Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Cultural Literacy: Booker T. Washington

Alright, let’s wrap up Black History Month 2023 with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Booker T. Washington. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences (two of them longish compounds) and three comprehension questions. A solid, if basic, introduction to this important figure in United States history.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Alex Haley

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.

Cultural Literacy: Jamaica

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.

The Weekly Text, 24 February 2023, Black History Month 2023 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Miles Davis

For the final Friday of Black History Month 2023, here is a reading on Miles Davis along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I don’t know what more I need to say about Miles–but that’s because I assume that most people know who he is.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Native Son

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. This is a half-page document with a one-sentence reading and one comprehension question. A tiny document, of limited utility, I suppose–unless you are teaching the novel and need something to use as a do-now to settle the class after a change of periods. If that.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Ivory Coast

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.

The Weekly Text, 17 February 2023, Black History Month 2023 Week III: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the Niagara Movement

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.

Cultural Literacy: Sojourner Truth

Moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Sojourner Truth. This is a half-page document with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. A spare but potentially useful introduction to Isabella Baumfree.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Reconstruction

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.

The Weekly Text, 10 February 2023, Black History Month 2023 Week II: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the 54th Massachusetts Infantry

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.