I’m not entirely confident high school students take any interest in him, but if they do, here is a reading on Bruce Springsteen with a comprehension worksheet to accompany it. He has effortlessly kept himself relevant since I first heard his music in 1975.
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 comprehension worksheet on Whitney Houston that I wrote to attend the Wikipedia article on the singer and actress. A student in one of the ELA intervention classes I co-teach requested it, so I whipped it up.
A couple of things about this document: first, it follows the Wikipedia article very closely as one scrolls down through it. Even though it looks like the user will have to perform wide and careful searches–and they do, even following the order of the article as closely as this sheet does–all he or she will really need to do is read the article and follow along with the questions. Second, it is long, so I’ve compressed all the material onto one page for the teacher’s convenience. The worksheet will need to be formatted properly, but it can also be edited easily for differentiation in whatever way is appropriate for your student or students.
In any case, the student for whom I developed this expressed her satisfaction with it.
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 film (1975) written by Frank Pierson and directed by Sidney Lumet about a bisexual man (played by Al Pacino) who stages a bank robbery to fund a sex-change operation for his transvestite lover (played by Chris Sarandon). The plot was based on a magazine article about a real incident. The ‘dog days’ have been identified since Roman times as the hottest days of the summer, between early July and mid-August, when Sirius, the Dog Star, is reputed to add its heat to the sun.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
At the beginning of another work week (for me, one of the odder pleasures of getting older is no longer dreading Monday mornings), here is a reading on Wayne Gretzky and the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. I’ve been producing quite a few new readings and worksheets, particularly high interest stuff, so they’ll be showing up here from time to time.
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 reading on Mickey Mouse and its accompanying comprehension worksheet. I continue to have good luck using this kind of short, high-interest reading with students who dislike reading and are unequivocal about that sentiment.
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.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I took a new job a couple of months ago; I’m now five weeks in, and so far so good. I’m spread much less thin, and working on literacy issues with much greater focus.
Which has permitted me the time, and the clarity of students who know their interests, to develop some new material, including this reading on comics legend Stan Lee and the comprehension worksheet to accompany it which students requested in an interest survey. You will note, particularly if you’ve heretofore downloaded and used other readings and comprehension worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, that these two documents are quite a bit longer than is the norm here. I find that bears what I hope is a brief explanation.
First of all, I synthesized this article from Wikipedia’s page on Stan Lee. While I do understand educators’ concerns with Wikipedia, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great idea to write off the site completely. I use Wikipedia heavily, support it financially, and believe it a worthy resource for certain types of work and fact-finding. In any case, where Wikipedia suffers what I’ll charitably call epistemological problems, I find them limited to politics, especially contemporary politics, and hot-button controversies. An article on someone like Stan Lee, in my experience, is highly unlikely to have been tampered with, and therefore unlikely to contain untruths.
Second, as to length. After trying to keep this reading to one page, I decided to edit together a relatively comprehensive biography of Lee. Thus it ran to two pages, and the comprehension worksheet to five. It goes without saying, I assume, that this document, as are all documents on this website, is in Microsoft Word format. Therefore, you may edit both documents to suit your students’ and your needs. I know this may be too much for some readers; simply cut sections you think are superfluous, and voila! You have differentiated instruction for one or more students.
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 novel (1962) by Ken Kesey (1935-2001). The narrator is the Chief, a Native American whose father was the last chief of his tribe. he is a patient in a mental hospital, in which is represented by ‘Big Nurse.’ The admission of McMurphy from prison precipitates a struggle between ‘good’ (the patients,) and ‘evil’ (Big Nurse), with the ‘liberation’ of the patients from institutional restrictions as the stake. The film version (1975), directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson as McMurphy, was an unexpected commercial success.
The term ‘cuckoo’ for an eccentric, fool or madman dates back to the late 16th century, deriving from the expression “a cuckoo in the nest,” denoting an oddity. ‘Cuckoo’s nest’ (along with ‘cuckoo academy’ and ‘cuckoo farm’) arose as a term for a psychiatric institution in the USA in the 1960s; cuckoos notably don’t make their own nests, but lay their eggs in those of other birds. The ‘one flew over’ in the title refers to the final escape of the Chief.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Recent circumstances have required me to produce a lot of short readings, including this one on the arcade game Pong as well as its accompanying comprehension worksheet. If you have kids interested in video games (are there any kids now who aren’t interested in video games?), this is a reading on the very first video game. Do you remember it? I do. And I had no interest whatsoever in 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.
Wrapping up on a dark Saturday morning (is there anything better, incidentally, on a winter morning, than strong black coffee?), here is a reading on the Rosetta Stone and a comprehension worksheet that accompanies 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.
“…This all means that how teachers look and sound when talking to students can be quite revealing. Participants were asked to rate teachers’ perceptions of students to whom they were speaking with brief (ten-second) audio and video clips. Though the clips only focused on the teachers’ behavior and did not show the students, participants as young as fourth grade were able to successfully differentiate between two types of students being addressed by the teachers: those who were considered to be ‘high’ achieving and those who were ‘low’ achieving (Babad, Bernieri, & Rosenthal, 1991). The teacher interacted with the ‘high’- achieving student more positively than with the ‘low’-achieving student. With less than half a minute of observation, our perception of how others, in this case teachers, feel about students can be readily identified.
As the authors point out in the discussion of their findings, with only ten seconds of film footage, there was barely enough time for teachers to utter more than two words; thus truly it was the manner in which the teachers addressed the students and not the content of their discussion that affected the ratings of how the teacher felt about each student.
Though these findings may seem to speak directly to the so-called expectancy effects, namely the finding that how students perform in class may be largely influenced by how the teacher feels about them (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968), our focus here is more upon student comfort than academic performance. Now more than four decades after Pygmalion in the Classroom thrust the idea of teacher expectancy effects into the professional and public vernaculars (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968), there is still a fair amount of controversy regarding just how strongly teacher expectations of students affect intelligence and performance (Jussim & Harber, 2005).
Rather than wade into these murky waters, we will instead focus on the indisputable points that because detection of emotion is instinctual, teachers must be incredibly careful and conscientious about how they deal with students in a classroom, particularly those who are ‘easy’ and those who are seen as more ‘challenging.’ Given the fact that teacher interactions with students influence how those students are perceived by their peers (Birch & Ladd, 1998), the case for conscious monitoring of behavior cannot be overstated.
It is recommended that educators plan ahead for interactions with students they may consider more trying or challenging than others. Just as the successful teacher plans for contingencies such as having extra supplies for students who may forget of be unable to afford their own, so must she also plan ahead for the possibility of questions, to which answers have already been provided, or other solicitations that could possibly evoke even subtle expressions of exasperation or annoyance.”
Excerpted from: Rekart, Jerome L. The Cognitive Classroom: Using Brain and Cognitive Science to Optimize Student Success. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2013.
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