“If education is always to be conceived along some antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?”
The Absorbent Mind, ch. 1 (1949)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Let’s get right to this week’s text, which is a reading on Maya Angelou. You might want to use, or adapt, this comprehension worksheet which accompanies the reading. Finally, here is an Everyday Edit exercise on Women’s History Month to attend any lesson you might want to contrive frome the first two documents. By the way, you can get lots more Everyday Edit worksheets from the generous folks who operate Education World.
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.
“German political philosopher naturalized U.S. citizen 1950. Arendt received her doctorate at the age of twenty-two from the University of Heidelberg, where she studied with Karl Jaspers. She fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in the U.S. (1941), where she held numerous teaching posts and became the first woman to be appointed full professor at Princeton University. She ended her career at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her reputation as a profound and independent philosophical analyst was launched with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), in which she documented the belief that Nazism and Communism had their roots in the anti-Semitism and imperialism of the 15th century. She continued to offer challenging and unconventional theories about the decline in values in modern society, in such books as The Human Condition (1961), and Crises of the Republic (1972). A storm of controversy surrounded the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), in which she suggested that even the Jews could be held partly responsible for Germany’s barbarisms in World War II. Her other works include On Revolution (1963) and On Violence (1970), in which she suggested that violence is a response to powerlessness. Her philosophically most ambitious work, The Life of the Mind (1978), a three-volume study of the fundamental mental activities thinking, willing, and judging, though unfinished (only the volumes Thinking and Willing were completed), it is a penetrating analysis of the processes of the mind and of their corresponding effects on action.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Today begins Women’s History Month 2018. Like last month for Black History Month, every post on Mark’s Text Terminal during March will be related to the history of women and their myriad contributions to and achievements in our global civilization. So, you’ll see two posts a day, five days a week here until Saturday, March 31st. We are at a moment in women’s history in which peril and opportunity best describe women’s position in the United States. Peril because the President of the United States is evidently a militant misogynist, and the vice president is a theocrat right out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; opportunity because these politicians have provoked a backlash that, happily, may well be be their undoing.
Clearly, the Me Too Movement is an encouraging development. So too are the courageous women Time magazine has called the “Silence Breakers.” That all of this began because women somehow got the crazy idea that they should be able to attend a business meeting without looking at the exposed genitals of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and his ilk seems ordinary enough to me, but it has been hailed as something of a miracle. Whatever: I thank them for their witness and testimony
That said, these are grim days. Voters in the United States have elected a man who is vain, prideful, ignorant, misogynistic, willing not only to boast to a dimwitted talk-show host (who himself is a a scion of the family that produced two of our least distinguished presidents) about sexually assaulting women on the strength of his “celebrity” status, but has also paid off a porn star to conceal the evidence of philandering from his third wife, who presents problems of her own, not the least of which is her–and her parents–dubious arrival in this country, which goes some length to expose the president’s hypocrisy on immigration.
(Aside: it seems to me, that Protestant Evangelicals who have overlooked Trump’s three marriages, and his payment to Stormy Daniels, and possibly a payment to a Playboy magazine model named Karen McDougal, have a lot of hypocrisy and moral blindness of their own to answer for.)
The overall misogyny of the Republican Party, coupled with its tacit encouragement of the craziest loose cannons in its ranks, has led to attacks on Planned Parenthood both in word and in deed. I’m a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood (and I think you should be too). By any measure to which I am prepared to stipulate, attacks on Planned Parenthood, a provider of healthcare for some of the most impoverished and vulnerable women in our nation, are, in my absolutely humility-free estimation, an attack on women everywhere.
For many years, I have naively considered a number of issues in human affairs essentially settled. For example, after the Enlightenment, I take as a given that the scientific method–you know, the controversial act of backing arguments with evidence to prove them–was the sine qua non of inquiry. Yet now on an almost daily basis, demagogues (and yes, they are mostly if not entirely Republicans) seek to undermine the legitimacy of science and the means by which it establishes facts. Similarly, after the the feminisms of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, I assumed that a woman’s right to control her destiny, particularly in terms of her own reproductive system, was settled.
Yet here we are, in 2018, still listening to garbage like this, uttered by people delightfully unencumbered by decency or shame. I could supply a lot more quotes from low-watt Republicans that diminish and disrespect women, but I’d be here all morning copying and pasting links–not to mention exposing my tender consciousness to some of the most aggressively stupid and vicious rhetoric currently on offer in the American marketplace of “ideas.” So I’ll take a hard pass on that.
So, let’s begin Women’s History Month 2018 with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Zora Neale Hurston, who serves as a perfect conjunction between Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Tomorrow I’ll post a more substantial Weekly Text, as I will on each Friday this month.
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.
OK, for the third post of this Tuesday morning, you might find this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Gospel Music useful somewhere in your practice. Because even in this short passage, its authors found room to mention Gospel’s influence on Rock and Roll, a couple of nice complements to this short exercise are this Wikipedia article on the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe as well as this this article from Rolling Stone arguing for her inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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.
“It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up in the world of thought—that is to be educated.”
Edith Hamilton (1867-1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
The last day of March is also the last day of Women’s History Month. This week’s Text is a reading on Murasaki Shikibu. Lady Shikibu wrote what is arguably history’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. Here is a comprehension worksheet to accompany the relatively short reading.
And that is the last Weekly Text for Women’s History Month. I hope they’ve been useful. Next week I’ll return to posting less theme oriented material; I think I have a grammar lesson queued up.
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.
It seems to me safe to assume that Elizabeth Cady Stanton is a staple in any Women’s Studies Program. For this fourth and penultimate week of Women’s History Month, Mark’s Text Terminal therefore offers this reading on Elizabeth Cady Stanton as well as a comprehension worksheet to accompany it. I hope you find them useful.
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 for week three of Women’s History Month is a reading on Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee, which may well be of higher interest to students than some of the readings posted this month. Here is a comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
And that’s it for this short (we had a snow day on Tuesday) but busy 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.
“That this book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of the feminine will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.”
Chicago Times-Herald
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
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