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.

Susan Sontag on Mental Health

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

Susan Sontag

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Love Game

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

Scratch * Duck * Love * Nil

“Sport makes much use of the concept of zero, loading it with a multitude of names. There is scratch in golf, coined from ‘scratching out’ any trace on a score card. In cricket, a batsman who gets zero scores a duck–the slang for a bird that lays an egg, the shape of a zero. And that is the origin, too, of the word ‘love’ in tennis, corrupted from the English trying to copy the French for egg–oeuf. Football, meanwhile, favours the Latin nil, from nihil–nothing.”

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.

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Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Independent Practice: Christianity

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

Here is an independent practice worksheet on Christianity that I wrote at some point for a freshman global studies class in New York City.

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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Oracle

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Oracle (noun): A shrine where deities were consulted for prophecies or revelations; a priest or other interpreter of supernal pronouncements or prophecies; any person thought to be a source or medium or divine communication, or one revered for his profound knowledge, foresightful wisdom, or authoritative counsel; a divinely inspired utterance, especially an enigmatic or ambiguously allegorical statement; a wise or purportedly wise opinion. Adjective: oracular, oraculous; adverb: oracularly; noun: oracularity, oracularness.

‘Presumably he prefers the anonymous ‘it’; and likes to see an expression like ‘I think that…’ replaced by ‘it is hypothesized…’ which, (apart from expurgating the dirty word “to think”) ministers to the bureaucratic underlings predilection for submissive autonomy combined with oracular authority.'”

Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery

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

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Louis XIV

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

Let’s begin this morning with this reading on Louis XIV, the Sun King, and add the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. Remember that this is a key figure in European history, if only as an exemplar of the absurdity and excess of absolute monarchy, particularly as this self-serving, greedy, vain, and arrogant sovereign practiced 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.

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Rotten Reviews: Paradise Lost by John Milton

Posted on January 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

“…do you not know that there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagry [sic] from the scriptures? I allow and rejoice that Christ only appealed to the understanding and affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me and Milton himself barely tolerable.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters 1796

“I could never read ten lines together without stumbling over some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the schoolroom, worse than either.”

Edward Fitzgerald, Letters, 1876

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Boycott (vt)

Posted on January 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

One thing you can say about Merriam-Webster: they know how to match their Words of the Day to the zeitgeist. Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb boycott the publisher’s choice from a couple of days ago. It is used transitively. Don’t forget your direct object: one must boycott something–a store, an agricultural commodity, the idiocy of loudmouthed politician–you get the picture.

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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Cultural Literacy: Aesop’s Fables

Posted on January 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

Given the stunning decline in introspection and the pursuit of virtue in American culture, I wonder if anyone anywhere needs or wants this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Aesop’s Fables . If so, there it is.

Also, if you want to teach Aesop’s Fables, there are several lesson plans posted on this blog: just use Aesop’s Fables as a search term on the home page and you’ll find them.

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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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets

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Book of Answers: Socrates’ Wife

Posted on January 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

“What was the name of Socrates’ wife? Famed for her shrewishness, the wife of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian philosopher was named Xantippe.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Arthur Schopenhauer on Amour Propre

Posted on January 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

“If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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