To begin the week (which ends in the first Friday of Black History Month 2019), here is a worksheet on the Greek word root idio. It means peculiar, personal, and distinct. Think of the word idiosyncratic, a word loaded with other Greek roots (i.e. syn and crat).
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.
Next Friday marks the beginning of Black History Month 2019. This year’s theme is Black Migrations; that link will take you to a page where you’ll find a printable PDF that would serve nicely as classroom door banner. People of African descent everywhere have been the subjects of voluntary migration and the objects of involuntary migration. In the United States, after Americans of African descent endured the horror and infamy of their forced migration into chattel slavery, they once again migrated from the southern states in what historians have dubbed The Great Migration.
Most Americans, alas, lack understanding of the ways in which The Great Migration changed–for the better, inarguably, in my not at all humble opinion–this country. I’ve always thought the most succinct reference to the changes to this country wrought by The Great Migration was uttered by the old bluesman, played by the great Joe Seneca, in Walter Hill’s 1986 film Crossroads. The Julliard student and aspiring blues guitarist played by Ralph Macchio is fixated on the music of Robert Johnson, and he wants Joe Seneca’s character, Willie Brown–whose name is called out in Johnson’s song “Crossroads,” to teach him a long-lost song of Johnson’s he believes Brown possesses. Macchio’s character, Eugene Martone, is fixated on Delta Blues, which he plays on an acoustic guitar. In exasperation, as the two of them prepare to play live, Brown tells Martone (I paraphrase, but closely, I am confident), “Muddy Waters invented electricity” as he takes the young man to a music shop to trade in his acoustic guitar for an electric.
The comment is freighted with numerous implications, not the least of which is that Muddy Waters and others like him (e.g. Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker) added numerous genres to the spectrum of American music. If you know anything about the blues, you know that without it there would be no rock and roll. In fact, whole genres of music in the United States would not exist without the influence of Americans of African descent.
Anyway, this week’s Text is a lesson plan on migration as a cause of history. I begin this lesson, when I teach it, with this context clues worksheet on the noun nomad. Finally here is the (very) short reading and comprehension worksheet that I’ve used in this lesson. This lesson, incidentally, is part of a unit I wrote to help students develop their own understanding of some basic concepts in historical study. I named the unit after a introduction to liberal studies course called “Causes of History” I heard students complaining about at Amherst College when I took Russian language classes there. I still remember what the students in my Russian class called it: “Causes of Misery.”
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.
OK, on a rainy morning, here is a lesson plan on “Merrill’s Alibi,” the fourth “case” in the first volume of the Crime and Puzzlement series of books.
I begin this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” the famous line, of course, from Romeo and Juliet. You’ll need this PDF of the illustration and questions from the book itself so students may can investigate whether or not Merrill’s alibi is credible. Finally, here is a typescript of the answer key to close the case of Merrill’s Alibi.
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.
In response to a request from a student, I worked up this reading on Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet and this vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it. If you’re not familiar with this, one of the famous poems of all time, it begins with the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
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.
Here is a short independent practice worksheet on Athens that I’ve had good luck using with struggling and emergent readers. It’s short, punchy, very easy to edit or adapt, and covers the key concepts about the center of the ancient Greek world.
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.
On a very chilly morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” This expression remains in sufficiently common usage that students probably ought to learn it somewhere along the way–if they don’t hear it in social contexts, didactic teaching may be called for. This document might help.
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.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States; this holiday, to me at least, given the political and cultural atmosphere in this country, feels especially important this year. If you ever feel a need to do something to make the world a more just place, today is the day to take action. As soon as the temperature rises to its balmy high of six degrees here in Springfield, Massachusetts, I’ll make the two-block trek to the Salvation Army Donation Center to deliver a couple of bags of things I can with which I can afford to part.
To celebrate the day, here is a reading on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and a vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet to attend it. As a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Justice Marshall did the work to bring about Dr. King’s version of a just society for all, regardless of skin color, in the United States. While he argued a number of significant cases that led to ethnic justice, his crowning achievement by most standards must be his triumph in the Kansas desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
If you find these materials useful, let me remind you that at this point in January, we are on the eve of Black History Month 2019. Mark’s Text Terminal will feature a full month of posts on Black History–as it does every year.
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.
Students everywhere, I expect, are thoroughly assimilated into digital culture and not especially interested in its origins and folklore–of which, as it turns out, there is a great deal. Take, for example, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a nineteenth-century polymath who is arguably the father of the computer. The amount of human error involved in mathematical work troubled Babbage, so he set out to invent the difference engine, a steam powered mechanical computer engineered to produce error-free mathematical tabulations.
Babbage’s invention has fascinated people since its inception, and unless I miss my guess, you will see in the course of your teaching career at least a few students interested in the history of computer technology. If so, then this reading on Charles Babbage and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it should serve as a short but thorough introduction to this obscure but important and fascinating historical figure.
If your students are up to and for it, you might also consider putting William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s (they are, incidentally, the progenitors of cyberpunk) work of alternate history and speculative fiction, The Difference Engine, in front of them. I like Gibson’s early work (his Neuromancer is a defining text of the cyberpunk genre, and a masterpiece in any case), don’t know much about Sterling, but found the novel fascinating.
Addendum: Please see the comments below from my esteemed high school chum Terry on the role of Ada Lovelace in creating the “software” to make Babbage’s engine actually perform more than basic mathematical tasks.
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.
Once again, I can’t remember why I thought I needed this learning support on historical ages and eras, so of course I don’t know why I wrote it. Unlike similar documents I’ve posted here recently subsequent to a housecleaning in the archives, this one has been useful in my classroom for students to turn into classroom posters. A little graphic design, some brightly colored markers, some of the student’s personal sense of style, and voila! You have an authentic piece of graphic art to hang on the wall of your classroom.
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.
These five worksheets on the homophones lead and led are not exactly the most cogent ever to issue from my pen. They do stand on their own, I think, and with some tinkering (which I may get to in the future, and since these are in Microsoft Word and can be manipulated, you can get to whenever you see fit) they might increase in cogency and therefore effectiveness.
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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