Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Robotic Surgery

Posted on July 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on robotic surgery along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is an Intellectual Devotional reading, so the worksheet is a two-pager with the standard (for Mark’s Text Terminal) eight vocabulary words, eight comprehension questions, and three “Additional Facts” questions.

If memory serves, I wrote this for a colleague who was running an after-school robotics program at a school in which I served in the North Bronx. I’m fairly certain I’ve never used it.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Carbon

Posted on July 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on carbon. This is a half-page worksheet with three questions. In other words, the barest of introductions to the topic. I believe I wrote this to accompany a lesson on carbon dating for a co-taught freshman global studies class in New York City.

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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Thomas Jefferson

Posted on July 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Happy Belated July 4th! In observance of the holiday, here is a reading on Thomas Jefferson along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As most people understand, Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence of the British colonies in North America. A deeper dive into the origins of Jefferson’s rhetorical style in the Declaration shows that it is mostly a summary of issues John Locke raised in his Two Treatises of Government, particularly in the second.

Whenever I think of Jefferson, to be honest, a quote that has stuck with me from my high school reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre. He is one of the great quotable authors of the twentieth century. This one comes from Breakfast of Champions (rather than, as I thought all these years, from  Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallooons, a book of Vonnegut’s essays and reviews that bears a rereading): “Thomas Jefferson High School…His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.” Vonnegut never backed down from this observation, as this speech from 2000, seven years before his death, affirms.

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.

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The Weekly Text, 2 July 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “The Cider Booth”

Posted on July 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Cider Booth.” 

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on dead languages. Incidentally, the short reading in this half-page document speaks specifically of Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. As a matter of routine in my classroom, I taught Greek and Latin word roots for vocabulary building. When one thinks about how often classical word roots turn up in English words, the idea under the circumstances that these languages are “dead” can make for interesting classroom discussions. Also, when one considers that Spanish, the first lingua franca of a wide swath of student I served over the years, is in some respect a modern version of Latin, the idea that the tongue of the Roman Empire is dead doesn’t quite make sense.

Anyway, to conduct your investigation into the case of “The Cider Booth,” you will need this PDF of the illustration and questions that both drive the investigation and serve as evidence in it. Finally, to identify a suspect and bring him or her to the bar of justice, here is the typescript of the answer key you will need.

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.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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Cultural Literacy: The Burr-Hamilton Duel

Posted on July 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in 1804. It is a key event in the early history of the United States; this half-page worksheet, with three questions, serves only as the briefest introduction to the event itself.

If you know only a little bit about this event, as I do, you know enough to understand that there is a professionally, politically and socially fraught backstory to it. Burr and Hamilton had been antagonizing each other for years, and the duel was in many respects the logical culmination of this conflict. I would think this affair would provide just the right kind of interesting challenge to an engaged and enterprising high school student preparing a research paper to satisfy requirements in the advanced grades.

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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Boethius

Posted on July 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on Boethius along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Like a good deal of the biographical material on philosophers, and expositions of philosophical concepts, from the Intellectual Devotional series, I wrote this for one student. Boethius was born in 477, the year after the Fall of Rome. He is best known for his book The Consolation of Philosophy. Did you know that the popular game show Wheel of Fortune is named for one of Boethius’s conception of fate? I didn’t either.

In any case, this reading is a cogent one-page biography of Boethius which doesn’t dumb down his ideas. Like almost everything you’ll find on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Word documents, so easily manipulated and adapted for a variety of needs.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Bond

Posted on June 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on bonds, the financial instrument, not the force that holds atoms and molecules together, nor the ineffable thing that grows between friends, lovers, and humans and their pets.

I worked for ten years in a economics-and-finance-themed high school in Manhattan’s financial district. The word bond, which is extravagantly polysemous, really confounded the students I served there. Over the years, I developed a range of materials to teach this word in all its meanings in all the parts of speech. So, be on the lookout for those documents on this blog.

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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Native Americans

Posted on June 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on Native Americans and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

This reading is only four paragraphs. It uses the story of the Nez Perce Tribe, and especially Chief Joseph’s legendary speech–“Hear me, my chiefs!” I am tired. My heart is sick. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever”–to tell the story of the destruction of the indigenous civilizations that inhabited North America prior to the arrival of the first European immigrants from England.

Given the disturbing, but unsurprising, discovery of mass graves at Canadian Indian Residential Schools, now is a very good time to take a look at what (if you happen to be of European descent, as I am) our forefathers wrought. It is not a pretty picture. But neither is ignoring these crimes. In any case, I think we are just seeing the first of the remains of this genocide.

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.

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Causation

Posted on June 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on causation along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. How much demand will you see for these documents? Well, that depends on your students.

In 16 years of teaching in New York City, I used this set of documents two or three times at the most. I wrote them for one particular student with a surpassing interest in philosophy, but little interest in anything else school offered him. In any case, this is a short reading that touches on the philosophical conundrum of causality. This might be a way to introduce students to the topic, then take them on a short analytical excursion through one of the most commonly committed logical fallacies, post hoc ergo propter hoc–“after this, therefore because of this.”

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.

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A Welcome Insight from The Washington Post

Posted on June 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is something that popped up in The Washington Post that came over the transom last weekend. It’s long overdue, but better late than never.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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