“Benchley and Dorothy Parker shared a tiny $30-a-month office for a time in the Metropolitan Opera House studios. As Benchley described it, ‘One cubic foot of space less and it would have constituted adultery.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
The Weekly Text from Mark’s Text Terminal for the first of July 2022 is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Great Diamond Heist.” I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on allusion (a half-page document with a three-sentence reading and three comprehension questions–just the basics). To conduct your investigation into this act of larceny, you will need the PDF of the illustration and questions that serve as the evidence in this case. Finally, for your students to bring the culprit or culprits to the bar of justice, here is the typescript of the answer key.
And that’s it for another week. I hope you are enjoying a relaxing summer.
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.
“Mannerism: Style of art and architecture that emerged in the period from ca. 1520 to ca. 1590, characterized by a reaction to harmony of the High Renaissance, an ideal of virtuosity for its own sake, and a concomitant preoccupation with the ambiguous and discordant. Exemplified in the works of El Greco, Pontormo, Parmigianino, and (late) Michelangelo.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on fascism. This is a full-page worksheet with a seven-sentence reading (a couple of which could easily be broken up) and nine comprehension questions.
Fascism, as you may know, is a notoriously slippery concept, but is nonetheless thrown around casually–I myself once (fortunately, before I was of voting age) ludicrously characterized President Jimmy Carter as a fascist. I studied authoritarian political movements as an undergraduate and can report that even experts on fascism–e.g. Walter Laqueur and George Mosse–were careful with the term and were circumspect about using the word casually. Indeed, Professor Mosse in particular, with whose work I am quite familiar, grappled for much of his career with his agnosticism about fascism and fascist movements.
All of this is a long way of saying that while this worksheet is far from perfect, it is a decent general introduction to some of the cultural, economic, and political aspects of fascism. As much as the seven sentences of text in this document expose, they are notable for the questions they leave unanswered and therefore arouse. In fact, this may be a good document for starting students’ questioning of the conceptual elements of fascism (trust me, they are wide-ranging, disparate, and frequently just plain crazy).
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.
Aretha Franklin: (1942-2018) U.S. popular singer. Her family moved from Memphis to Detroit when she was 2. Her father, C.L. Franklin, was a well-known revivalist preacher; his church and home were visited by such luminaries as Aretha’s aunt Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and Dinah Washington. She made her first recording at 12. At first she performed only on the gospel and ‘chitlin’ circuits, but in 1967 her powerful and fervent voice took the country by storm in a string of songs including “I Never Loved a Man,” “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” and “Natural Woman.” Her later albums include Amazing Grace (1972), Sparkle (1976), Who’s Zoomin’ Who (1985), and One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism (1989). She was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Here is the fourth and final lesson plan of the Summer of Soul unit I wrote earlier this year. This lesson opens with this short reading with three comprehension questions on the concept of “a seat at the table,” i.e. joining in decision-making processes, particularly where those decisions concern oneself. The mainstay of this lesson is this reflection and assessment guide for discussion and note-taking at the end of this unit.
Because this is it. You now have access to all four lessons in this unit. If you expand this, or otherwise change it, I would be very interested in hearing what you did. I wrote this unit quickly to capitalize on student interest (Summer of Soul won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards in 2022). Even as I presented the unit, I recognized that there is a lot of room to expand and improve this material.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, film/television/photography, high-interest materials, music, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, united states history
“Oswald Spengler: (1880-1936) German philosopher. A schoolmaster before he turned to writing, Spengler is remembered for his influential The Decline of the West (2 volumes, 1918-22), a study in the philosophy of history. He contended that civilizations pass through a life cycle, blossoming and decaying like natural organisms, and that Western culture is irreversibly past its creative stage and headed into eclipse. Though acclaimed by a public disillusioned in the wake of World War I, his work was criticized by both professional scholars and the Nazi party, despite some affinities with its dogma.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Here is a reading on Archimedes along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Is there anything more I need to say about this polymath from Syracuse? He gave us the lever, and shouted “Eureka” (Greek for “I have found it”) when he solved the problem of the Golden Crown.
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.
“In prehistoric Britain, fifty-six stone pillars stood in the outer circle of Stonehenge. In more recent times, the National War Memorial in Washington, erected after World War II, commemorates the dead with fifty-six pillars (also the number of signatures on the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the thirteen states). And in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, fifty-six towering red columns were erected to represent the ‘equal, united and harmonious’ ethnic groups of China.”
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.
Suetonious: Latin Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (AD 69?—after 122) Roman biographer and antiquarian. Suetonius’ family was of the knightly class. His writings include De viris illustribus (“Concerning Illustrious Men”), short biographies of literary figures what were the ultimate source of nearly all that is known about the lives of eminent Roman authors. Lives of the Caesars, his other major work, is seasoned with bits of gossip and scandal related to the first 11 emperors; it is largely responsible for the vivid picture of Roman society and its decadent leaders that dominated historical thought until modified in modern times by the discovery of nonliterary evidence.
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
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