Here, on a rainy, warm Tuesday morning, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Puritans, the zealots who settled this country, and whose intellectual and spiritual descendants are still trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.
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, on a chilly Thursday morning in Manhattan, is a Cultural Literacy Worksheet on the Nuremberg Trials. I can think of a number of places and subjects in which a high school teacher could use this short 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.
I’m old enough to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in life and in death. Indeed, I remember vividly that April day in 1968–I was in third grade–when a career criminal named James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. King while he was in Memphis assisting sanitation workers in their quest to be treated with basic human dignity by that municipal government. As confused and conflicted as my parents’ political principles were, they respected Dr. King, and admired the work he was doing. My father, as I recall (remember: I was eight years old, so some of this stuff was a little over my head), was particularly demoralized by Dr. King’s murder, and saw it as a sign, along with the horrors of the Vietnam War, of encroaching barbarism.
Today, we observe the anniversary of Dr. King’s work. Here is a reading on the practice of nonviolent resistance, which was the cornerstone of Dr. King’s strategy in his fight for civil rights for Americans of African descent. You might want to use this comprehension worksheet to accompany it. Finally, here is a piece of work I consider timely–especially considering this report on inequality in schools in the United States that came over the transom yesterday–to wit, this Cultural literacy worksheet on de facto segregation.
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.
If WordPress’s statistics can be trusted, there has been a lot of traffic on Mark’s Text Terminal for a reading and comprehension sheet I posted a couple of months ago. To complement those documents, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on fascism.
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.
We’ve been studying the Industrial Revolution and the birth of capitalism in my sophomore global studies class. That means we’ve been spending a lot of time with Adam Smith, but for the sake of expedience, I imagine, very little on David Ricardo. Certainly, Ricardo is one of the most important of the political economists.
But perhaps not for the high school curriculum. In the event you might need it (it might make a good short introduction to a lesson on Smith, Thomas Malthus, or James Mill, if you teach those thinkers), here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on David Ricardo.
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 social class, so when politicians whine about “class war,” your students will have some context for understanding that concept.
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.
Since he has become au courant by way of the Broadway musical, now seems like a good time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Alexander Hamilton.
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.
For the past couple of years, I’ve strived to conceive of a unit or two on argumentation. It has turned out to be a complicated and tricky endeavor, and I remain in struggle with several issues in its conception and execution: first and foremost, for whom am I writing this? Argumentation involves a high degree of abstraction, which is hard to adapt and differentiate, yet I have a duty to my students who struggle. Is this philosophical work in logic and epistemology, or an English Language Arts unit on rhetoric? What is the difference between a thesis and an argument? How does one postulate a thesis? How does the process of argumentation proceed? What logical progression should the lessons in a unit on argumentation follow?
This year, I am finally writing this unit. I wish I could tell you it is going smoothly, but I continue to wrestle with a lot of the issues set out above. Furthermore, despite an extensive search for books on teaching argumentation to high school students, I’ve tended to turn up either highly technical books (Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument) or relatively tedious and superficial manuals like George Hillocks’ Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12, which I found a complete waste of my time.
My fingers began typing the cliche “In the end” to begin this paragraph. However, I instantly realized that I am nowhere near the end of thinking about the issues involved in planning this kind of instruction. In fact, I expect that I’ll continue to work at these materials, either revising them, or adapting and differentiating them, for years to come.
For the moment, however, I have decided that the first unit (of two planned) will be on the rhetoric of argumentation. Fortunately, there is an excellent book to inform the materials I’m developing, namely Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The authors supply an assortment of rhetorical templates that students may use–either directly in their own writing, or as guides to developing their own rhetorical moves in the kinds of papers high school and college classes require them to write.
In any case, one of the first things I noticed as I began teaching argumentation was–and is, alas–that students didn’t understand the difference between an argument and a quarrel. I knew I needed to begin by resolving that confusion.
That said, the first lesson in Unit 1 of Arguing Your Case (as I am calling these two units) is designed simply to help students differentiate between arguments and quarrels. Here is the lesson plan for differentiating between quarrels and arguments. I begin all my lessons, to ease the transition between classes, with a do-now exercise. For this lesson, you might want to use (since with any work on argumentation, we endeavor to endow our students with the skills to participate in academic discourse–which is what they do in most if not all of the papers they write) this context clues worksheet on the noun discourse. The mainstay of the lesson is this worksheet on distinguishing between quarrels and arguments. Finally, you might find useful the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.
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.
As we approach the sad anniversary of John Lennon’s murder (it’s this Friday), today seems like a good time for Mark’s Text Terminal to offer this Cultural Literacy worksheet on The Beatles.
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 the Sophomore Global Studies that I co-teach, we’ve spent a great deal of time this fall on the French Revolution and its consequences. Therefore, although I may be a day late and a dollar short with it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Ancien Regime.
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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