“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ch. 1 (1903)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, united states history
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Alex Haley. This is a full-page document with a reading of three sentences and six comprehension questions. The reading doesn’t mention Mr. Haley’s role in the production of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (a salient fact in any writer’s career, I would think), focusing instead on Roots: The Saga of an American Family and its commercial and artistic success.
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.
Moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Jamaica. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of six sentences and six comprehension questions.
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.
“National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth “Concerning Violence” (1961) (translation by Constance Farrington)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, philosophy/religion, professional development
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Ivory coast, or as it is more properly known, as part of the Francophone world, Cote d’Ivoire. This is a full-page document with a reading of five sentences and nine comprehension questions. It’s mostly an introduction to the geography of the area of West Africa in which Cote d’Ivoire is situated.
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 week’s Text, in observation of Black History Month 2023, is a reading on the Niagara Movement with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Did you know that the Niagara Movement, organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, was the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People–i.e. the NAACP?
I hadn’t, until I read the document presented here.
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 Cultural Bias: This normally takes the form of linguistic difference between West Indian English and ‘standard classroom’ English. The West Indian child’s choice of words, usage, and meaning of words, pronunciation, and intonation, sometimes present tremendous difficulties in communication with the teacher, and vice versa. This factor, while recognized in a lip service way by many of the teachers and other authorities involved, is often ignored when assessing and generally relating to the child. Thus, teachers often presume to describe West Indian children as being ‘dull’, when in fact no educated assessment of the child’s intelligence can be made under these circumstances. In addition, many behaviour patterns and ways of relating to the teacher which are part of West Indian culture are misunderstood by the teacher, who usually has no understanding of or inclination to learn about the West Indian culture. The ILEA report (page 10) points out that only three of the nineteen schools suggested as a helpful method the training of teachers about the culture of the immigrant’s country. While certain initial attempts are being made to educate teachers in this direction, the scope and direction of the programme—and the people running it—make one very sceptical about its usefulness.
On common difficulty, for instance, arises from the fact that the child is not expected to talk and ‘talk back’ as much in the West Indian classroom as he is here, in the English classroom. English teachers tend to interpret this apparent shyness and relative unresponsiveness as indicating silent hostility or low intelligence. Many teachers have said to me that only after years of experience have they discovered that when the West Indian child does not understand what they are saying, he replies ‘Yes’, because he thinks this is expected of him in his relationship with the teacher. Moreover, many children fear that they may arouse the teacher’s anger or be thought stupid if they as her to repeat what she has said.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
Have you ever read C. Vann Woodward’s monograph The Strange Career of Jim Crow? Martin Luther King, Jr. characterized it as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” Woodward marks the end of Reconstruction as the beginning of Jim Crow, a thesis that I believe remains for many if not most professional historians the final word on the subject.
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on Reconstruction, a two-page document with a reading of nine sentences (including a doozie of a compound in right in the middle of the paragraph) and 12 comprehension questions, covers a lot of ground. Still, if you really want students to understand how local peckerwoods in the South seized power and used it to oppress Americans of African descent for the next eighty years, you’ll need to go to Woodward’s book, or one like it by one of his epigones.
In any event, this document, like just about everything you’ll find on this website, is formatted in Microsoft Word. In other words, you can alter this document to suit your students’ 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.
“Perry Preschool Project: A longitudinal study that examined the lives of 123 African American children born in poverty and at high risk of school failure. From 1962 to 1967, at ages 3 and 4, the subjects were randomly divided into a program group that received a high-quality preschool program and a comparison group that received no preschool program. Those who participated in the high-quality preschool program were later found to have higher earnings, to be more likely to be employed, to be less likely to have committed crimes, and to be more likely to have graduated from high school than were adults from the comparison group who had received no preschool education.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
On this, the second week of Black History Month 2023, Mark’s Text Terminal presents this reading on the 54th Massachusetts Infantry and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The 54th Massachusetts is the regiment made famous by the film Glory. If you live in Boston, and frequent that city’s Common, then you know The Shaw Monument, which passively honors the heroes of the 54th Massachusetts with this memorial to the regiment’s abolitionist, Boston Brahmin commander, Robert Gould Shaw (whom I learned recently was an ancestor to the revered American poet Robert Lowell).
In any event, we should remember the 54th Massachusetts for its heroic, selfless actions at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner (depicted well in Glory) on 18 July 1863. We should also remember William Harvey Carney for his heroism in that encounter, and for his status as the first Black soldier to win his greatly deserved Medal of Honor.
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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