Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Cultural Literacy: Two Worksheets on Rudyard Kipling

Let’s move along with a couple of Rudyard Kipling-related Cultural Literacy worksheets, the first a simple biography of the writer, the second a short but cogent analysis of his unfortunate poem “The White Man’s Burden.” If you teach global studies, or whatever your school district calls a broad survey of world history, the latter document might be useful in helping students develop their own understanding of the uses of culture to create, buttress, and therefore justify ideology, in this case the depredations of European colonialism.

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.

Gilded Age

Alright, last but not least this beautiful spring morning is this reading on the Gilded Age along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I assume I don’t need to belabor the point that this reading could very well describe our own epoch.

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.

A Lesson Plan on the Percentages of Chemical Elements that Compose Earth from The Order of Things

Here is another lesson plan from The Order of Things, this one on the percentages of chemical elements that compose this planet. Here is the list and comprehension questions that constitutes the work of this lesson. If you have any questions about this material, please see the excursus on worksheets from The Order of Things in the About Posts & Texts page, linked to above the banner photograph.

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.

Ted Williams

OK, baseball fans, I know it isn’t much, but perhaps you can take some comfort from this reading on Ted Williams 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.

A Learning Support on Note Cards for Research and a Structured Note-Card Blank

Over the years I’ve been assigned to “co-teach” many classes; in New York City, I was a regular fixture in social studies classrooms in which I was charged with supporting struggling learners. In the last school I worked in in the Five Boroughs, I worked with three different teachers with three different approaches to the curriculum. Because the assistant principal in charge of the humanities regularly changed the form and content of the curriculum, my duties required me, as a colleague once put it so cogently, to constantly “reinvent the wheel.”

One of the most contentious, and therefore most subject to change, was the synthetic research paper. One of the teachers I worked with assigned students the task of writing, and turning in for assessment, a set of 3 x 5 cards with sources and notes that would eventually end up in students’ papers. For that reason, I contrived this learning support with examples of note cards for research along with this structured note-card blank to aid struggling learners with this task.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Alcoholism

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on alcoholism that doesn’t require any explanation, I guess.

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.

Brooklyn Bridge

It was the biggest civil engineering project in the history of the world when it was built, so it has global significance. But whenever I post something like this reading on the Brooklyn Bridge and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet, I do so with my erstwhile New York City colleagues in mind. This is as much about the Roebling family, father and son, who designed and built the bridge–did you know that the day-to-day superintendency of the project fell to Emily Warren Roebling, the daughter-in-law of John Roebling, who began construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? There’s some women’s history to be extracted from this material for the right learner.

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.

A Sample Outline and Structured Outlining Blanks

For ten years, I worked in a school in Lower Manhattan that assigned synthetic research papers to students who lacked basic writing skills. And that issue was one of many at that school where writing assignments were concerned. Over the years, I fabricated a lot of learning supports on the fly, including this sample outline and these structured outlining blanks.

At one point, in the social studies classes I co-taught, students were required to submit outlines in the run-up to writing their actual paper. I suspect I prepared the documents in this post to support students in drafting their outlines. At least that’s what these supports look like to me. Of course, you can use them however you see fit. As always, these documents are in Microsoft Word, so they can be manipulated for your students and circumstances.

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.

Morphine

When I left Vermont in August of 1996 to seek my fortune as a doctoral candidate in history, I intended to return posthaste–if not to Vermont, than as near to the state as possible. Last August (of 2019) I finally made it back here to work in a public school system. I’d visited every summer for many years, but as I learned slowly and the hard way (like the way I learn everything in my life, alas), living in a place is quite a bit different than visiting it.

Of course I was aware of the opioid crisis in the state–it has been national news–and a national problem, after all–but I hadn’t had a chance to see it up close.

Now I have, and I can tell you that in the 23 years I was away, opioids cut a wide swath through the social and economic fabric of this fine state. So, for any young person who thinks that trying opioids won’t necessarily lead to personal disaster, here is a reading on morphine along with 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.

Cultural Literacy: Congress of Vienna

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Congress of Vienna for you social studies teachers. This is one of those key events in global history that I imagine every history teacher must deal with at some point in the curriculum.

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.