Category Archives: Independent Practice

OK–Black History Month 2026 has arrived. As I say every year, at Mark’s Text Terminal every month is Black History Month because Black History is American History. At the same time, far be it from me to second guess a person of Carter G. Woodson’s stature; Black History Month is his brainchild. This month I have a couple of new things to roll out, developed in the year since the last time the calendar spun around to February.

So let’s start out with these 27 pages of annotations I prepared to accompany all 17 chapters of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus. As you may know, Ms. Adichie is a member of a group of writers known as the “Children of Achebe” (about which I heard a great deal on a public radio program several years ago, and can now find no credible source for citation on the Internet). Artificial Intelligence (which I think dubious at best) yields a list of names that include Ms. Adichie, as well as Helon Habila, Chigozie Obioma, and Sefi Atta.

Achebe, of course, refers the the late, great, Chinua Achebe, whose novel Things Fall Apart is universally regarded as a masterpiece of post-colonial literature. Purple Hibiscus is also an exemplary post-colonial novel. And it’s difficult to get past the first sentence of this fine book without noticing Ms. Adichie’s homage to Chinua Achebe: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.”

Finally, in preparing this post, I intended to refer to material I’d prepared and published for Ms. Adichie’s short book (pamphlet, really, and literally the transcript of a TED talk), We Should All Be Feminists. To my surprise, I somehow never staged this material for inclusion in this blog. I have two versions of the unit, one complete and one incomplete. The complete unit was prepared for a small class of emergent readers and writers, so there is a lot of material. Needless to say, now that I have uncovered this lapse, I have this material in the warehouse and ready for publication.

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.