“Who wrote Tom Brown’s School Days (1857)? Thomas Hughes, English jurist. The book for boys tells of young Tom Brown’s adventures at Rugby. Hughes also wrote a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on nations with the shortest coastlines. Here is the list as reading with comprehension questions. As the title of this post indicates, this is another lesson adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s magisterial (I really want her job) reference book The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1997).
Nota bene, please, that I wrote these materials (there are quite a few of them on this blog now, with more to come) with the needs of students who struggle with reading in mind, especially when two symbolic systems (letters and numbers) are at work in the same lesson. If you find this lesson useful in your classroom, you might find its companion, a lesson on nations with the longest coastlines, which I published last month, a complement to the documents in this post.
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.
As the story goes, the trio were distracted upon being offered an apple labelled to be the ‘fairest of all.’ They each sought to influence the judge—the prince-shepherd Paris of Troy—with the gifts of power, intelligence, of the love of the world’s most beautiful (mortal) woman. Paris chose the latter and set out to seduce Helen. She was, of course, married to Menelaus—and unfortunate detail that sparked the Trojan War.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research
Here is a reading on Blackbeard (aka Edward Teach) along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Last weekend, for the first time, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean. So when I was perusing the Intellectual Devotional shelf in the warehouse earlier, this material caught my eye. It looks to me like the producers of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the star, Johnny Depp (whose fey performance is both hilarious and oddly touching), were and are well aware of the life and times of Blackbeard (although he apparently appears in the series’ fourth film, played by the great Ian McShane). If you have students who are fans of these films, I would hazard a guess that this will be high-interest material for 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.
Here is a worksheet on differentiating between the adjectives fortuitous and fortunate. This is a full-page worksheet with ten modified cloze exercises that provide students an opportunity to use these words in a structured setting. You, however, can do with it as you wish, because like most things on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document.
Confusing these two words remains one of the most common lapses in usage I see on a regular basis. Just the other day I received an email whose author used fortuitous when she meant fortunate. I suppose it’s the sound of these two words that makes them so easy to misuse. For the record, fortuitous means, simply, “occurring by chance.” Fortunate, on the other hand, means “bringing some good thing not foreseen as certain,” “receiving some unexpected good.” or, more simply, “lucky.” As the reading in this document points out, a car accident can be fortuitous in that it occurs by chance, but few people would characterize it as fortunate.
This is a contested area of usage. I’ll guess that if you looked up fortuitous in Garner’s Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner would tell you that the use of fortuitous to mean fortunate has gained widespread acceptance in the American vernacular. Nonetheless, sticklers continue to emphasize the distinction limned above. What do you think? More importantly, what do your students think? Should a sharp distinction between these words continue to be observed? That’s an essential question in usage, I submit: how do words maintain their narrow meanings and therefore, arguably, their integrity?
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.
“Mammon: An Aramaic word used in the New Testament of personify riches and worldliness; also, the god of avarice or cupidity. The word occurs in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13 to represent the opposite of a God-fearing life: ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate one and love the other; or he will hold to one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ Both Spenser, with his cave of Mammon in The Faerie Queene, and Milton, by identifying him with Vulcan in Paradise Lost, make Mammon the epitome of the evils of wealth.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
It’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective aghast. It means “struck with terror, amazement, or horror” and “shocked.”
The word derives from the Middle English verb gasten, “to frighten.” As you may perceive, this is also the source of the adjective ghastly. Not surprising, I suppose, since things that are ghastly generally cause us to feel aghast.
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.
“National Velvet: A novel (1935) by Enid Bagnold (1889-1981). Velvet, a butcher’s daughter, win a piebald horse in a raffle. Disguised as a boy, she rides it in the Grand National, Britain’s premier steeplechase. Although she is past the winning post, she is disqualified for dismounting before the weighing-in. A popular film version (1945), directed by Clarence Brown, starred a 14-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here is a reading on sex change surgery along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Lest you misunderstand, this is not about the medical science or procedure of gender affirmation surgery.
Rather, it is about the infamous John/Joan case. The reading nicely job summarizes the tragic story of David Reimer, whose parents made the mistake of deferring to the New Zealand psychologist John Money. Money, who apparently coined the terms “gender identity” and “gender role,” appears to me to be at least culpable in, if not the direct cause of, the suicides of David Reimer and his twin brother. I wrote this material (using, once again, a reading from the Intellectual Devotional series) during the pandemic; as of this writing, I have not used this material with students. Nonetheless, I have tagged this post’s documents as high-interest material. Unless I miss my guess, students will indeed find these documents of considerable interest.
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.
“To accurately teach reading via a systematic synthetic phonics approach, and be able to discuss this teaching with colleagues, teachers need to be aware of a whole range of terms. For instance, they need to know that a ‘digraph‘ is a grapheme made up of two letters. They need to know that a diphthong is a sound made-up sound of two vowel sounds, as well as how to recognise a dipthong in speech. They need to know about the ‘schwa‘ vowel sound because this is linked to problems children have with spellings. They need to know what a ‘morpheme‘ is–the smallest unit of meaning–and how this differs from a ‘grapheme.’ They need etymological knowledge such as the origin language of a word; is it Anglo-Saxon, French, or perhaps Latin?”
Ashman, Greg. The Truth about Teaching: An Evidence-Informed Guide for New Teachers. Los Angeles: Sage, 2018.
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