Here, on a Thursday morning, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Demeter.
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.
“(1987) A novel by Toni Morrison, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It is the story of a runaway slave whose desperation forces her to slash her infant daughter’s throat with a handsaw rather than see the child in chains. But eighteen years after the child’s death, a young woman appears and the characters believe she is the slain infant returned to earth. Set in the pre- and post-Civil War era outside Cincinnati, Beloved is developed through a series of flashbacks to the Sweet Home Plantation. The main characters are Sethe, the heroine who is literally haunted by the baby daughter she killed; Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s child; Paul D., a former slave who knew Sethe when they were together at Sweet Home; and Denver, one of Sethe’s other three children.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
For a variety of reasons, I felt trepidation about posting this reading on flapper icon Betty Boop and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
But for a variety of other reasons, in the final analysis, I decided to offer it after all. For starters, even almost 100 years after her appearance in the cultural iconography of the United States, Betty Boop persists. Also, as I began thinking about this reading, as well as watching the initial reactions of students working on it, I saw that the story of Betty Boop offers a way of analyzing a number of critical social and cultural phenomena in the United States, not the least of which is sexism and the objectification of women.
An essential question for this might be something along the lines of “What is sexism?” Which then opens the door to the more particularly critical question, “How does Betty Boop represent social and cultural sexism?” There are lots of other questions this material raises. For example, this reading offers a specific and compelling example of the concept of the risque in culture, which seems to me worth teaching, even in an age where what was once risque is now blase. If you have somewhat more advanced students, I’ll guess they’ll be the ones to ask those kinds of questions–and more, I hope.
And what more could a teacher want, after all?
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’s an Everyday Edit on poet Phyllis Wheatley.
If your students like Everyday Edit worksheets, please remember that the good people at Education World give away a year’s supply of them.
“Annie Besant (born Wood, 1847-1933) English author, theosophist, and political radical. Besant separated from her clergyman husband and became associated with Charles Bradlaugh in the free-thought movement. And advocated of socialism and social reform, she was a member of the Fabian Society, an organizer of labor unions, and a worker among impoverished and delinquent children. Later, after meeting Mme. Blavatsky, she became a leading theosophist in England. Interest in occult theology took her to India (1889), where she founded the Central Hindu College at Benares, and began to agitate for home rule in India. She wrote many religious works as well as her Autobiography (1893), How India Wrought for Freedom (1915), and India, Bond or Free (1926).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here are a pair of Cultural Literacy worksheets on matriarchy and patriarchy. This is a pair of binary concepts students really ought to know; I think they could be profitably introduced early on in the global studies cycle, along with early humans.
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.
“Thought…is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately…no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, women's history
It’s Thursday, and as another week proceeds to its end, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the goddess Athena. She is, as you will recognize in the nouns Athens and Athenaeum, an important figure in both the Greek pantheon and Western civilization.
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.
Continuing with Women’s History Month 2019, here are a reading on Queen Victoria and a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it. Given her outsized influence in British history, as well as the adjectival form of her name–Victorian–serving as a metaphor for a kind of stuffy, repressed age, whenever and wherever it occurs–she seems to me someone with whom students should have at least a passing familiarity.
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.
It’s Monday again, the first of Women’s History Month 2019, which Mark’s Text Terminal will observe with Women’s History-related posts for the entire month. Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Marian Anderson. I am happy to report that the authors, even in the squib that serves as a reading for this worksheet, mentioned the ugly racist indignity Ms. Anderson suffered in 1941.
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.
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