What do Amelia Bloomer, Samuel A. Maverick, and Charles C. Boycott have in common?

Each of their names has become an eponym, a word derived from someone’s name.

The stories behind eponyms are wonderful introductions to word study. Take the story of Captain Boycott, for example. As the representative of an absentee English landlord, he was responsible for collecting rent from Irish tenants in the 1880s. Times were hard, and the tenants requested a decrease in the rent. Boycott not only refused, he evicted them.

In response the community refused to have anything to do with Boycott. No one would sell him or his family any food. He couldn’t hire anyone local to care for his livestock or work as a servant in his house. Some accounts say the mailman wouldn’t deliver his mail. People wouldn’t even speak to his family.

When it was time to harvest, Orangemen from other counties were escorted to the fields by 1000 British troops, even though no violence was ever threatened. The cost of security has been estimated at 10 times the cost of the entire crop. Humiliated and utterly defeated, Boycott and his family left Ireland.

Newspapers picked up the story, and before long boycott was a verb. The strategy was later used very effectively by Mahatma Gandhi, Nazi resisters, and civil rights activists.

One word yields a lesson in history, politics, interpersonal relations, and effective civil disobedience. This is a much more interesting way to study vocabulary than learning syllabication and parts of speech!

The people listed below have also donated eponyms to English. Enjoy their stories!

• Amelia Bloomer
• General Ambrose Burnside
• Samuel Maverick
• Jean Nicot
• John Duns Scotus

One of the best-kept secrets in education is Cable in the Classroom.

Cable in the Classroom is an organization of cable programmers and cable providers working together to make programming and other support available to schools. Since our students are as likely to learn from documentaries as from documents, this is a generous gift. Sometimes a good 5-minute clip is all a lesson needs to capture student interest or to illustrate a point. CIC makes these videos available without charge and without commercials.

Cable in the Classroom programming meets these criteria:

• It has extended copyright clearance, usually for one year. Teachers can record something in October and use it in March with a clear conscience.
• It is free from advertising.
• It is free from violence.
• It is designed for the classroom.
• It provides free support materials, usually via download from the Web.
• It is available without charge via cable TV.

Cable in the Classroom members also provide schools with free cable TV programming and broadband services. CIC sponsors and publishes research on the impact of media literacy in the quarterly magazine Threshold. The monthly magazine Cable in the Classroom includes a programming schedule, classroom tips, and other articles of interest to teachers.

The monthly programming guide is also published on the CIC website. Teachers can find broadband projects and podcasts of educational interest there, too. Don’t miss “Shakespeare: Subject to Change”!

Of all the excellent programming available, one of the most fun is the Sports Figures series. ESPN sponsors programming that uses popular athletes to explain and illustrate math and physics concepts. Designed for secondary students, each episode is a great model of explaining a process or concept. One could serve as a prewriting activity before a unit on expository writing, for instance. And if an English student picks up an understanding of vectors in the process, so much the better.

Cable channels and cable providers do this as a public service. Don’t miss it!

At this time of year, seniors often start planning an elaborate prank. Sometimes they target a favorite teacher; sometimes, the school in general. The best pranks are done with style and humor.

During one passing period my students noticed that I was talking to another teacher and not really paying attention to them. They picked up my teacher desk and took it to the men’s room down the hall. They were back in their seats looking angelic by the time the tardy bell rang.

In this prank a young Irish girl named Becky tries to arrange for her school’s demolition. She manages to keep a straight face while everyone around her is cracking up.

What pranks have you been involved with?

Flip.com is Web-based presentation software with lots of bells and whistles and no bullet points, a chance for creative people to mashup their thoughts with video, graphics, and music. The result is called a Flipbook.

As a teacher I wondered what a Flipbook designed by a specific literary character might look like. Take Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. She probably wouldn’t have a Flipbook, but her daughter Pearl certainly would! I wondered what it would look like, especially what it would sound like.

Then I thought, well, why wouldn’t Hester have a Flipbook? She would just have to tone it down a little, no Nelly Furtado in the background.

Flip lends itself well to projects in a variety of disciplines. What would the Flipbook for one of the Jamestown colonists look like? Or for Pocahontas? What would the Flipbook look like for the planet Jupiter? For Mt. Everest? For a triangle? (”Hi! I’m an equilateral triangle. Here are my brothers, Right and Isosceles, and my sister, Scalene. We want to be bridges when we grow up.”)

What combination of visual, color, sound, and/or video might persuade the school board to offer more fruit in school lunches? Or encourage students to donate toward the local homeless shelter? That sounds like persuasive writing to me.

Flip.com is a great example of Web 2.0 technology at work. We can use it with writing to learn or writing to demonstrate learning. And if some authentic writing also slips in, so much the better. Have fun with it!

The world as students have explained it to their teachers …

The National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest, presents The Big Read, a program that supports community literacy initiatives.

According to its press release, the program “seeks to provide citizens with the chance to read and discuss a single book within their communities. Communities are encouraged to apply for one of approximately 400 grants that will be awarded in 2008; 200 will be awarded for programming occurring between January and June (application deadline: July 31, 2007), and 200 more will be awarded for programming occurring between September and December.

“In addition to a grant, communities will receive a library of resources, including reader’s and teacher’s guides and audio guides with commentary from artists, educators, and public figures. Communities will also get publicity materials. For 2008, communities will choose from 12 prominent classics used in 2007 and nine new books: A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines; Washington Square by Henry James; A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin; The Call of the Wild by Jack London; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick; Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson; The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (linked with Big Read to Russia); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain; and Old School by Tobias Wolff.”

Books, support for purchase, and an environment in which to read. Does it get any better than this?

YOU want your kids to research an issue carefully. THEY want to research it quickly.

YOU want your kids to use authoritative sources in their writing. THEY think Google and Wikipedia are authoritative.

YOU think good research might involve books, journals, and other print media. THEY just roll their eyes.

Can’t we all just get along?

In the interests of classroom peace and harmony, the Annenberg Public Policy Center has launched FactCheckED.org, a resource that helps both sides. Its stated goal is “to help students learn to be smart consumers of … messages, to see through the deceptions that they encounter daily, to dig for facts using the Internet and other resources, and to set aside prejudice and weigh evidence logically.”

FactCheckED provides students with links to authoritative sites related to public policy issues, and indicates with possible bias with some of the sites. It provides a glossary of terms and suggestions for avoiding deception.

FactCheckED provides teachers with ready-made lesson plans to help students learn the most common logical fallacies and how to detect them at work.

This site is a relative newcomer to the Web, but it should have a long and busy future. The Annenberg Center welcomes comments, feedback, and suggestions.

YOU want your students to become informed, responsible citizens. THEY want that, too. This site is good common ground.

What do these three quotations have in common?

• “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.” (William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)
• “He that is of the opinion that money will do everything may well be suspected to do everything for money.” (Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack)
• “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural Addresss)

If you noticed the “mirroring” of words, you noticed chiasmus (or, for rhetorical purists, antimetabole — the distinction is often blurred). In this figure of speech, a thought is emphasized with a bit of wordplay. The structure emphasizes a relationship between concepts.

The name comes from the Greek letter “chi,” which looks like an X. The crossing of lines can be compared to the crossing of thoughts that occurs in the trope.

Never let a fool kiss you          

x

or a kiss fool you.

In classical chiasmus, grammatical structures are inverted, as in this example:

“He labors without complaining and without bragging rests.”

In the first part of the sentence, the verb precedes the prepositional phrase. In the latter part, it follows the phrase.

Political speechwriters sometimes refer to chiasmus as “reversible raincoat sentences.” Because this structure calls attention to itself, it is most effective when used sparingly.

May 7 is the birthday of Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. Part mystic, part political activist — all poet — in 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though he also wrote prose and drama, composed music and painted, he is remembered primarily as a poet. Throughout India, and especially in Calcutta, where he lived, he is iconic.

His reputation in the West was established when he published Gitanjali, a collection of poems he wrote in Bengali and translated into English himself. Tagore was traveling in England at the time, and his poems were an immediate sensation.

Here are two of Tagore’s poems.

++++++++++

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

++++++++++

“My Country Awake”

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

++++++++++

Related links:

• Complete text of Gitanjali, including an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
• Tagore’s page at Nobel Prize.org
• Martin Sheen reads “My Country Awake”

The world as students have explained it to their teachers …

• Syntax is all the money collected at the church from sinners.
• The blood circulates through the body by flowing down one leg and up the other.
• In spring, the salmon swim upstream to spoon.
• Iron was discovered because someone smelt it.
• A person should take a bath once in the summer, not so often in the winter.
• The word trousers is an uncommon noun because it is singular at the top and plural at the bottom.