“self-efficacy: The belief that an individual can produce effects through personal effort. Like self-esteem, self-efficacy is important in setting and meeting goals for students of all ages.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Warsaw Uprising: (August-October 1944) Insurrection in Warsaw in World War II that failed to prevent the pro-Soviet Polish administration from gaining control of Poland. In July 1944, as Soviet troops approached Warsaw, the Polish underground was encouraged to stage an uprising against the Germans. Though wary of Soviet promises of self-government, the Polish home army of 50,000 troops attacked the weakened German force and gained control of most of Warsaw in four days. German reinforcements then bombarded the city with air and artillery attacks for 63 days, The approaching Red Army halted, and the Soviets refused to allow aid from the Allies to the beleaguered Poles, who were forced to surrender when their supplies ran out in October; the Germans then deported the rest of the city’s population and destroyed most of the city itself. By allowing the Polish home army to be eliminated, the Soviets diminished potential resistance to their establishing political domination for Poland in 1945.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on plagiarism. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three simple sentences and three comprehension questions. I think it judicious, particularly now that we’ve entered the age of artificial intelligence, to remind students regularly of their obligation not to plagiarize.
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.
“authoritarianism: A style of government in which the rulers demand unquestioning obedience from the ruled. Traditionally, ‘authoritarians’ have argued for a high degree of determination by governments of belief and behavior and correspondingly smaller significance for individual choice. But it is possible to be authoritarian in some spheres while being more liberal in others. Frederick the Great is alleged to have said, ‘I have an agreement with my people: they can say what they like and I can do what I like.’
Authoritarianism has become simply a ‘boo’ word, referring to overweening and intolerant government irrespective of the justification, or lack of it, of such practices. Thus is often means exactly the same as despotism, an older word. A number of American political scientists in the Cold War period distinguished between ‘authoritarian‘ and ‘totalitarian‘ governments. The former (mainly military regimes) had two advantages over the latter: they did not last as long and though they would repress their political opponents as brutally as any known regimes, they left a larger sphere for private life. (Totalitarian regimes were, in this context, invariably communist.) Thus, where conditions were not yet ripe for democracy, there were relative advantages to authoritarianism.”
Excerpted from: McLean, Iain, and Alistair McMillan, editors. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“acculturation: This term is used to describe both the process of contacts between different cultures and also the outcome of such contacts. As the process of contact between cultures, acculturation may involve either direct social interaction or exposure to other cultures by means of the mass media of communication. As the outcome of such contact, acculturation refers to the assimilation by one group of the culture of another which modifies the existing culture and so changes group identity. There may be a tension between old and new cultures which leads to the adaptation of the new as well as the old.”
Excerpted from: Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner. Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Penguin, 2006.
“Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: (April 19-May 16, 1943) Revolt by Polish Jews under Nazi occupation against deportation to Treblinka. By July 1942 the Nazis had herded 500,000 Jews from surrounding areas into the ghetto in Warsaw. Though starvation killed thousands each month, the Nazis began transferring over 5,000 Jews a week to rural ‘labor camps.’ When word reached the ghetto in early 1943 that the destination was actually the gas chambers at Treblinka, the underground Jewish combat group ZOB attacked the Nazis, killing 50 in four days of street fighting and causing the deportations to halt. On April 19, Heinrich Himmler sent 2,000 SS men and army troops to clear the ghetto of its remaining 56,000 Jews. For four weeks the Jewish ZOB and guerillas fought with pistols and homemade bombs, destroying tanks and killing several hundred Nazis, until their ammunition ran out. All the Jews were either killed or deported, and on May 16 the SS chief declared ‘The Warsaw Ghetto is no more.’”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Liberal Arts: In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Biblical authority for fixing the number at seven comes from Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” Such applied subjects as law and medicine were excluded from the from the liberal arts on the grounds that they were concerned with purely practical matters. In modern times, the liberal arts include languages, sciences, philosophy, history, and related subjects. The term is a translation of the Latin artes liberales, so called because their pursuit was the privilege of freemen who were called liberi.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
I rather doubt there will be a huge amount of demand for this Cultural Literacy worksheet on treasury bills, though perhaps there should be. I developed it when I worked in a economics-and-finance-themed high school in Manhattan a number of years ago, then never used it.
In any case. this is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. The second two of the three sentences are longish compounds separated by semicolons which might be best broken up and rewritten as simpler clauses for students who struggle with these kinds of sentences.
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.
“We are a culture that has been denied, of has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where boys are lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys–a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.
Functional illiteracy in America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can’t read a simple sentence. There are some 50 million people who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate–a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book. And it is not much better beyond our borders. Canada has an illiterate and semiliterate population estimated at 42 percent of the whole, a proportion that mirrors that of the United States.”
Excerpted from: Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, 2009.
“fascism: A right-wing nationalist ideology or movement with a totalitarian and hierarchical structure that is fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism. In ancient Rome, the authority of the state was symbolized by the fasces, a bundle of rods bound together (signifying popular unity) with a protruding axe-head (denoting leadership). As such, it was appropriated by Mussolini to label the movement he led to power in Italy in 1922, but was subsequently generalized to cover a whole range of movements during the inter-war period. These include the National Socialists in Germany, as well as others such as Action Francaise, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, or the Falangists in Spain. In the post-war period, the term has been used, often prefixed by “neo,” to describe what are successors to these movements, as well as Peronism and, most recently, some movements in ex-Communist countries, such as Pamyat in Russia (see extreme-right parties). Given such diversity, does the term have any meaning?
Genuinely fascist ideologies are: monist, that is to say, based upon fundamental and basic truths about humanity and the environment which to not admit to question; simplistic, in the sense of ascribing complex phenomena to single causes and advancing single remedies; fundamentalist, that is, involving a division the world into “good” and “bad” with nothing in between; and conspiratorial, that is, predicated on the existence of a secret world-wide conspiracy by a hostile group seeking to manipulate the masses to achieve and or maintain a dominant position.
In content, these ideologies are distinguished by five main components. (1) Extreme nationalism, the belief that there is a clearly defined nation which has its own distinctive characteristics, culture, and interests, and which is superior to others. (2) An assertion of national decline—that at some point in the mythical past the nation was great, with harmonious social and political relationships, and dominant over others, and that subsequently it has disintegrated, become internally fractious and divided, and subordinate to lesser nations. (3) This process of national decline is often linked to a diminution of the racial purity of the nation. In some movements the nation is regarded as co-extensive with the race (the nation race), while in others, hierarchies of race are defined generically with nations located within them (the race nation); in virtually all cases, the view is taken that the introduction of impurities has weakened the nation and been responsible for its plight. (4) The blame for national decline and/or racial miscegenation is laid at the door of a conspiracy on the part of other nations/races seen as competing in a desperate struggle for dominance. (5) In that struggle, both capitalism and its political form, liberal democracy, are seen as mere divisive devices designed to fragment the nation and subordinate if further in the world order.
With regard to prescriptive content, the first priority is the reconstitution of the nation as an entity by restoring its purity. The second is to restore national dominance by reorganizing the polity, the economy, and society. Means to this end include variously: (1) the institution of an authoritarian and antiliberal state dominated by a single party; (2) total control by the latter over political aggregation, communication, and socialization: (3) direction by the state of labor and consumption to create a productionist and self-sufficient economy; and (4) a charismatic leader embodying the “real” interests of the nation and energizing the masses. With these priorities fulfilled, the nation would then be in a position to recapture its dominance, if necessary by military means.
Such priorities were explicit in the inter-war fascist movements, which engaged in racial/ethnic “cleansing,” establishing totalitarian political systems, productionist economies, and dictatorships, and of course went to war in pursuit of international dominance. But such parties can no longer openly espouse these extremes, and national/racial purity now takes the form of opposition to continuing immigration and demands for repatriation; totalitarianism and dictatorship have been replaced by lesser demands for a significant strengthening in the authority of the state, allegedly within a democratic framework; productionism has become interventionism; and military glory has been largely eschewed.”
Excerpted from: McLean, Iain, and Alistair McMillan, editors. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.