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: Golden Parachute

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a “golden parachute.” This is a half-page worksheet with a short, dense reading of three compound sentences and three comprehension questions.

I haven’t heard the expression “golden parachute” in some time, and I tend to listen often to economics and finance radio programs and podcasts. People my age will remember this term as a part of the vernacular, particularly in the 1980s, when they became increasingly common, as The Business Professor explains. The word is still in use, at least as recently as five years ago, as this 2016 Harvard Business Review article demonstrates. In any event, paying executives to leave companies (especially if there is malfeasance, failure, or both) is so commonplace now that the concept remains, whatever term describes it–as this one aptly does.

I don’t know if your students need to know about this. I worked for some time in a business- and finance-themed high school, so I must assume I wrote this worksheet for my work there. In any case, you can do what you want with this document as it is formatted in Microsoft Word (as just about everything on this site is–ergo open source).

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.

Term of Art: Visual Perception Disabilities

“visual perception disabilities: Students with visual perception disabilities have trouble making sense out of what they see, not because they have poor eyesight but because their brains process visual information differently.

Children with this problem have trouble organizing, recognizing, interpreting, or remembering visual images. This means that they will have trouble understanding the written and picture symbols they need in school—letters, words, numbers, math symbols, diagrams, maps, charts, and graphs.

Because this type of visual problem is subtle, it is often undiscovered until the child starts having problems in school. Visual perception problems include the ability to recognize images a person has seen before and attach meaning to them; to discriminate among similar images or words, and to separate significant features from background details; and to recognize the same symbol in different forms (understanding, for example, that the letter ‘D’ is the letter ‘D’ whether it is uppercase or lowercase, in different colors or fonts). Sequences are another important visual perception skill; a child with a visual sequencing problem may not understand the difference between the words ‘saw’ and ‘was.’

Students with visual perception problems are usually slow to learn letters and numbers, and often make mistakes, omissions, and reversals. They often have trouble with visual memory and visualization and may be extremely slow readers.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Cultural Literacy: Gilded Cage

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a gilded cage, i.e. “to live in luxury but without freedom.” This is a half-page worksheet with a long, one-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. In other words, a short, punchy means of introducing students to this commonly used idiom in the English language.

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.

Design

“Design: The composition or general conception of a total work of art, or a part of it. Since the 19th century, applied also to the creation of pleasing and well-formed useful objects.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

The Weekly Text, 20 August 2021: A Lesson Plan on Nations with the Shortest Coastlines from The Order of Things

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on nations with the shortest coastlines. Here is the list as reading with comprehension questions. As the title of this post indicates, this is another lesson adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s magisterial (I really want her job) reference book The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1997).

Nota bene, please, that I wrote these materials (there are quite a few of them on this blog now, with more to come) with the needs of students who struggle with reading in mind, especially when two symbolic systems (letters and numbers) are at work in the same lesson. If you find this lesson useful in your classroom, you might find its companion, a lesson on nations with the longest coastlines, which I published last month, a complement to the documents in this post.

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.

Blackbeard

Here is a reading on Blackbeard (aka Edward Teach) along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Last weekend, for the first time, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean. So when I was perusing the Intellectual Devotional shelf in the warehouse earlier, this material caught my eye. It looks to me like the producers of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the star, Johnny Depp (whose fey performance is both hilarious and oddly touching), were and are well aware of the life and times of Blackbeard (although he apparently appears in the series’ fourth film, played by the great Ian McShane). If you have students who are fans of these films, I would hazard a guess that this will be high-interest material for them.

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.

Mammon

“Mammon: An Aramaic word used in the New Testament of personify riches and worldliness; also, the god of avarice or cupidity. The word occurs in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13 to represent the opposite of a God-fearing life: ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate one and love the other; or he will hold to one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ Both Spenser, with his cave of Mammon in The Faerie Queene, and Milton, by identifying him with Vulcan in Paradise Lost, make Mammon the epitome of the evils of wealth.”

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

Cultural Literacy: Ghettos

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on ghettos. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions.

Generally, I try to guide students toward the definition of ghetto that characterizes the concept the word represents as “a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.” If you need to teach about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April of 1943, this worksheet could serve as a good instruction: the first sentence reports that ghettos were, “Originally, areas of medieval cities in which Jews were compelled to live.” However, the second sentence continues, “Today, the term usually refers to sections of American cities inhabited by the poor.” Happily, then, this document does not racialize the noun ghetto–making it, I would argue, useful for opening a discussion about the racialization of certain words in English–if you’re so inclined to do so.

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.

Denis Diderot on Skepticism

“Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.”

Denis Diderot

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

Term of Art: Thematic Unit

“thematic unit: A unit of study whose lessons are focused on a specific theme, sometimes covering a variety of subject areas. For example, the theme of inequality may be explored by studying the caste system in India and slavery in the American South. These units may be used as an alternative approach to teaching history, but history educators are critical of the tendency to teach such content without regard to a chronological framework. Themes that lack historical context, the critics say, are superficial and confusing.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.