“The Negro Race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth.”
“The Talented Tenth” (1903)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which in a short paragraph, and with your expert teaching, will illustrate for your students how the kidnapping, subjugation, forced labor, and murder of persons of African descent is intimately bound up with the economic growth and development of the United States.
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.
“Fire * Earth * Air * Water
The ancient division of the world of matter into four categories underwrote a whole interlinked system of equivalences that helped define human character, tend imbalances, mend illness and peer into the future. For the four elements were also assessed on a scale of hot and cold, wet and dry and given particular associations.
Thus, Fire was both hot and dry and linked with one of the four humours (the choleric) and the astrological signs of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius. Earth was dry and cold, and allied to black ‘melas’ bile (melancholic) and the three earth signs of Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn. Air was both hot and wet, and connected with blood and a sanguinous character and the three air signs of Gemini, Libra and Aquarius. Water was wet and cold, allied with a phlegmatic character and the water signs of Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.
The elements can also be allied to the four suits of cards, either our modern symbols or the fourteenth-century forms that are used in the tarot pack: Cups (water), Swords (air), Batons (fire) and Coins (earth).”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged numeracy, science literacy
OK, here is a short reading on prime numbers along with the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies 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.
“Visigothic Art: The Visigoths were the most Romanized of the Germanic invaders, and thus their cultural legacy (mostly south of the Pyrenees) includes the continuation of late Roman-Christian architectural styles (5th century-711), with one notable addition: the horseshoe-shaped arch, adopted by the Arabs after the invasions of 711. The Visigoths excelled in metalwork and jewelry using gold, crystal, and precious stones.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
If you happen to be teaching a unit or lesson an ancient Rome, this context clues worksheet on the noun consul might be helpful, particularly concerning Julius Caesar’s activities in the that city in and around 44 BC.
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.
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Emancipation Proclamation does a very nice job of including the fundamental political cynicism behind the document as a political gesture and an act of liberation. In so doing (and you will see that there is plenty of room to expand this worksheet, which you can easily do because, like just about everything else published on Mark’s Text Terminal, it is in Microsoft Word), it opens a lot of room to ask big questions about the document itself, as well as others like 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.
“The sources of some emotional attitudes are easy to appreciate. Here’s Oprah Winfrey on reading: ‘Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered that there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.’ One source—probably the primary source—of positive reading attitudes is positive reading experiences. This phenomenon is no more complicated than understanding why someone has a positive attitude toward eggplant. You taste it and like it. Oprah tasted the mental journeys reading affords, and loved them.
But we can elaborate a bit on this obvious relationship. Kids who like to read also tend to be strong readers, as measured by standard reading tests. Again, not terribly surprising—we usually like what we’re good at and vice versa. The situation yields a positive feedback loop….
If you’re a good reader, you’re more likely to enjoy a story because reading it doesn’t seem like work. That enjoyment means that you have a better attitude toward reading; that is, you believe that reading is a pleasurable, valuable thing to do. A better attitude means you read more often and more reading makes you better at reading—your decoding gets still more fluent, lexical representations become richer, and your background knowledge increases. We would also predict the inverse to be true: if reading is difficult you won’t enjoy it, you’ll have a negative attitude toward the activity, and you’ll avoid it whenever possible, meaning that you’ll fall still further behind your peers. This cycle has been called ‘The Matthew Effect’ from the biblical verse ‘For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath’ (Matthew 25-29). Or more briefly, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
When I worked at an economics-and-finance-themed high school in Lower Manhattan, this context clues worksheet on the noun conglomerate was de rigueur. I’m hard pressed to imagine it isn’t a word high school students ought to know.
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.
“Antagonist: In drama or fiction, the antagonist opposes the hero or protagonist (q.v.). In Othello, Iago is the antagonist to the Moor. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Farfrae is antagonist to Henchard.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
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