Monthly Archives: June 2023

Metier

Posted on June 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Metier: A particular subject in which an artist specializes.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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The Weekly Text, Friday 23 June 2023: History of Hip-Hop Lesson 16, Concluding Assessment and Reflection

Posted on June 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Alright, here, finally, is the sixteenth and final lesson plan of the History of Hip-Hop Unit. I use this Cultural Literacy worksheet on racism as a do-now exercise. The work of this lesson, which I have allowed to play out over two or three days, is this concluding assessment and reflection and this metacognitive assessment worksheet.

And that, gentle reader, is that. There are now sixteen lessons available on the History of Hip-Hop at 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.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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On Juneteenth 2023, a Prescription from Isabel Wilkerson

Posted on June 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the true history of our country, wrenching though it may be. The persistence of caste and race hostility, and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste. You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.

‘We must make every effort [to ensure] that the past injustice, violence, and economic discrimination will be made known to the people,’ Einstein said in an address to the National Urban League. ‘The taboo, the “let’s-not-talk-about-it” must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practice is a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.’

The challenge for our era is not merely the social construct of black and white but seeing through the many layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have. Even the most privileged of humans in the Western word will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough. They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death. A caste system spares no one.”

Excerpted from: Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. New York: Random House, 2020.

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Cultural Literacy: Emancipation Proclamation

Posted on June 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

For Juneteenth 2023, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Emancipation Proclamation. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences, each of them longish compounds, and four comprehension questions. Like so many of these Cultural Literacy squibs, this one’s brevity does not attenuate its thoroughness. Indeed, it notes, with historical accuracy, that “In itself, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves, because it applied only to rebellious areas that the federal government did not then control.” That is an important fact to keep in mind when analyzing this document. Put another way, the Emancipation Proclamation was in some measure a symbolic gesture.

By 19 July 1865, now known as Juneteenth, however, the Confederacy was vanquished and the Emancipation Proclamation carried the force of law.

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.

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Blog Post Number 6,001

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

OK, here is another milestone on this blog, passing the six-thousandth post. I don’t have much to offer in the way of commemoration, but I did find some preliminary documents in a unit I planned to write on interjections. These are pretty basic; I didn’t proceed with developing the unit for a variety of reasons, though primarily because I didn’t think this relatively minor part of speech required a full unit. Put another way, I decided that if students knew (they did and probably still do) that Homer Simpson says “d’oh” and Peter Griffin says “crap” when something annoyed, vexed, or otherwise exercised them, then they understood that an interjection, mainly, was “a cry or inarticulate utterance (such as Alas! ouch! phooey! ugh!) expressing an emotion.”

So, without further ado, here are the unit plan in barest outline, with the similarly graphically configured first lesson plan and second lesson plan, and, finally, this interjections review worksheet.

That’s it. Now it’s on to 7,000.

This is the place where I usually plead for peer review and notifications about typos in documents. There’s nothing much to comment on with these documents, which are basically templates. Nonetheless, if you think interjections require their own lesson, or even unit, I would be interested in hearing about that thought.

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Posted in Announcement, English Language Arts, Lesson Plans, Worksheets

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Jeanne Chall on Educational Theory, Practice, and Reform

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

“As I begin to consider whether some educational practices resulted in higher educational achievement, I began to think in terms of patterns, types, and syndromes. Can educational practices, philosophies, and beliefs be classified into broad patterns and types? Do some students learn better when exposed to one pattern or another?

I thought this was a particularly appropriate time to ask such questions. The number of proposed educational reforms seems to be at an all-time high. And precisely when we need stability, we seem to be investing our hopes in one educational change after another—with little evidence that any one of them will improve student achievement levels. Whether because we have too little supporting evidence or simply fail to use that which we have, we go about debating the merits of one or another practice as though we were in an intellectual vacuum relative to our own past experience.”

Excerpted from: Chall, Jeanne S. The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom? New York: The Guilford Press, 2002.

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Concepts in Sociology: Acculturation

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Last September, about four days before the beginning of the school year, I learned that I was tasked with teaching a sociology elective in my school. There was, of course, no curriculum. It happens that I know something about the domain, but not enough to teach it effectively.

So, I went write to work reading, taking notes, accumulating text, and trying to synthesize it all into something that had relatively expansive scope and logical sequence. As usual, other responsibilities intervened, and I often found myself without a proper lesson to teach. Which brings us to this worksheet on acculturation. I prepared this, and sixty-nine others like it, on the fly when I needed something in a hurry.

So, if you see the “Concepts in Sociology” header on a blog post, it will be one of these documents. I’d be interested, as below and always, if you use these materials in your classroom and how. Most of them are relatively short, and might be appropriate for do-now exercises at the beginning of a class period. Many of them might be usefully integrated into social studies or English language arts lessons, depending on the texts and approach you’re using in those domains.

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.

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Bowdlerize

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

“bowdlerize: To expurgate a book. In 1818 an English physician, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), gave to the world a ten-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works ‘in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’ Bowdler later treated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in the same way. Hence, we have the words bowdlerist, bowdlerizer, bowdlerism, bowdlerization, etc.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Cultural Literacy: William Blake

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on William Blake. When I began teaching in New York City in 2003, his poem “The Chimney Sweeper” was included on at least a couple of New York State’s high-stakes Regents’ Tests–so I imagine I prepared this document to introduce students–and with a four-sentence reading with three comprehension questions, I think this worksheet serves its purpose–to Blake.

In my high school year, after being directed toward William Blake by Allen Ginsberg and The Fugs (and yes, I stipulate I went to high school in a very different time than today), I started reading him and have never stopped.

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.

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Term of Art: Space Perception

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

“space perception: The ability to understand on a perceptual level the way in which objects are facing or placed, the direction in which they are moving, and the relation of objects to each other, both in distance and orientation.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

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