Category Archives: Independent Practice

Here is a reading on the Otis Elevator company with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As usual, David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim, the editors of the Intellectual Devotional series, ably synthesized Elisha Otis’s biography (he was, to my surprise, a farm boy from Halifax, Vermont) with the changes his invention wrought in American life–and in a one-page reading (!).

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 reading on the minimum wage and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. In three paragraphs, this reading does an admirable job (the guys who wrote and edited the Intellectual Devotional series are clearly masters of the art) of exposing the history of the minimum wage in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s broad array of New Deal legislation, the rationale for the law, and its practical effects on American social and economic history.

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 reading on the Ku Klux Klan along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I have almost posted these documents a number of times over the years, but always hesitated and returned them to the warehouse. I think, or at least hope, that the entirety of this blog exposes my attitude toward the KKK–I think they are a dangerous group of racists and hatemongers who bear watching–hence this reading.

Once again, the editors of the Intellectual Devotional series have not equivocated and in one page detailed the crimes of the Klan and its threat to the civil rights of people it hates. I think students really deserve the plain facts of this hate group’s existence and its aims. This short reading serves as a good general introduction to the KKK.

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.