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.

Dr. King on Government Action and Inaction

“Government action is not the whole answer to the present crisis, but it is an important partial answer. Morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.”

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story ch. 11 (1958)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Hellenistic Art

“Hellenistic Art: Term describing the later and less classical phase of Greek art, ca. 300 to 100 B.C. Also applied to Greco-Roman art and architecture.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Battle of Antietam

OK, social studies teachers, here is a short reading on the American Civil War Battle of Antietam along with a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to go with 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.

An Independent Practice Worksheet on Ibn Battutah

Ok: very quickly, on this busy Tuesday morning, and in the ongoing observation of Black History Month 2020 at Mark’s Text Terminal, here is an independent practice worksheet on Ibn Battutah.

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.

Word Root Exercise: Gam/o, Gamet/o, and -Gamy

Here is a worksheet on the Greek word roots gam/o, gamet/o, and -gamy. This is a complicated but nonetheless productive set of roots that mean marriage, sexual union, gamete, and united. Science teachers, I would guess that some of these words turn up in your classroom.

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.

Chaos (n)

OK, I’m on my way out the door–but here’s a context clues worksheet on the noun chaos; I’ll assume I don’t need to belabor a rationale for students knowing this word.

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.

Did Ralph Ellison Speak for You?

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

Invisible Man epilogue (1952)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Cultural Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education

Continuing with Black History Month 2020, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court Decision that desegregated public schools in this country.

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.

Term of Art: Metalanguage

“Metalanguage: A language used to refer to statements made in another language, called in this context the object language. If the statements being referred to are in French and the statements referring to them are in English, for example, then the distinction between object language (French) and the metalanguage (English) is clear, but if the object language and metalanguage are both expressed in English, or both in a formal language such as the predicate calculus, then confusion can arise. Quotation marks can sometimes help, as in the sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true if an only if snow is white, in which the statement belonging to the object language is enclosed in quotation marks. Many paradoxes, including debatably the liar paradox, arise from a failure to distinguish object language from metalanguage: expressions involving true and false, when applied to a sentence, must always be expressed in a metalanguage and not in the object language of the sentence, The ideas behind the concept of a metalanguage are traceable to an article ‘On Denoting’ by the Welsh philosopher Bertrand (Arthur William) Russell (1872-1972) in the journal Mind in 1905, and the concept was fully developed by the Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski (1902-1983) in his monograph De Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen (The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages) in 1933.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

“Long Walk to Freedom: The autobiography (1994) of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), the first black president of South Africa, who, under the apartheid regime, had been jailed for three decades, largely on Robben Island. The title is said to have been inspired by the words in ‘From Lucknow to Tripuri,’ and essay (1939) by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), who was to become the first prime minister of independent India:

There is not easy walk-over to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow again and again before we reach the mountain-tops of our desire.”

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