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.

Cultural Literacy: Bacchus

Posted on July 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

OK, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Bacchus. He is, as my late, great friend Fritz Hewitt once said, “the god of rave-up.” If you prefer, the reading in this worksheet puts it, a bit more academically: Bacchus is the “Greek and Roman god of wine and revelry.” This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of five sentences–all short–and three comprehension questions. Even a reading this short, from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, hits all the bases, including associating Bacchus with Dionysus, which is useful.

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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Quintilian

Posted on July 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Quintilian Latin Marcus Fabius Quintilianus: (AD35?-after 96) Latin teacher and writer. Born in Spain, Quintilian was probably educated and trained in oratory in Rome. From about 68 to 88 he taught rhetoric, becoming Rome’s leading teacher and was an eminent advocate in the law courts. His Institutio oratoria is a practical survey of rhetoric in 12 books and a major contribution to educational theory and literary criticism, His dual emphasis on intellectual and moral training appealed to humanists of the 15th-16th centuries and through them influenced the modern view of education as all around character training to equip a student for life.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Elizabeth Hardwick on Reading

Posted on July 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

I recently found myself in receipt of The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, published by The New York Review of Books for its fine series of “Classics.” I couldn’t help but notice, and feel a need to transcribe for future use, this essay on reading, titled, simply, “Reading.” There is a great deal in these 2,158 words to provoke thought–especially for teachers.

But what do you think?

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, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Realism (In Literature)

Posted on July 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

“realism: In literature, the theory or practice of fidelity to nature or to real life and to accurate representation without idealization. The 18th-century works of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett are among the earliest examples of realism in English literature. It was consciously adopted as an aesthetic program in the mid-19th century in France, when interest arose in recording previously ignored aspects of contemporary life and society; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) established the movement in European literature. The realist emphasis on detachment and objectivity, along with lucid but restrained social criticism, became integral to the novel in the late 19th century. The word has also been used critically to denote excessive minuteness of detail or preoccupation with trivial, sordid, or squalid objects. See also naturalism.

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Realism (In Visual Art)

Posted on July 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

“realism: In the visual arts, an aesthetic that promotes accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of close observation of outward appearances. It was a dominant current in French art between 1850 and 1880. In the early 1830s, the painters of the Barbizon school espoused realism in their faithful reproduction of the landscape near their village. Gustave Courbet was the first artist to proclaim and practice the realist aesthetic; his Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers (1849) shocked the public and critics with their frank depiction of peasants and laborers. In his satirical caricatures, Honore Daumier used an energetic linear style to criticize the immorality he saw in French society. Realism emerged in the U.S. in the work of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. In the 20th century, German artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit worked in a realist style to express their disillusionment after World War I. The Depression-era movement known as Social Realism adopted a similar harsh realism to depict the injustices of U.S. society. See also naturalism.

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Cultural Literacy: Avatar

Posted on July 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy on the concept of the avatar. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three short sentences and three comprehension questions. Interestingly, the reading in this worksheet deals with the concept of the avatar in Hinduism, but not the avatar as a graphical representation of a computer user that is usually reflective of a person’s character or persona.

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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Realism (In Philosophy)

Posted on July 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

“realism: In philosophy, any viewpoint that accords to the objects of human’s knowledge an existence that is independent of whether they are perceiving or thinking about them. Against nominalism, which denies that universals have any reality at all (except as words), and conceptualism, which grants universals reality only as concepts within the mind, realism asserts that universals exist independently of their being expressed in language and conceived by human minds. Against idealism and phenomenalism, it asserts that the existence of material objects and their qualities is independent of their being perceived. Similarly, moral realism asserts that moral qualities of actions (such as being morally good, bad, or indifferent, or being ethically right, wrong, or obligatory) belong to the actions themselves and are not to be explained as mere products of a mind that perceives and feels attracted to or repelled by the actions. In opposition to conventionalism, realism holds that scientific theories are objectively true (or false) based on their correspondence (or lack or it) to an independently existing reality.

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Basic English

Posted on July 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Basic English: A simple form of English designed by C.K. Ogden (1889-1957). It has 850 words, with rules of their use and expansion of sense, and 150 more bridge words for specific fields, such as medicine, chemistry, and physics, which have themselves a body of internationally common words or signs. Working with Ogden on its development was I.A. Richards, who took the system to schools and universities in China as a help in the teaching of English at all levels. Its possible use as an international language was the reason Sir Winston Churchill, one of its strong supporters, gave part of his talk at a Harvard commencement in Basic English. Before his death in 1979, Richards was again in China, working on the use of basic English for international purposes. [Ed. Note: This entry is written in Basic English.]”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Book of Answers: Paradise Lost

Posted on July 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

“What playwright wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem? Clifford Odets, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.”

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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Unified Science or Unity-of-Science View

Posted on July 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Unified science or unity-of-science view: In the philosophy of logical positivism, the doctrine holding that all science share the same language, laws, and method. The unity of language has been taken to mean that either that all scientific statements could be restated as a set of protocol sentences describing sense-data or that all scientific terms could be defined using physics terms. The unity of law means that the laws of the various sciences must be deduced from some set of fundamental laws (e.g. those of physics). The unity of method means that the procedures for supporting statements in the various sciences are basically the same. The unity-of-science movement that arose in the Vienna Circle held to those three unities, and Rudolf Carnap’s ‘physicalism’ supported the notion that all the terms and statements of empirical science could be reduced to terms and statements in the language of physics.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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