Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on reggae. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two relatively simple declarative sentences and two comprehension questions: a short, symmetrical reading on this popular music genre.
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.
When I prepared this document a couple of years ago, I found myself wondering if the Watts Riots are on anyone’s mind anymore. I’m old enough to remember them distinctly and I certainly remember the film Wattstax, which I badly wanted to see. At age 14, alas, I couldn’t surmount its R rating–so given, I assume, because of Richard Pryor’s hilarious “license-plate-pressing motherf*****r” routine.
Anyway, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Watts Riots. This is a half-page document with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. The reading does mention the Rodney King beating, which is, I submit, an association worth making in an exercise like this.
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.
While I fear it falls far short of the standards to which I like to think this blog conforms, here, nonetheless, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tin Pan Alley. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences–the first a compound separated by a semicolon, the second a longish declarative sentence–and three questions. The reading presents the term “Tin Pan Alley” as metaphorical and notes that it is “not used as much today as it was a generation or two ago” to refer, generally, “to the popular music industry in the United States.”
My problem is this: Tin Pan Alley is a metaphor, yes, but it was also a real place in Manhattan. So, and I think this especially true for those of us who teach in the Five Boroughs, our students ought to know about the literal (to use an overworked adjective) Tin Pan Alley.
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.
In this age of super-duper video games, I doubt there would be much call for this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Three Musketeers. In middle school, I loved the swashbucklers, but it doesn’t appear they are much read anymore. I suppose, if nothing else, this half-page document with its three-sentence reading and three comprehension question might play a role in some sort of instruction in literary history, especially where Dumas is concerned.
And it seems to me that most people in the world would benefit from dedicating some thought to the Three Musketeers’ motto: “All for one and one for all.”
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the adjective and preposition vis-a-vis. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one sentence and two questions. One of the questions calls for the composition of a sentence using vis-a-vis, so it could be easily eliminated if you just to introduce the use of this term in the vernacular–that is, to mean “in relation to.” I will say that this worksheet does little more than that, which I discovered when I researched the word a bit at Merriam-Webster. This Gallicism literally means “face-to-face” and can be used that way as a noun, should you care to extend this worksheet further.
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 year, I’ve been assigned to co-teach a United States History class. I’ll spare you the details other than to say that a student I’ve worked with several years, and who is developing into an exceptional human being, asked me for some textual support in the course. So I assembled these four pages of short articles on U.S. history from The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Can you use 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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the split infinitive as an issue in grammar and style. This is a half-page document with a reading of four sentences and three comprehension questions.
At this point, I’ve read a sufficient number of grammar manuals which have argued, to my satisfaction, that splitting an infinitive is not only permissible, but even necessary in some instances to specify meaning. Even the Modern Language Association (MLA) has said that split infinitives are “generally” allowed. Nonetheless, as the reading in this worksheet observes, “Some people consider it poor style, or even incorrect style, to split an infinitive.” I expect there are educators somewhere who counsel students to avoid split infinitives. When I worked in three different college writing centers in the 1990s, occasionally a student would wander in with a paper in which their professor had issued the imperative “avoid split infinitives!” The first question these students raised was “What is a split infinitive?”
Hence this worksheet.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the linguistic concept of spoonerism. This is half-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. I can’t remember now why I prepared this; I suspect it will have relatively low utility in most classrooms, but who knows? I cannot in good faith argue that high school students, my own purview, need to understand what a spoonerism is, let alone know or care about William Archibald Spooner.
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 is a series of four documents on DNA. You’ll find all four of them–they’ll download to your computer–if you click on that hyperlink. I’ve also posted each individually below. These require a brief explanation.
I’d long understood that I needed something like a basic introduction to DNA. The entry in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy seemed like the place to start, but then things got complicated. The head worksheet, so to speak, is on DNA. However, like many of the entries in The Dictionary I’ve encountered as I’ve begun producing more worksheets from it, the DNA article contained a number of “see this or that” elements inside parentheses. I understood that without accompanying articles on these scientific concepts, to wit genetic code, nucleotides, and mitosis, the original article on DNA would only be so useful.
So here, in the order in which they appear in the aggregated document in the first paragraph, are the four worksheets, each based on a reading from The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. I think I should point out here that I am not a science teacher, and my brief experiences co-teaching science classes did little to improve my ability to teach science. Because of my own education, I understand science more philosophically as a mode of inquiry, and tend to understand the epistemology of the domain rather than actual scientific practice. I have tended to use science teaching as means of building literacy–hence reading comprehension exercises like these. Anyway, let’s get these document up and out.
First, of course, is this worksheet on DNA, which began this whole procedure. This is a two-page document with a reading of eight sentences (three of which contain parenthetical elements in their respective terminations, and which the following documents seek to address) and ten comprehension questions.
Second is this worksheet on the genetic code. At the end of the first sentence in the DNA reading above, the reader receives instructions, in parentheses, to “see genetic code.” This document deals with that exhortation. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences–and these are all longish compounds which may require modification for some readers–and four comprehension questions.
The third document in the series is this worksheet on nucleotides. This document deals with the imperative, in parentheses at the end of the second sentence in the DNA document, to “see nucleotides.” This is a full-page document with a five-sentence reading and five comprehension questions.
Fourth, and finally, is this worksheet on mitosis, which answers the call, in parentheses at the end of the sixth sentence, to “see mitosis.” This document is a full page, with a reading of four sentences and five comprehension questions. I should probably mention here that the reading for this worksheet contains two parenthetical references: at the end of the third sentence, the reader is encouraged to “see genetics“; and at the end of the fourth sentence, there is another encouragement to “see meiosis.” I have assumed that if a teacher is using these documents, students already have a relatively firm grasp of the concept of genetics. As of meiosis, if a science teacher will step forth and ask me to produce a worksheet on that concept, I’ll do so and amend this post.
Addendum: After reviewing the four documents posted above, I decided to develop two more Cultural Literacy worksheets–one on meiosis and another on sex chromosomes in order to deal with all the cross references on the preceding four. In the final analysis, I haven’t much of an idea about the usefulness of all of this. What I can tell you is that these are six documents formatted in Microsoft Word (like most things on Mark’s Text Terminal, and if you are a regular visitor here, I’ll bet you’re tired of hearing me say that), so you can combine, copy, paste, revise, edit, and adapt as you see fit.
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.
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on imperialism is the final documents post for National Native American Heritage Month 2023. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. Once again, like almost everything from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, this reading’s brevity–it defines imperialism clearly and correctly and explicitly links it with colonialism–is its strength.
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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