As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I took a new job a couple of months ago; I’m now five weeks in, and so far so good. I’m spread much less thin, and working on literacy issues with much greater focus.
Which has permitted me the time, and the clarity of students who know their interests, to develop some new material, including this reading on comics legend Stan Lee and the comprehension worksheet to accompany it which students requested in an interest survey. You will note, particularly if you’ve heretofore downloaded and used other readings and comprehension worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, that these two documents are quite a bit longer than is the norm here. I find that bears what I hope is a brief explanation.
First of all, I synthesized this article from Wikipedia’s page on Stan Lee. While I do understand educators’ concerns with Wikipedia, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great idea to write off the site completely. I use Wikipedia heavily, support it financially, and believe it a worthy resource for certain types of work and fact-finding. In any case, where Wikipedia suffers what I’ll charitably call epistemological problems, I find them limited to politics, especially contemporary politics, and hot-button controversies. An article on someone like Stan Lee, in my experience, is highly unlikely to have been tampered with, and therefore unlikely to contain untruths.
Second, as to length. After trying to keep this reading to one page, I decided to edit together a relatively comprehensive biography of Lee. Thus it ran to two pages, and the comprehension worksheet to five. It goes without saying, I assume, that this document, as are all documents on this website, is in Microsoft Word format. Therefore, you may edit both documents to suit your students’ and your needs. I know this may be too much for some readers; simply cut sections you think are superfluous, and voila! You have differentiated instruction for one or more students.
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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