“Life is indeed darkness save when there is urge/And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge/And all knowledge is vain save when there is work/And all work is empty save when here is love.”
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet (1923)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
This morning when I first pulled this reading on photochemistry and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet off the shelf, I assumed it would be about developing photographs in a dark room, an arcane art that I nonetheless learned in high school in the 1970s but that is now a niche skill, I suppose.
In fact, this is a nice introduction to the actual physics of light–which is, after all, what the Greek root photo means: light.
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.
“True Grit: A film Western (1969) based on a novel (1968) of the same name by Charles Portis (b. 1933). The film starred John Wayne as an indomitable one-eyed marshal, ‘Rooster’ Cogburn, who is eventually persuaded to help a determined teenage girl avenge herself upon her father’s murderers. According to Portis, he picked up the phrase while researching memoirs about the old West, in which all manner of heroes were praised for their ‘grit’ (meaning their determination and courage):
‘I had never seen it in such profusion as in these books. There was grit, plain grit, plain old grit, clear grit, pure grit, pure dee grit (a euphemism for damned) and true grit. Thus the hard little word was in my head when I began the story.’
He jotted the phrase down on the title page of his script for use within the text when it became appropriate, and then realized it would make a good title itself. Portis was not, as he admitted himself, the first writer to make use of the phrase: as early as 1897 Bram Stoker quoted it in his novel Dracula.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“What was the source of Betrolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928)? Brecht follows the general outline of English playwright John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), but focuses more on social evils.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
For you music teachers, whose talents I envy, here is a reading on melody along with its attendant 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.
teleology: Causality in which the effect is explained by the end (Greek telos) to be realized. Teleology thus differs essentially from efficient causality, in which an effect is dependent on prior events. Aristotle’s account of teleology declared that a full explanation of anything must consider it’s the final cause—the purpose for which the thing exists or was produced. Following Aristotle, many philosophers have conceived of biological processes as involving the operation of a guiding end. Modern science has tended to appeal only to efficient causes in its investigations. See also mechanism.
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
It’s a word used routinely in relation to the American Civil War in social studies textbooks, but in my experience never taught explicitly in social studies classrooms, so maybe this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the adjective antebellum. This Latinism, as this half-page worksheet points out in its two-sentence reading (with two comprehension questions), means “before the war.”
If you think it will help, here is a word root exercise on the Latin root bell-.
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.
“Venus de Medici: A statue thought to date from the 4th century BC. It was dug up in the 17th century in the villa of Hadrian at Tivoli, near Rome, in eleven pieces. It was kept in the Medici Palace at Rome until its removal to Florence by Cosimo III de’Medici (1642-1723). Since 1860 it has been in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Byron described his reaction to the statue in Childe Harold:
‘We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with Beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fullness…’
Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV (1818)
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here is a reading on hypnosis along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I believe this might be high-interest material, so I have 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.
“taxonomy: In biology, the classification of organisms into a hierarchy of groupings, from the general to the particular, that reflect evolutionary and usually morphological relationships: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. The black-capped chickadee, for example, is an animal (kingdom Animalia) with a dorsal nerve cord (phylum Cordata) and feathers (class Aves: birds) that perches (order Passeriformes: perching birds) and is small with a short bill (family Paridae). a song that sounds like ‘chik-a-dee’ (genus Parus) and a black-capped head (species atricapillus). Most authorities recognize five kingdoms: monerans (prokaryotes), protists, fungi (see fungus), plants, and animals. Carl Linnaeus established the scheme of using Latin generic and specific names in the mid-18th century; his work was extensively revised by later biologists.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
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