Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Betty Friedan. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. In other words, a basic introduction to this seminal figure in the modern feminist movement.
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.
“Art can never be totally legislated to any system, even those that reward obedience and send dissidents to hard labor and death; not can it, in our specifically compromised system, be really free. It may push up through cracked macadam, by the merest means, but it needs breathing space, cultivation, protection to fulfill itself, Just as people do. New artists, young or old, need education in their art, the tools of their craft, chances to study examples from the past and meet practitioners in the present, get the criticism and encouragement of mentors, learn that they are not alone. As the social compact withers, fewer and fewer people will be told Yes, you can do this; this also belongs to you. Like government, art needs the participation of the many in order not to become the property of a powerful and narrowly self-interested few.”
Excerpted from: Hunter, J, Paul, Alison Booth, and Kelly J. Mays. The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Ninth Edition. New York: Norton, 2007.
March is Women’s History Month. Mark’s Text Terminal observes the occasion with documents posts and quotes dealing with women’s myriad contributions to the world. To begin the month, here is a reading on Margaret Sanger and a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
Incidentally, I am well aware that Margaret Sanger is a controversial figure–and so is the organization she founded, Planned Parenthood, which issued this manifesto on Ms. Sanger, addressing her involvement with the eugenics movement in the United State and analyzing whether or not she was racist. This is an extremely complicated topic; if you type “Margaret Sanger and eugenics” you will receive page after page of results, many of them highly ideologically charged.
What Margaret Sanger did accomplish, to the offense of many, was to make contraception available to couples who could then, literally, plan their parenthood. Contraception is a sin in the Catholic church, though many Protestants also take umbrage at the idea that a woman has the right to control her own body. Planned Parenthood at this point in its history has established a history of providing healthcare (and yes, the occasional abortion, still legal for now) to low-income patients. For these reasons, Planned Parenthood has become a target of choice for the anti-feminist right wing of the Republican party. Margaret Sanger’s poor choice of ideological fellow travelers has made her a tool of activists who seek to destroy Planned Parenthood.
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.
For Week II of Black History Month 2022, here is a reading on Aretha Franklin with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The Queen of Soul has been in the zeitgeist recently with the new biographical motion picture on her, Respect.
Have you seen the movie? I haven’t, but plan to. The producers assembled one hell of a cast, including the incomparable Audra McDonald as Aretha’s mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, Forest Whitaker as her father, The Reverend C.L. Franklin, and Mary J Blige (!) as Dinah Washington. And last but certainly not least, Jennifer Hudson as Aretha herself.
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.
This week’s Text is this lesson plan on using compound prepositions.
I open this lesson with this Everyday Edit worksheet on Eleanor Roosevelt; if this lesson goes into a second day, here is another on time zones. Incidentally, if you and your students find these Everyday Edit worksheet edifying (and therefore rewarding), the good people at Education World generously distribute a yearlong supply of them at no charge.
Here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the principal work of this lesson. And, at last, here is the teacher’s copy of same.
And that is it for another week.
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.
This week’s Text is final lesson plan of the pronouns unit that I’ve been posting piecemeal for the past couple of years. This is the 13th lesson in the unit and the concluding assessment. Nota bene, please, that is is emphatically not a test, but rather a supported assessment that, as the plan will explain, aims to assist students in developing their own understanding of a number of pieces of discrete procedural knowledge. This lesson should take place over a couple of days, if not three.
Accordingly, I’ve lined up three Everyday Edit worksheets to serve as do-nows for this lesson: the first on Susan B. Anthony; the second on Harriet Tubman; and the third on Jane Goodall. Incidentally, if you and your students find these Everyday Edit worksheets useful, or even enjoyable, as students I have served in the past (to my considerable surprise) have, then I have good news for you: the good people at Education World give away a yearlong supply of them.
There are two supports for this lesson (which students used during earlier lessons, so they will be familiar with them if you too have used them), the first on pronouns and case (with the verb to be conjugated for contextual support), the second on the use of indefinite pronouns (e.g. someone, anyone, everybody, all, etc).
Finally, here is the worksheet for this lesson, which is really more of a graphic organizer. It guides students through all the lessons they have completed for this unit.
And that, esteemed reader, is it. There is now a 13-lesson unit on pronouns available on this site; simply type pronouns into the search bar in the upper-right-hand corner of the home page, and you will find them all.
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.
This week’s Text is the penultimate lesson in the 13-lesson unit on pronouns I engineered several years ago, and have been working on ever since. It is basically a pre-assessment review lesson to prepare student for the final lesson, a guided mastery exercise in which they review and recapitulate all the foregoing lessons.
I open this lesson with this Everyday Edit worksheet on “Women Get the Vote.” If the lesson enters a second day for whatever reason, here is another Everyday Edit, this one on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here is the scaffolded worksheet for this lesson that is its primary work. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of same. I’ll put up the final lesson soon, and then there will be a 13-lesson unit on pronouns available in its entirety on Mark’s Text Terminal.
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.
“Isabel Allende: (1942-) Chilean novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Touted as the first major female figure in Latin America’s book of narrative fiction, she has become one of the continent’s best known and bestselling authors, but has been dismissed by some as an epigone of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his school of Magic Realism. Born in Lima, Peru, she worked as a journalist in Chile. After President Salvador Allende, her father’s cousin, was deposed in 1973, she emigrated to Venezuela and then to the U.S. Her best-known novel is her first book, La casa de los espiritus (1982; tr The House of the Spirits, 1985); set in a nameless Latin American country, it is the story of several generations of the upper-class Trueba family. It was followed by the novels De amor y de sombra (1984; tr Of Love and Shadows, 1985) and Eva Luna (1987; tr 1988), and the short-story collection Cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; tr The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991). Later books include El plan infinito (1991; tr The Infinite Plan, 1993), the story of a Chicano lawyer in San Francisco, and Paula (1994; tr 1995), a moving account of her daughter’s illness and death.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Novelist and Round Table frequenter Alice Duer Miller once paid off a loss at cards to Aleck Woollcott, informing him: ‘You, sir, are the lowest form of life—a cribbage pimp.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, women's history
“The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.”
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
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