Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. I’ll proceed to my next post on the assumption I don’t need to belabor this high point in American rhetoric.
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.
“Meritocracy: A social system in which status is achieved through ability and effort (merit), rather than ascribed on the basis of age, class, gender, or other such particularistic or inherited advantages. The term implies that the meritorious deserve any privileges which they accrue. In practice it is difficult to find reliable measures of merit about which social scientists can agree.
The term was coined by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) to refer to government by those identified as the most able high achievers, with merit defined as intelligence plus effort. His fantasy attempted to foresee the extreme consequences of a society which fully implemented the goal of equality of opportunity through the educational system, with the most able rising to the upper echelons, leaving intellectual dullards to carry out the humble manual work. The book warned that the new focus on intelligence and ability in the educational system merely institutionalized inequality of intellectual ability in place of inequality based on social class. Since judgements about what constitutes effort are inescapably moral (does a lazy genius merit rewarding? And, if so, why not reward a hard-working dullard?) the term remains highly contested (see, for example, John Goldthorpe, ‘Problems of “Meritocracy’) in Robert Erikson and Jan O. Jonsson (eds.). Can Education be Equalized?, 1996).”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Health teachers, if you can use them, here is a short reading on bulimia and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I hope you can use it. This has tended to be high-interest material in my classrooms, 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.
“Louise Bourgeois: (1911-2010) Franco-American painter and sculptor, Bourgeois was born in Paris to a family that operated an art gallery specializing in historic tapestries. Dissatisfied with the conservatism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she pursued her education at a number of independent academies and in the studios of modernist painters Fernand Leger, Andre Lhote, and others. Her early paintings are notable for their feminist content. In 1949, Bourgeois gave up painting and began experimenting with new sculptural materials that ranged from concrete to marble. Later, Bourgeois focused on naturalistic and amorphous forms. By the seventies, her engagement with feminism had led her to a more assertive depiction of women and further exploration of sexual themes. Her works vary in scale and media, but most often evoke bodies, or parts of them, in order to call into question how the human body is perceived.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here’s the last post of the day and for the final Friday of Women’s History Month 2020, a short reading on the fascinating Victoria Woodhull and 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.
Here is something new at Mark’s Text Terminal: a reading and analysis lesson plan derived from the text of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book The Order of Things. I’ll be writing up a summary of this work and its purpose on the “About Posts & Texts” page, which you can click through to just above the banner photograph. I am still thinking through how to describe the object of these lessons (I have 30 of them outlined at this point), but I can say this much: these worksheets are an attempt to provide students practice, as a road to developing their own understanding of what former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called the work of “symbolic analysts.”
This first lesson plan is on the admission of the first 13 of the United States. The worksheet for this lesson calls upon students to read and analyze both language and numbers (two sets of symbols, in other words) in order to answer a series of relatively simple comprehension questions. There is a lot of room to alter this material to you and your students’ needs; as always, these documents are in Microsoft Word, so they are easily manipulable.
More of these are forthcoming, as is a more extensive explanation of them and rationale for their use, as above, on the “About Posts & Texts” page.
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.
“Five Ws: The questions that must be answered when writing journalistic prose: who, what, when, where, and why. Together, the questions act as a formula for getting the basic story on an issue or a topic.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
OK. Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on hunting and gathering societies. I’m hard pressed to imagine that this doesn’t belong as a foundation stone in any social studies curriculum.
Hell, it may even arouse interest in building a cooperative society. Remember cooperation? I liked 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.
“Impressionism: The 19th-century movement, well developed by the time of the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, that is now regarded as the culmination of realism. The impressionist painters analyzed natural effects with devoted intensity. They devised the spectrum palette and relied on optical mixing to capture the impression of light at a given moment. The most important of them include Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb dawn. It’s only used intransitively. The context clues I use call upon students to infer that two meanings of this word, to wit. “to begin to grow light as the sun rises” and “to begin to be perceived or understood.”
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 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.