“Blacks should be used to play whites. For centuries, we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices, and even their odors. Often our survival had depended on the accurate reading of a white man’s chuckle, or the disdainful wave of a white woman’s hand.”
The Heart of a Woman, ch. 12 (1981)
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, drama/theater, poetry, readings/research, women's history
Sadly, we’ve reached the last Friday of Black History Month 2019. Mark’s Text Terminal closes out the month with this reading on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet which accompanies it.
I hope you’ve found useful material for your Black History Month instruction here at Mark’s Text Terminal.
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.
When I first began work in Lower Manhattan in 2008, for the first time in my career, I worked with students who were reading—decoding and comprehending—at grade level or very close to it. The primary challenge to serving these students revolved around the issues of interest and choice; they could read, they simply chose not to because they were completely uninterested in the material assigned them.
Back then, there was a Borders bookstore just east of the school in which I worked on Trinity Place, over on Broadway, right across from Trinity Church. I often found myself there during my lunch break. In the course of my browsing, it occurred to me that I might be able to co-opt kids into reading by supplying them with high interest articles from what looked like the two leading Hip-Hop magazines of the day, to wit XXL and Vibe. I say “looked like” because these two periodicals, while ostensibly about Hip-Hop music, also contained a number of features of interest to young, inner-city residents. Not only that, but the prose was really first-rate.
And bingo! Students who had theretofore been failing English began to read articles and submit—completed!—the comprehension worksheets I wrote to attend them.
Still, I knew these assignments ultimately would suffer from expiration dates. As I mentioned in a blog post a year or so ago, I remember the time before Hip-Hop was part of popular music’s landscape. That means, of course, that I have seen a lot of rappers come and go. So, it was only a matter of time before these readings and worksheets became obsolete. While students may know who 50 Cent is, but as far as they’re concerned, he is not as au courant as whoever is the newest and flashiest star in the Hip-Hop firmament.
Like many rappers (I ask again, how many people remember Kool Moe Dee, a rapper I really liked in the 1980s), Borders was a casualty of time and circumstance—in its case, the 2008 economic collapse that took the bookseller, like electronics superstore chain Circuit City—down the drain. Over time, I’ve disposed of all the materials I accumulated after students began, once again, turning up their noses at those articles and worksheets. Vibe appears to have survived the transition to digital media, as did XXL. I just haven’t the time to keep up with the always rapidly changing rises and falls of stars in Hip-Hop.
However, I did keep one article, Jay-Z’s resume, because I understood that it had value as a well-constructed example of such a document. Moreover, across time, it became clear that unlike many rappers, (and his resume tends to affirm this, I think), Jay-Z is a permanent part of the global cultural landscape. So here is a PDF of Jay-Z’s resume scanned directly from the pages of Vibe (and the hyperlink at the beginning of this paragraph is a web page with a better reproduction of the document). If you think it might be easier to use, you might consider sacrificing some authenticity an use this typescript of Jay-Z’s resume I prepared, in Word format. I sought to keep the fonts and formatting consistent while assembling a graphically presentable and readable document.
For both teachers and students, I also prepared this glossary of key words used in the document. Finally, here are two comprehension worksheets to attend these documents.
You’ll notice, as of this writing, that no lesson plans or do-nows accompany these materials. I have a lesson plan template made and a few preliminary questions formulated, but this work, without a lesson plan, remains incomplete. As a rule, indeed, a relatively rigid one here at Mark’s Text Terminal, I don’t like to post incomplete work. I do so now because Jay-Z has been in the news a good deal lately for a variety of things–primarily political stances–and I think students should know what self- and community advocacy look like. If you use this material, check back here occasionally for an addendum that will render the assembled document an complete lesson plan.
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.
Lorraine Hansberry has crossed my radar screen several times recently: she was the subject of a PBS American Masters series, and she is featured prominently in Raoul Peck’s superlative documentary, James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro. Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin were great friends, and her early death was a great tragedy for him, and for the theater.
Here, hot off the press, is a reading on playwright Lorraine Hansberry and its attendant 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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, drama/theater, high-interest materials, lgbtq history, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, united states history, women's history
Although I’d been aware of her since high school, I wasn’t aware of the indignities she endured as the first African-American writer to publish in North America. This reading on early African-American poet Phillis Wheatley (with its accompanying vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet) does a nice job of exposing that particular disgrace on the part of white Boston elites.
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.
“The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in universal contempt and pity.”
“Strivings of the Negro People” (1897)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
OK, for the second Friday of Black History Month 2019, here is a high-interest reading on seminal Hip-Hop group Public Enemy and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.
Years ago, I set out to write a reading and writing unit on the History of Hip-Hop, starting from a pithy remark Chuck D made to characterize Hip-Hop, to wit that the musical genre in its manifestations was “CNN for Black people.” Even though the seriously alienated students in whose service I contrived this material took great interest in it, the principal of the school forbade me from teaching it. I have yet to revisit that material and take it further, as I have no reason to think any of the principals I’ve worked for since would have allowed me to present this high-interest, differentiated material.
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.
When I was in high school, one of the ways one exercised one’s will to power was to possess more, and deeper, cultural knowledge. This was particularly true of music. The more obscure and unlistenable prog-rock band and recordings one could find, the more social capital one possessed. I won’t bore you with the details of this; if I mentioned the names of some of these rock groups, you almost certainly wouldn’t know them. That’s how arcane this knowledge was and is, and how ephemeral and transient the music turned out to be.
That was never true, however, of one of the masterpiece albums a friend of mine played for me when I was about 16. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is simply a seminal album: it broke new ground, and still sounds fresh and innovative today. It also gave rise to a new genre of music–jazz fusion, or fusion jazz–depending on which word one wants modifying the other.
Here is a reading on Miles Davis’ invention of and contributions to fusion jazz with a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it. I’ve found students with even a modest interest in music find this material interesting.
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.
“Drew, Charles Richard: (1904-1950) U.S. physician and surgeon. Born in Washington, D.C., he received his PhD from Columbia University. While researching the properties and preservation of blood plasma, he developed efficient ways to process and store plasma in blood banks. He directed the U.S. and Britain’s World War II blood-plasma programs until 1942. An African-American, he resigned over the segregation of the blood of blacks and whites in blood banks. He died in an auto accident.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Hey! Black History Month 2019 begins today. I’m always excited for this month to roll around. In 16 years of teaching in inner-city schools, I have served students of predominantly (recent) African Descent. (I modify that locution with recent because as it turns out, we all–humans, I mean–started out in Africa. As the late, great Richard Pryor put it, “So Black people we the first people had thought. Right? We were the first to say, ‘Where the f**k am I? And how do you get to Detroit?’”)
Because I have, from childhood, been enamored of syncretic African cultural forms in this country–particularly jazz–the history of Black people in the United States has always been a deep interest of mine. As a matter of fact, I consider the seven years I lived in Harlem a post-graduate exercise. I really was thrilled to read about the locations of famous nightclubs, or the addresses of famous Harlem residents (Billie Holiday’s first apartment was on was on 138th Street, just off Lenox Avenue; A’Lelia Walker’s Dark Tower was on 136th Street in Sugar Hill–I could go on at length starting with 555 Edgecombe Avenue or The Dunbar Apartments–there are just so many of these august addresses in Harlem) and then stroll by to look at them.
Because David Blight, a historian at Yale, has recently published a new biography of him (you can read Ta-nehisi Coates’ review here), let’s start the month with this short reading on Frederick Douglass and its 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.
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