In the Sophomore Global Studies that I co-teach, we’ve spent a great deal of time this fall on the French Revolution and its consequences. Therefore, although I may be a day late and a dollar short with it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Ancien Regime.
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.
The minute I viewed, as a middle school student, Alain Resnais’s short but magisterial film on the Holocaust, Night and Fog (there is a lesson plan for this film elsewhere on this blog–a simple search from the home page will take you to it) I became interested, perhaps obsessed, with authoritarian political movements. As an undergraduate, I studied their manifestations in Russia; I ended up writing my honors thesis on the brewing miasma of authoritarian politicians in Russia.
Along the way, I became aware of the difficulty of any one definition of fascism. For my money, the late Professor George Mosse of the University of Wisconsin remains the best expositor and chronicler of fascism, if only because he insisted on talking about this abstract noun in the plural. There isn’t any one fascism, Mosse averred, but several. So I am circumspect about any reading claiming to be the last word on this political movement.
That said, I think this reading on fascism from the Intellectual Devotional’s Modern Culture volume is a perfect introduction to the basic elements of fascism, as well as a nice chronicle of its exponents. Here is a reading comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
Happy Thanksgiving! I’m posting this on the Wednesday before so that I may enjoy four computer-free days over the break.
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 is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on absolute monarchy which might be useful to social studies teachers. It’s designed to begin a class period and introduce, generally, the topic.
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.
(As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have long considered the American Federation of Teachers quarterly magazine, American Educator to be a credible and edifying periodical that includes useful research for teachers. Recently, it ran this excellent article on the problem of fake news in the United States. My school’s mindless ban on Wikipedia, I think, represents little more than an unwillingness to recognize the opportunities Wikipedia offers for students to learn how to evaluate evidence judiciously. In this short quote, the authors of the aforementioned article make the case for using Wikipedia for just that purpose.)
“You heard right: Wikipedia. Fact checkers’ first stop was often a site many educators tell students to avoid. What we should be doing instead is teaching students what fact checkers know about Wikipedia and helping them take advantage of the resources of the fifth-most trafficked site on the web.
Students should learn about Wikipedia’s standards of verifiability and how to harvest entries for links to reliable sources. They should investigate Wikipedia’s ‘Talk’ pages (the tab hiding in plain sight next to the ‘Article’ tab), which, on contentious issues like gun control, the status of Kashmir, waterboarding, or climate change are gold mines where students can see knowledge-making in action. And they should practice using Wikipedia as a resource for lateral reading. Fact checkers, short on time, often skipped the main article and headed straight to the references, clicking on a link to a more established venue. Why spend 15 minutes having students, armed with a checklist, evaluate a website on a tree octopus (www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus) when a few seconds on Wikipedia shows it to be ‘an internet hoax created in 1998.’”
McGrew, Sarah, et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American Educator Fall 2017 (4-10). Print.
“The most important achievement of American education in the last thirty years is bringing a much larger proportion of our diverse society into the schools and succeeding with them there to some degree is not adequately recognized in the national debate about school quality. If we could get the youngsters who drop out or high school each year to stay there, it would cause another [test]score decline, and I’d be in favor of it.”
Harold Howe II, from His Martin Bushkin Memorial Lecture (1984)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Astrology, n. The science of making the dupe see stars. Astrology is by some held in high respect as the precursor of astronomy. Similarly, the night howling tomcat has a just claim to reverential consideration as precursor to the hunting bootjack.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
[Addendum: If you need or want a more recent and comprehensive version–replete with lesson plan and context clues worksheet on the transitive verb impale, click on this hyperlink.]
Although he has gone by many names, Prince Vlad III of Wallachia and his legend have come down to us in a number of forms, including rural folk tales, he is best known from Irish author Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Since Halloween is right around the corner, here is an Intellectual Devotional reading on Vlad the Impaler along with a reading comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
To complement this exercise, finally, you might want to use this short Cultural Literacy exercise on the Grim Reaper.
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.
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“It is my intention in this book to show that a great…shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious, and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against ‘junk’ on television, I must first explain that…I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to match printing’s output of junk.”
Excerpted from: from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986).
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun traitor that I wrote last week for the sophomore global studies class I’m co-teaching this year. It’s a word that has application in our current political circumstances.
Just sayin’.
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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