If you teach United States History, than you might find useful this reading on the beginnings of the Civil War as well as the reading comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. It serves any number of purposes which will be contingent, ideally, on the student to whom it is assigned.
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
As I sit down to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the digital divide, I wonder if it is still relevant. It looks like, to some extent, the availability of relatively cheap smartphones have done something to close this gap. At the same time, as net neutrality ends, the divide may reopen with different fissure lines. And as far as smartphones go, yes they are readily available; but neither smartphones themselves nor the data plans that make them useful are created equal. On could make the argument that the lines of the digital divide now run along the lines of smartphones and the plans that drive them.
If nothing else, this worksheet introduces students to the idea that social class determines what one has access to in our society, so this worksheet could be used to open a conceptual inquiry on social class and the extent to which it circumscribes life itself.
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.
“Leporello, manservant of the fictional rake Don Giovanni (Don Juan), revealed that his master made 1,003 sexual conquests in his Spanish homeland…as well as 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, and 91 in Turkey. Of course, it must be remembered that Leporello’s purpose was to gently persuade Donna Elvira not to put too much trust in his master–and to amuse an operatic audience. Still, Don Giovanni’s figures stack up well alongside his historic rivals. Casanova claimed to have slept with a mere 122 women. Byron (who wrote his own Don Juan) raced through more than 300 women (plus numerous rent boys and transvestites) before his early death in Greece, aged 36.”
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.
While I doubt it’s a word that comes up much in any teacher’s classroom, I nonetheless wrote this context clues worksheet on the noun polymath. Because polymath is basically synonymous with Renaissance man, it seems like a word high school students ought to know to understand this important intellectual and cultural dimension of the Renaissance.
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.
This is the one-thousandth post on Mark’s Text Terminal, a milestone I didn’t think I would reach until the end of this year. I’ve been trying to figure out how to “celebrate” this, but have decided that I won’t. It took almost three years to publish this many posts. I imagine I’ll keep this blog going for awhile; at the moment, it’s one of the key sources of professional satisfaction for me, which matters.
Anyway, I offer today something I started working on about three years ago, but never really made any progress on developing. In the autumn of 2015 I was summoned to jury duty in my borough. I’ll spare you the details other than to say it was a particularly tragic case involving the murder of a child. While waiting in the jury room for what seemed like interminable periods of time, I worked on a variety of things. Along the way, I read David Crystal’s book on what was then a favored mode of communication among my students. That book was Txting: the Gr8 Db8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
One of my obsessions as a teacher is helping students become proficient writers. I saw in Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 the possibility of helping students develop their own understanding of the various registers in which people use language, how proper English usage works, to introduce them to the field of linguistics, and to demonstrate while texting language is perfectly appropriate for communication between social acquaintances and intimates, it is inappropriate for other kinds of communication and correspondence. At issue, in Mr. Crystal’s view, is whether or not “textese” is a language . Starting from the basic laws of linguistics, he says yes, it is. I’m not so much interested in that question per se as much as the answers it yields and their implications for proper and clear usage. The essential question for this unit (which, alas, is not on the overarching unit plan, is this: What are the characteristics of a language, and does “textese” feature them? If so, how?
So I began compiling this aggregated text sheet from the book for use in developing worksheets and learning supports. I also started outlining a unit plan to use with this material. And, finally, I started this lesson plan template. And that, esteemed reader, is as far as I got with it. In the meantime, the students in the school in which I serve took a step down–in my opinion–in terms of compositional sophistication and began communicating via Instagram and Snapchat, which rely, I gather, on images rather than text.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. I rather doubt I will take this work any further, so after I post it here, I will remove it from my computer. However, if you develop this further, I would be grateful indeed if you would let me know where you took it. 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 is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the word and concept of cosmology. I’ve used this with lesson on the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
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.
On this first day of the summer break here in New York, here are two context clues worksheet on the nouns bureau and bureaucracy. Do I need to argue that these are words and concepts high school students should know?
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.
“A satire in fable form by George Orwell (1903-1950) published in 1945 and depicting a totalitarian regime like that of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The story describes how the animals, accompanied by the slogan ‘Four legs good, two legs bad,’ overthrow their human oppressors. However, the pigs, by cunning treachery and ruthlessness, come to dominate the more honest, gullible, and hard-working animals. Their ultimate slogan is: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ The leader of the pigs is Napoleon, representing Stalin, and at the end the pigs are in cahoots with the humans, even beginning to totter around on two legs. An animated film of the novel appeared in 1955.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on clones and cloning. This is the kind of stuff that tends to fascinate kids; it’s a neat little literacy exercise, even if you don’t teach science.
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.
“A concept is that which is understood by a term, particularly a predicate. To possess a concept is to be able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: the ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applied, and being able to tell the consequences of its application. The term “idea” was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its associations with subjective and mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of a concept. In the semantics of Frege, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by as subjective term.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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