Category Archives: Social Sciences

You’ll find domain-specific material designed to meet Common Core Standards in social studies, along with adapted and differentiated materials that deal with a broad array of conceptual knowledge in the social sciences. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Homosexuality

When I started working with troubled adolescents in 1990, I was surprised to see that the the clinical professionals with whom I worked, tread very lightly, if at all, around the issue of sexual identity in the kids we saw. In fact, on the only occasion I saw it addressed directly, one of the more highly placed professionals in the program angrily denied that it was a precipitant to or a factor in other clinical issues.

I’m not qualified to speak deeply about clinical pathology, but at the same time I knew that gay kids coming of age in a deeply homophobic society faced challenges that I clearly hadn’t experience and therefore didn’t understand. I did know that gay kids suffered a very high rate of suicidality.

Things have changed, fortunately. Here is a reading on homosexuality along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This has, along the way in my time as a teacher, become a high-interest item, so I have tagged it as such.

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.

Nietzsche on the Motivation of a Philosopher

“If you want to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Word Root Exercise: Sphere

OK: finally, on this rainy April morning, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root sphere. It means ball. I’ll assume I needn’t belabor the point that students should know this root, which is also, per se, a noun in the English language as well as combining to make a variety of nouns in the sciences and mathematics.

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.

A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “The Awesome Treasure”

Because they are, so to speak, flying off the shelf, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Awesome Treasure.”

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Any Port in a Storm.” This scan of the illustration and questions drives the case; this typescript of the answer key helps you solve it.

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.

Braggadocio

“Braggadocio (noun): Bumptious bragging or self-inflation; boastful language. Adj. braggadocian.

‘…the fancy lingoes of psychiatry, pedagogy, welfare, and big business—these are the twentieth century equivalents of ‘tall talk,’ sharing in the windiness of the nineteenth-century variety, but unlike it, incredibly dull and vapid. The hyperbole, grotesquery, and braggadocio survive only in American slang.’ Thomas Pyles, Words and Ways of American English

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Cultural Literacy: Enfant Terrible

I can think of no better time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the term and concept enfant terrible, since we seem to have so many of them at the moment in our culture and society.

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.

Term of Art: Voluntary Associations

“Voluntary Associations: Any public, formally constituted, and non-commercial organization of which membership is optional, within a particular society. Examples include churches, political parties, pressure groups, leisure associations or clubs, neighborhood groups, and (sometimes) trade unions and professional associations. In some theories of democracy, emphasis is placed on the important role such groups can play in fostering participation in the civil society, and thus in maintaining social order.”

Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Delegate (n/vi/vt)

Here are a pair of worksheets on delegate as a noun and a verb. As a verb it is used both intransitively and transitively–and the stress shifts to the penultimate vowel a–as in delegate, like the thing you walk through to enter a zoo or park.

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.

Everyday Edit: Japan’s “Coming of Age Day”

Here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Japan’s “Coming of Age Day.” If you like these worksheets then you are in luck! The generous people at Education World give away a yearlong supply of them, and if you dig a little deeper over there, you’ll find the answer keys as well.

Mahabharata

“Mahabhrata: One of the two great epic poems of ancient India (the other being the Ramayana), about eight times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey together. It is a great compendium, added to as late as AD 600, although it had very nearly acquired its present form by the 4th century. Covering an enormous range of topics, the Mahabharata, with its famous interpolation, the Bhagavadgita, has as its central theme the great war between the sons of two royal brothers, in a struggle for succession. The brothers are Dhritarashtra and Pandu, their families being referred to respectively as the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The Pandavas ultimately prevail, the eldest of them, Yudhishtira, gains the throne, and Arjuna, one of his younger brothers and in many ways the hero of the entire epic (especially through the Bhagavadgita), gains the hand of the lovely Draupadi and brings her home as the wife of all five brothers, The epic also contains the Shantiparvan, an important discourse on statecraft, and the famous Savitri episode, the tale of Nala Damayantt. In its totality, it is an encyclopedia of Hindu life, legend, and thought: ‘What is not in the Mahabharata,’ says the Mahabharata, ‘is not to be found anywhere else in the world.'”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.