Tag Archives: readings/research

The Weekly Text, 5 January 2024: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the California Gold Rush

Happy New Year!

This week’s Text is this reading on the California Gold Rush with its accompanying vocabulary-building, comprehension and analysis worksheet. These materials are adapted from the Intellectual Devotional series; for more on these materials at Mark’s Text Terminal, please see the About Posts & Texts page, accessible through the links on the banner of the home page (right above the 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.

Verdigris (n)

During the pandemic, I acquired (and fortunately discarded relatively quickly) the unfortunate habit of writing down the Word of the Day from Merriam-Webster (it appeared on my phone as a notification until I had the good sense to put a stop to it) for future development into context clues worksheets. I have finally finished developing these materials and will begin now to post them on this blog.

This worksheet on the noun verdigris is one of the fruits of this dubious enterprise. The word means “a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces.” You know–like on the Statue of Liberty. I doubt very much that this is a word–despite its charms–that high school students need to know. On the other hand, after my maternal grandfather taught me the word one evening while we stood before the verdigris-covered statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln on Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I have been pleased to be able to use the word to understand the phenomenon.

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.

Thorstein Veblen

“Thorstein (Bunde) Veblen: (1857-1929) U.S. economist. Born in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, he grew up in Minnesota and earned a PhD in philosophy from Yale University. He taught economics at the University of Chicago and other universities but was unable to keep any position for long because of his unconventional ideas and the disorder in his personal life. In 1899 he published his classic work The Theory of the Leisure Class, which applied Darwin’s evolutionary theories to the study of modern economic life, highlighting the competitive and predatory nature of the business world. With dry humor he identified the markers of American social class, and he coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe the display of wealth made by the upper class. His reputation was highest in the 1930s, when the Great Depression was seen as a vindication of his criticism of the business system.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

A Four-Page Learning Support for United States History

This year, I’ve been assigned to co-teach a United States History class. I’ll spare you the details other than to say that a student I’ve worked with several years, and who is developing into an exceptional human being, asked me for some textual support in the course. So I assembled these four pages of short articles on U.S. history from The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

Can you use them?

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.

Book of Answers: Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus and Cressida

When was Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde written?  Between 1385 and 1390.

When was Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida written? It was first performed around 1602 and first published in 1609.

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Motivation

“motivation: Factors within a human being or animal that arouse and direct goal-oriented behavior. Motivation has long been a central subject of study in psychology. Early researchers, influenced by Charles Darwin, ascribed much of animal and human behavior to instinct. Sigmund Freud believed that much of human behavior was also based on irrational instinctive urges or unconscious motives. Walter Cannon proposed that basic human drives served homeostatic functions by directing energies toward the reduction of physiological tensions. Behavioral psychologists, in contrast, stress the importance of external goals in prompting action, while humanistic psychologists examine the role of felt needs. Cognitive psychologists have found that a motive sensitizes a person to information relating to that motive: a hungry subject, for example, will perceive food stimuli as larger than other stimuli. See also behavior genetics, human nature, learning.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

“Minor” Arts

“Minor” Arts: Generally, all art forms except the major ones of painting, sculpture, and architecture. See “Low Art,” Decorative Arts, Applied Arts.

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Cultural Literacy: Spoonerism

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the linguistic concept of spoonerism. This is half-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. I can’t remember now why I prepared this; I suspect it will have relatively low utility in most classrooms, but who knows? I cannot in good faith argue that high school students, my own purview, need to understand what a spoonerism is, let alone know or care about William Archibald Spooner.

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.

The Weekly Text, 15 December 2023: A Series of Four Documents on DNA

This week’s Text is a series of four documents on DNA. You’ll find all four of them–they’ll download to your computer–if you click on that hyperlink. I’ve also posted each individually below. These require a brief explanation.

I’d long understood that I needed something like a basic introduction to DNA. The entry in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy seemed like the place to start, but then things got complicated. The head worksheet, so to speak, is on DNA. However, like many of the entries in The Dictionary I’ve encountered as I’ve begun producing more worksheets from it, the DNA article contained a number of “see this or that” elements inside parentheses. I understood that without accompanying articles on these scientific concepts, to wit genetic code, nucleotides, and mitosis, the original article on DNA would only be so useful.

So here, in the order in which they appear in the aggregated document in the first paragraph, are the four worksheets, each based on a reading from The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. I think I should point out here that I am not a science teacher, and my brief experiences co-teaching science classes did little to improve my ability to teach science. Because of my own education, I understand science more philosophically as a mode of inquiry, and tend to understand the epistemology of the domain rather than actual scientific practice. I have tended to use science teaching as means of building literacy–hence reading comprehension exercises like these. Anyway, let’s get these document up and out.

First, of course, is this worksheet on DNA, which began this whole procedure. This is a two-page document with a reading of eight sentences (three of which contain parenthetical elements in their respective terminations, and which the following documents seek to address) and ten comprehension questions.

Second is this worksheet on the genetic code. At the end of the first sentence in the DNA reading above, the reader receives instructions, in parentheses, to “see genetic code.” This document deals with that exhortation. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences–and these are all longish compounds which may require modification for some readers–and four comprehension questions.

The third document in the series is this worksheet on nucleotides. This document deals with the imperative, in parentheses at the end of the second sentence in the DNA document, to “see nucleotides.” This is a full-page document with a five-sentence reading and five comprehension questions.

Fourth, and finally, is this worksheet on mitosis, which answers the call, in parentheses at the end of the sixth sentence, to “see mitosis.” This document is a full page, with a reading of four sentences and five comprehension questions. I should probably mention here that the reading for this worksheet contains two parenthetical references: at the end of the third sentence, the reader is encouraged to “see genetics“; and at the end of the fourth sentence, there is another encouragement to “see meiosis.” I have assumed that if a teacher is using these documents, students already have a relatively firm grasp of the concept of genetics. As of meiosis, if a science teacher will step forth and ask me to produce a worksheet on that concept, I’ll do so and amend this post.

Addendum: After reviewing the four documents posted above, I decided to develop two more Cultural Literacy worksheets–one on meiosis and another on sex chromosomes in order to deal with all the cross references on the preceding four. In the final analysis, I haven’t much of an idea about the usefulness of all of this. What I can tell you is that these are six documents formatted in Microsoft Word (like most things on Mark’s Text Terminal, and if you are a regular visitor here, I’ll bet you’re tired of hearing me say that), so you can combine, copy, paste, revise, edit, and adapt as you see fit.

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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Lay (vt) and Lie (vi)

Here is a worksheet on the use of the verbs lay and lie. These are two commonly misused words, and Paul Brians, in his excellent book Common Errors in English Usage (which he generously makes available at no charge on his page at the Washington State University website) sorts them out in the seven-sentence reading that drives this worksheet. There are also ten modified cloze exercises for students to try their hands at using these two verbs properly.

Simply put, lay is transitive and requires a direct object: One lays one’s keys on the counter when one returns home from work. Lie is intransitive and does not require a direct object: One lies down to take a nap.

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.