with Athens and with its own numerical associations ever since Aeschylus wrote the play Seven Against Thebes.”

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.

Rotten Reviews: Euripides

“A cliche anthologist…and maker of ragamuffin manikins.”

AristophanesThe Thesmophoriazusae, 411 B.C.

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Ad Ignorantiam

To ignorance: depending for its effect on the hearer’s not knowing something essential; arguing that something is true because it has not been proven false, or challenging another to disprove rather than endeavoring to improve.”

Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

The Devil’s Dictionary: Brain

“Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes a man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of the office.” 

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

The Weekly Text, June 22, 2018: A Lesson Plan on Developing Thesis Statements

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on postulating theses, i.e developing thesis statements, I wrote for somewhat more advanced students in our Wednesday afternoon institute class. Here is the worksheet that attends the lesson and the teacher’s copy of the worksheet. I wrote this last fall, and used it once; if ever you felt inclined to comment on Mark’s Text Terminal, I would enthusiastically welcome your comments on these documents. The unit of which they are a part is still in the developmental stage.

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.