Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Ho Chi Minh. This is a full-page document with five questions, and room, with supplemental material, for quite a few more.

Ho’s importance as a world historical figure is well established, even if his biography suffers from lacunae. He is known to have used pseudonyms freely. If you’re interested in taking your students for a slightly deeper dive in Ho Chi Minh’s life and struggle for Vietnamese independence, you’ll find a reading and comprehension worksheet under that hyperlink.

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 Afghanistan. This is a full-page document with with fifteen questions, which befits a topic as complicated and omnipresent as Afghanistan. Of course, this is a Microsoft Word document, like almost everything on Mark’s Text Terminal, so you can bend it to your needs, reformat it, or leave it as is.

The United States has technically been at war there since 2001, making it this nation’s longest-running conflict. Two weeks ago, on May 9, 2021, a girl’s school was bombed in Kabul killed upwards of 90 students–all girls and young women. No group has claimed responsibility, but it’s a safe bet that the Taliban, the group the United States sought to extirpate from Afghanistan, is culpable in the tragedy. In any case, if you need any insight into the attitude of Muslim fundamentalists toward the education of women, you might try Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography, I Am Malala. On September 11 of this year, United States forces will leave Afghanistan after nearly twenty years there. This has provoked justifiable anxiety on the part of United States policy makers and Afghans themselves.

So in other words, a bundle of current history to unpack 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.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Buddha; this is a half-page document I’ve used as a do-now to get lessons started–particularly lessons on the civilization and culture of India.

I don’t think most people realize that Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born into an Indian aristocratic clan, the Shakya, and arrived at his compassionate philosophy (Buddhism really isn’t a religion) by self-abnegation, voluntary poverty, prayer, and meditation. One gets a sense of this, as I recall (it’s over forty years since I read it), in Siddartha, the classic 1922 novel by Herman Hesse–and a high school literary staple, if memory serves. Anyway, this short document (two questions) serves as a very basic introduction to this relatively complex 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.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Manchu Dynasty, also known as the Qing Dynasty. This is a half-page worksheet with three questions. In other words, it is only a general introduction to the subject of this last imperial dynasty of China.

The Manchu Dynasty is a complicated topic–worthy of a great deal more than a short reading and three questions. It ruled china for almost three hundred years (established in 1636, the dynasty ruled from 1644 to 1912, with a brief restoration in 1917) created the fourth largest empire in world history, and immediately preceded the Republic of China. In other words, the Manchus ruled China in the modern period, and left its stamp on the nation in terms of territoriality. It also, in its decline, suffered the humiliations of the Opium Wars and the indignity of the “unequal treaties” imposed by the British.

So, again, this Manchu Dynasty and its decline in the nineteenth century, presents an opportunity for a case study of Western colonialism and its discontents.

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 Indonesia. The most populous Muslim-majority nation in the world and the fourth-most populous country in the world is an archipelago of over seventeen thousand islands, among them Java, to most populous island in the world.

Indonesia, by way of its Maluku (“Spice”) Islands, is the world’s leading producer of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. These export commodities attracted, inevitably one must suppose, the Dutch East India Company, which competed with the Portuguese Empire for dominance in Indonesia, became the dominant colonial power in the islands. Indonesia’s post-colonial history is bumpy to say the least.

In other words, Indonesia is a perfect case study for building analytical skills in historical inquiry, particularly in the fields of colonial and post-colonial studies.

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 Saddam Hussein. This is a full-page document with a total of ten questions.

I’ll assume I needn’t belabor the relevance of the late authoritarian ruler of Iraq and war criminal, who remains au courant for a variety of reasons. He is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and elsewhere. He has the two distinctions worth discussing, I think: he served to destabilize the Middle East while both in and out of power, and he was both an ally and an enemy of the United States in the course of a generation.

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 Gang of Four. This is half-page worksheet on the political faction of the Chinese Communist Party that rose to prominence (and included in its small number Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, owing to her marriage, of course, to Mao Zedong) during the Cultural Revolution, and not the highly esteemed British post-punk band.

If you know anything about post-revolutionary China, you may know that the Cultural Revolution was another highly ideologized social and cultural movement which aimed to extirpate all vestiges of capitalism and Chinese traditionalism from the nation’s culture. Like the Great Leap Forward, it was an unmitigated disaster. As many as 20 million people died during the Cultural Revolution.

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 Emperor Hirohito, the longest-lived and longest-reigning Japanese emperor and one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of the world.

Emperor Showa, as he is now known in Japan, ascended to the throne on Christmas Day, 1926. He sat on the throne, therefore, during Japan’s imperial expansion, the nation’s militarism in the 1930s, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and, of course, the “Day of Infamy,” the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In other words, he was culpable in the acts that drew the United States into World War II. He was also culpable, then, in Japanese war crimes during that conflict as well. However, the degree of his culpability appears to be subject of intense and ongoing scholarly debate.

So he presents an interesting case study in war crimes, guilt, culpability and historical memory among other concepts and topics.

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.