“On hearing that Time editor Henry Luce objected to a profile of himself published in The New Yorker—on the grounds that not one nice thing was said about him in the whole piece—Ross told him, ‘That’s what you get for trying to be a baby tycoon.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
If you or your students can use them, here is a reading on Saturday Night Live along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The show is soon to arrive, amazingly, at its fiftieth anniversary. As a friend of mine once put it, it gave us a reason to stay home on Saturday nights when we were young–which was probably a good thing in terms of our financial and physical (and perhaps moral) health. The reading, for all that, is relatively short.
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.
If you can use it, and I say that with the confidence of experience, because the study of John J. Audubon at the primary and secondary secondary levels of education isn’t much done, here is a reading on John J. Audubon along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As with most readings from the Intellectual Devotional series, this one-page text does an excellent job of encapsulating a complex life, particularly Audubon’s, uh, unorthodox working methods. What is doesn’t report, which I learned in the process of preparing this post, is that Audubon was a slaveholder.
So, what a bitter irony that he is buried in Harlem.
This post would not be complete without mentioning Audubon’s achievements, particularly his majestic and magisterial Birds of America, the double elephant folio he produced, and which is now a high spot in American antiquarian book collecting. Most copies–there are 120 known in all–of the book are in the possession of research libraries around the United States–the Beinecke Library at Yale keeps its copy (like its copy of the Gutenberg Bible, which came out of the Melk Abbey) out for display in its main gallery. When I followed various of the great research libraries on Twitter e.g. The Huntington Library, the Lilly Library, The Newberry Library, and, again, the Beinecke at Yale, a couple of them filmed and posted the turning of pages of Birds of America, a ritual worth watching.
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.
OK, I just finished writing these 14 reading comprehension worksheets on Kobe Bryant. These follow very closely the Wikipedia article on Mr. Bryant. In fact, each worksheet is named for the sub-heading in the reading about which it asks questions. If you want to make your own worksheets, here is the worksheet template.
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
The final Text for 2021 is a lesson plan on coin denomination in United States currency with its list as reading and comprehension questions. This material is adapted from The Order of Things, Barbara Ann Kipfer’s enviable reference book. This is relatively simple material, designed to aid students who struggle with the kind of reading and analytical skills that are presented by, for example, word problems in math.
Like most things on Mark’s Text Terminal, these documents are formatted in Microsoft Word, so you can alter them to suit the needs of your students.
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.
“Dalton Trumbo: (1905-1976) American screenwriter and novelist. One of Hollywood’s highest paid writers in the 1930s and 1940s, Trumbo was blacklisted and served a prison term for his refusal—as one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’—to answer questions about Communist affiliations posed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. Living in Mexico, he continued to write popular movie scripts, such as Exodus (1960), The Sandpiper (1965), and The Fixer (1968), although some of his work in the 1950s had to be credited to pseudonyms. He published four novels, including Johnny Got His Gun, all of which expressed his populist attitudes.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a reading on The Pentagon with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I don’t know how much utility these documents carry, but I suspect that they would be best used with a student who has a particular interest in the topic. The reading is an informative summary on the building and its history, and is sufficiently up to date to include the attack on The Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Somehow, the editors of the Intellectual Devotional series fit all of that into a one-page text.
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.
“American Language: A term that presents American English as a national language, sometimes as an aggressive declaration of independence from the standard language of England: ‘This occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language’ (H.L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th edition, 1936); ‘George Bush is hardly known for his rhetorical gifts. But his speech at last summer’s Republican Convention has already left its mark on the American language’ (Laurence Zuckerman, ‘Read My Cliché,’ Time, 16 Jan. 1989).”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
“The author can’t win, ever, by Fiedler’s standard of judgement. Only the critic can win…there is more in American fiction, much more, than Fiedler has been able to find.”
Malcolm Cowley, New York Times Book Review
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, united states history
Here is a reading on the Otis Elevator company with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As usual, David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim, the editors of the Intellectual Devotional series, ably synthesized Elisha Otis’s biography (he was, to my surprise, a farm boy from Halifax, Vermont) with the changes his invention wrought in American life–and in a one-page reading (!).
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.
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