Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Iroquois League. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of on sentence and one comprehension question. In other words, a short, basic introduction to this indigenous nation.
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.
“Iriquois: Any member of the Iroquois Confederacy or more broadly, any speaker of Iroquoian languages. Iroquoian-speaking peoples were semisedentary, practiced agriculture, palisaded their villages, and dwelled in longhouses that lodged many families. Women worked the fields and, in matrilineal groups, helped determine the makeup of village councils. Men built houses, hunted, fished, and made war. Iroquoian mythology was largely preoccupied with supernatural aggression and cruelty, sorcery, torture, and cannibalism. Their formal religion consisted of agricultural festivals. Warfare was ingrained in Iroquois society, and war captives were often tortured for days or made permanent slaves, Today the various Iroquois tribes include about 20,000 members.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Today begins National Native American Heritage Month 2024. Unlike this blog’s (therefore my own) woeful deficiencies during Hispanic Heritage Month 2023 last month and in September, I have a full raft of materials to post this month–which contains five Fridays.
So the Weekly Text for today, Friday, 1 November 2014, is this reading on the Pequot War along with its attendant 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.
“semantic knowledge: Data stored in long-term memory regarding general information and concepts.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
A couple of years ago, I was assigned a sociology elective at my school. In the inimitably brilliant style of my school’s chief administrator, I learned of this three days before classes began. And of course there was, again typically, no curriculum for this course.
So I needed to come up with something in a hurry. I did, but let’s face it: developing a curriculum for a high school sociology course, let alone mastering its teaching, is a process that takes years: I really only had days, so I needed to move this process along quickly. I have a fair amount of material, but I fear it is of mixed quality. So, here is a worksheet on assimilation, the process by which immigrants integrate into their adopted nations and societies.
I would be particularly interested, if you use any of this material, and especially if you happen to know anything about sociology (I do, but clearly not enough for the endeavor to which I was deployed), to hear from you about it.
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.
“Jacobo Arbenz Guzman: (1913-1971) Soldier and president of Guatemala (1951-54). The son of a Swiss émigré, Arbenz joined the leftist army officers who overthrew the dictator Jorge Ubico (1878-1946) in 1944. Elected president in 1951, he made land reform his central project. His efforts to expropriate idle land owned by the United Fruit Company and his alleged Communist links led to an invasion sponsored by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. When the army refused to defend Arbenz against what appeared to be a superior force, he resigned and went into exile, and the CIA installed the leader of the proxy army, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1914-1957), as president.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
OK, last but not least in documents posts for Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Yucatan. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. The document does note that the Yucatan is the site of “many Mayan ruins.”
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.
“The Labyrinth of Solitude (El laberinto de la soledad, 1950; tr 1961): A book by Octavio Paz. This penetrating essay on Mexican history has probably been more widely read and is thus more influential than any of Paz’s other essays or poetry. In search of the meaning of the Mexican and, by extension, the Latin American experience, Paz singles out the conquest of the Indians by Spanish invaders as the moment the true Mexico became isolated and obscured by masks. Silence, dissimulation, machismo, hermeticism, violence, and the cult of death are the masks adopted by the Mexican to disguise his fundamental historical solitude. Paz argues, however, that solitude has become a universal part of the human condition and that all men, like the poet himself, must become conscious of this condition in order to find, in the plentitude of love and creative work, a glimpse of the way out of the labyrinth of solitude.
In the revised and supplemented edition of 1985, Paz clarifies his view of Mexican culture and history, and deals with U.S.-Mexico relations. He also reexamines the dichotomy between the “two Mexicos,” the “developed” and the “underdeveloped,” and finds that the distinction is itself an imposition of the former upon the latter. He discusses the “other” Mexico as not only a tradition and a culture, but as representing a philosophical “Other,” like the other within.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Uruguay. This is a full-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and four comprehension questions.
Incidentally, should you be interested in delving deeper into Uruguayan politics and society, I published this blog post on Tupac Amaru II, who was the namesake of a Uruguayan revolutionary group the Tupamaros, whose work resisting a repressive governments led the way to Uruguay becoming a “full democracy,” indeed, one of the strongest democracies in the Americas.
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.
For the final Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, here is the post for this month that bears the scantest relation to Hispanic History: a a reading on the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As this event’s name indicates (and if you’ve read Erik Larsen’s fascinating book The Devil in the White City, you know most if not all there is to know about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition), it is related to Christopher Columbus, to wit the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the “New World.”
Certainly Spain’s arrival in the New World basically begins what we might consider Hispanic History, that’s how we come by the word Hispanic, after all. So there is marginal relevance here. I don’t know, this event seems like the conquistador’s round of self-congratulation for a job of genocide well done.
But as I said at the outset of this month, I am woefully under-inventoried where materials related to Hispanic History is concerned.
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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