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.

Posted on May 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Yang Chen Ning, known as Frank Yang (b. 1922) Chinese-U.S. theoretical physicist. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1945 and studied with E. Teller at the Univ. of Chicago. He showed that parity is violated when elementary particles decay. This and other work in particle physics earned him and Tsung-Dao Lee (b. 1926) a 1957 Nobel Prize. His research focused mostly on interactions involving the weak force among elementary particles. He also worked in statistical mechanics.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Independent Practice: The Han and Tang Dynasties

Posted on May 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

Here’s is an independent practice worksheet on the Han and Tang dynasties in observation of day two of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2019. Remember that Mark’s Text Terminal will post materials related to this area of study throughout the month of May.

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.

Matsuo Basho

Posted on May 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Matsuo Basho (1644-1694): Japanese haiku poet. Basho is generally acknowledged as the developer and greatest master of this form. His haiku went through many phases, evolving from the pedantic verse of his early youth to his lighthearted poetry of his last years. The work of his peak period is characterized by evocations of man’s ultimate harmony with nature. A wanderer for much of his life, Basho also wrote travel sketches interspersed with haiku. Oi no kobumi (1688; tr The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1966) is famous for its opening passages, which reveal his basic beliefs, but the best work in this genre is Oku no hosomichi (1689; tr The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1966), which, outwardly describing his journey to rural areas of northeastern Japan, inwardly traces his spiritual quest for a beauty and lyricism all but lost in urban life.”

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

Cultural Literacy: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Posted on May 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

Today begins Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2019. Mark’s Text Terminal, as it did last year, will feature posts on topics related to this theme for the entire month of May.

Now that xenophobia and bigotry have returned to a rolling boil in the United States, it’s worth remembering that, as ugly as all this is, the grotesqueries of nativism are hardly a new phenomenon in this country. So let’s start the month with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to remind us of the ignominious places we’ve traveled as a nation.

John Dewey Dissects Teaching “Content”

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

“From the standpoint of the educator…the various studies represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from the experience of the young…is real. The subject matter of the learner…cannot be identical with the formulated, crystallized knowledge of the adult…. Failure to bear in mind the difference…is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preexisting knowledge.”

John Dewey

Democracy and Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Independent Practice: Ivan the Terrible

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

As I work to clear off my desktop for the start of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2019, which begins tomorrow, here is an independent practice worksheet on Ivan the Terrible. And since parts of Russia are geographically in Asia, this is a perfect place to conclude this morning’s publishing orgy.

Jerome Bruner on Understanding and Interpretation

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

I. “Understanding unlike explaining, is not preemptive; for example, one way of construing the fall of Rome narratively does not rule out other interpretations. For narratives and their interpretations traffic in meaning, and meanings are intransigently multiple…. Since no one narrative construal rules out alternatives, narratives pose a very special issue of criteria.”

II. “In a word, narrative accounts can be principled or not but do not rest on stark verification alone, as with scientific explanations. Any constitutional lawyer worth his salt can tell you how Justice Taney’s way of construing history in the Dred Scott decision was excruciatingly tunnel-visioned, unmindful of competing perspective, and therefore lethal in its consequences.”

Jerome Bruner

The Culture of Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Brewer’s Curious Titles: Tarzan

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

“The famous foundling reared by apes in the African jungle was created in 1912 by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Tarzan has had countless adventures in novels and films, in which he communes with animals, rescues damsels in distress and discovers long lost civilizations. The first novel of 24 in which he appears is Tarzan of the Apes (1914). In the ‘monkey language’ that Burroughs invented for him, his name means ‘white’ from tar, and zan, ‘skin.’ He is given this name by his foster-mother, Kala the ape. The name came to be adopted for any apparent ‘he-man’ and was bestowed by the media on the Conservative politician Michael Heseltine (b. 1933), not only for his height and blond hair but also with reference to an incident of 1976 when he brandished the House of Commons mace to protect it. Tarzana, now a suburban residential section of Los Angeles, was named in honour of Tarzan.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

A DBQ on Ancient Egypt

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

How the “document-based question” came by its unwieldy bureaucratic designation mystified me in the years I worked in New York City schools. Known to teachers by its initialism, “DBQ,” it always seemed to me to describe a cornerstone of any humanities curriculum. Indeed, much of what we asked students to do in history and English classes at the secondary level is to read and interpret a variety of documents.

In any case, in order to appease administrators, I developed a couple of social studies”DBQ” units that called upon students to read and interpret primary and key secondary documents. This worksheet on ancient Egypt endeavors to school kids in this practice. If you need or want it, here is the teacher’s copy of the same document.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Dead Languages

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

Once upon a time I possessed sufficient ignorance and moral certainty to rail against “dead languages,” to wit Greek and Latin, and their valorization for their part in the “Western Canon.” On some level, I still think valorization of the “Western Canon” is mistaken, but so do I think that about the idea of “dead languages.” My own comments on dead languages ended when I discovered, to my surprise and chagrin, that Greek and Latin are very much alive in the roots of the English language.

Anyway, if you’d like your students to understand this, perhaps this Cultural Literacy worksheet on dead languages will help.

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Category Archives: Social Sciences

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