The Stoic Prescription
Grammar: Inversion
A Level 6 English lesson exploring psychology.
What's in this lesson
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL lesson on psychology, practising inversion. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Stoic Prescription
Of the roughly 800 philosophical texts attributed to Stoic thinkers, fewer than a dozen survive intact — yet those fragments have generated a self-help industry worth an estimated $11 billion annually. Not since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics colonised university syllabuses has a school of ancient philosophy so thoroughly penetrated mainstream culture. The irony, as any serious reader of Epictetus would recognise, is that Stoicism's founders would have regarded the commodification of their ideas as precisely the kind of indifferent — something neither good nor bad in itself — that a person of genuine moral progress should train themselves to ignore.
Vocabulary
- austere distinction
- brutal brevity
- intentional activity
- intrinsic moral weight
Grammar: Inversion
- Inversion: negative
- Never did he pretend the discipline was easy. — fronted negative adverbial + auxiliary + subject
- Inversion
- Seldom does a system strip the good life so completely. — use do/does/did when no other auxiliary is present
Discussion questions
- Is total self-control a strength or a form of self-deception?
- Do you think philosophy can genuinely change how someone lives?
- Should people accept bad situations rather than fight to change them?
The Stoic Prescription
Grammar: Inversion
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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