Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on absolute monarchy which might be useful to social studies teachers. It’s designed to begin a class period and introduce, generally, the topic.
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.
(As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have long considered the American Federation of Teachers quarterly magazine, American Educator to be a credible and edifying periodical that includes useful research for teachers. Recently, it ran this excellent article on the problem of fake news in the United States. My school’s mindless ban on Wikipedia, I think, represents little more than an unwillingness to recognize the opportunities Wikipedia offers for students to learn how to evaluate evidence judiciously. In this short quote, the authors of the aforementioned article make the case for using Wikipedia for just that purpose.)
“You heard right: Wikipedia. Fact checkers’ first stop was often a site many educators tell students to avoid. What we should be doing instead is teaching students what fact checkers know about Wikipedia and helping them take advantage of the resources of the fifth-most trafficked site on the web.
Students should learn about Wikipedia’s standards of verifiability and how to harvest entries for links to reliable sources. They should investigate Wikipedia’s ‘Talk’ pages (the tab hiding in plain sight next to the ‘Article’ tab), which, on contentious issues like gun control, the status of Kashmir, waterboarding, or climate change are gold mines where students can see knowledge-making in action. And they should practice using Wikipedia as a resource for lateral reading. Fact checkers, short on time, often skipped the main article and headed straight to the references, clicking on a link to a more established venue. Why spend 15 minutes having students, armed with a checklist, evaluate a website on a tree octopus (www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus) when a few seconds on Wikipedia shows it to be ‘an internet hoax created in 1998.’”
McGrew, Sarah, et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American Educator Fall 2017 (4-10). Print.
On this rainy Monday morning in New York City, I offer this Cultural Literacy worksheet on verbs.
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.
“It is my intention in this book to show that a great…shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious, and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against ‘junk’ on television, I must first explain that…I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to match printing’s output of junk.”
Excerpted from: from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986).
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the transitive verb that I just now used in a lesson on transitive and intransitive verbs. This document serves as a quick way to introduce the skill of recognizing and correctly using this type of verb.
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 third Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month, 2017, Mark’s Text Terminal offers a reading on Miguel de Cervantes and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on primogeniture, a concept that almost certainly recurs in most high school social studies classes.
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.
Hispanic Heritage Month begins today, so for the next five Fridays, I’ll post readings and comprehension worksheets in its honor. To kick off the month, here are an Intellectual Devotional reading on Pele, the legendary Brazilian soccer star, and a comprehension worksheet to complement it. This should be relatively high interest material, particularly for kids from Latin America who follow soccer–as so many of the students I serve do.
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.
Now seems like an apt time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a police state. Republics are in constant danger of lapsing into police states–something to keep in mind.
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.
On a bright, cool morning in Springfield, Vermont, I offer you this Cultural Literacy worksheet on schism. The definition and this worksheet limits the noun to its meaning as a breach within a religion. Merriam-Webster defines it more broadly, so there is some room here for the kind of rich discussion on usage that educational research suggests benefits students.
In any case, by their senior year at the very least, this is a word and concept high school students really ought to know.
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.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.