Category Archives: Independent Practice

As you may know (or probably know if you are a regular user of this website), Hispanic Heritage Month is observed annually from 15 September to 15 October in the United States. Therefore, it is also observed here at Mark’s Text Terminal. The problem for the blog–and therefore for me, with which I am currently displeased–is that after this month, whose offerings are arguably at the margins of Hispanic Heritage Month, I will have run out of materials for Weekly Texts for the month.

It’s probably worth mentioning that Latinx students in the school in which I serve, during the local superintendent’s visits, have discussed the fact that they often feel invisible at our school. Demographically, our student body is principally students of Afro-Caribbean descent. We do tend to make a big deal of Black History Month, but not so much of Hispanic Heritage Month.

In fairness to the institution in which I serve (which probably doesn’t deserve it, but that is a subject for a blog entry that I will probably never write), ignorance of Hispanic Heritage Month is not unusual. During the 2018-2019 school year, I worked in a high school in Springfield, Massachusetts. Springfield (and nearby Holyoke) has a longstanding and robust citizenry of Puerto Rican descent. In that school, the students I served had never even heard of Hispanic Heritage Month. That, you won’t be surprised to hear, shocked me. In any event, despite its many shortcomings, at least the majority of the faculty and administration, ergo the student body, at my current school is aware of this month’s celebration of the contributions to this nation from its citizens of Hispanic descent.

A couple of years ago, I was assigned a sociology elective course three days  before the school year began. There was no syllabus or curriculum for this course, and I obviously had no time to plan. As I began working on the course, I focused on sociological issues germane to the community in which I live and work. Knowing as I did Latinx students’ feelings of invisibility in my school, I began work on a unit on the infamous “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles in 1943. The idiocy of standardized testing and pointless, make-work administrative mandates ultimately derailed this project, although I do have a unit outlined, texts chosen, and ancillary material, particularly the PBS documentary on this incident, ready to build into a series of at least a half-dozen solid lessons. I plan to finish this unit at some point (after, at the very least, I read Thomas Sanchez’s novel Zoot Suit Murders, a copy of which I currently possess). I’ll get that material up as soon as I can.

In the meantime, please accept the rather weak tea, where Hispanic history is concerned, of this reading on San Francisco along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

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.