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.

Academy

“The name of Plato’s school near Athens. It was named after a legendary hero, Hecademus or Academus. The school had a long history, continuing until Justinian suppressed the philosophical school in AD 529.”

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

Vox Populi (noun phrase)

While I doubt you have much call for it, here, nonetheless, is a context clues worksheet on the Latinism vox populi. It’s a noun phrase meaning, just as it sounds, “voice of the people.”

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: Brain-Compatible Strategies

“Instructional approaches that incorporate thinking processes and real-life activities in the classroom, make use of visual and auditory stimuli in addition to written materials, and engage higher-order thinking skills. Critics say there is no scientific basis to such strategies and that they simply reflect the pedagogical preferences of advocates.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

Usury (n)

Here, on a fine spring morning, is a context clues worksheet on the noun usury.

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.

Friction

In response to student demand, I have begun producing some new materials for basic science literacy. To that end, here is a reading on friction and 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.

The Atlantic on Homework

This article on homework from The Atlantic–a practice of which teachers really ought to be skeptical–is definitely worth a look.

Term of Art: Adage

“Adage (noun): An often quoted saying.

‘The urge to be first with the facts on Wolfe appears to have reflected an authentic version of the old academic adage: for Halberstadt it was ‘scoop or perish.’ He may accomplish both. Eliot Fremont-Smith, Village Voice.'”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

The Devil’s Dictionary: Autocrat

“Autocrat, n. A dictatorial gentleman with no other restraint upon him than the hand of the assassin. The founder of that great political institution, the dynamite bomb-shell system.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

A Learning Support on Basic Literary Terms

Over time, I’ve posted several items like this learning support of basic literary terms. This one is something I assembled for a specific class that was dealing with the terms outlined. Like everything else here at Mark’s Text Terminal, it’s a Microsoft Word document, so you can manipulate the text for your classroom needs.

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.

Ulysses

“A novel (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941), regarded by many as the 20th century’s most important work of fiction in the English language. The novel is famous for its innovative use of language and its experimental use of stream-of-consciousness techniques. T.S. Eliot commented: ‘James Joyce has no style but is the vacuum into which all styles rush.’ The book was published by a small press in Paris in 1922, after three US judges banned further publication of chapters in the United States, and it was immediately acclaimed as a work of genius.

The narrative centres on a single day, 16 June 1904, the day on which Joyce had his first formal date with Nora Barnacle (1884-1951), a barmaid with whom he shared the rest of his life. The book tells of the day in the life of its Jewish-Irish hero, Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of the author’s A Portrait of the Artist as as a Young Man (1916). The structure of the book is intended to parallel that of Homer’s Odyssey, with Odysseus’s decade of wandering compared to Bloom’s single day of roaming in Dublin. Bloom thus represents Odysseus (whom the Romans called Ulysses), Molly answers approximately to Odysseus’s wife Penelope and Dedalus corresponds to his son, Telemachus. Joyce described his Homeric parallel–which he worked out in considerable detail–as a bridge across which he could march his 18 episodes, after which the bridge could be ‘blown skyhigh.’ 16 June is now often known (and celebrated), especially in Ireland, as ‘Bloomsday.’

Ulysses was eventually cleared for publication in the United States, the judge concluding: ‘Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.’

It was published in the United States in 1934, and in Britain in 1936.

In 2001 The Bookseller magazine reported that a bookshop assistant had been asked for a copy of James Joyce Is Useless.”

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