If you can use them, here are a reading on Alexander Graham Bell with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. There’s not much to day beyond that–other than for the right student, this may well be high-interest 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.
Dexter (Keith) Gordon: (1923-1990) U.S. tenor saxophonist, one of the most influential saxophonists in modern jazz. Born in Los Angeles, Gordon played in the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Billy Eckstine in the early 1940s, later working in small groups with Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron, and fellow tenorist Wardell Gray. He was incarcerated on narcotics charges in the early 1950s, and moved to Denmark in 1962. A starring role in the film Round Midnight (1986) revived his career.
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“When did the Abbey Theater open? The Dublin theater dedicated to presenting Irish drama opened in 1904. Its directors included William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory. Destroyed by fire in 1951, the theater reopened in 1966.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Ukranian language formerly Ruthenian language: East Slavic language spoken by about 41 million people in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Russia, and in enclaves around the world. Only about three-quarters of Ukrainians are first-language speakers of Ukrainian, but there are millions of first language speakers in Russia, Belarus, and the Central Asian republics. Ukraine’s premodern literary language was Church Slavic. Ukrainian was one component in the chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which also mixed Church Slavic, Belorussian, and Polish. With the fall of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks in the 18th century, Ukrainian-speakers were stateless and the status of the language, thought of as peasant speech by the nobility, was low. The language and orthography (using a form of the Cyrillic alphabet) were gradually standardized in the 19th century.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
While I very much doubt there will be much demand for it, here nonetheless is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Vidkun Quisling. This is full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and five comprehension questions.
Quisling’s surname name became a synonym for traitor and collaborator after his decision, which this document covers, to collaborate with the Nazis during during the German occupation of Norway in World War II. I first encountered this use while reading Christopher Simpson’s excellent book Blowback many years ago; he uses the term, in that study, “quisling governments” to describes the complicity of officials in the Soviet Baltic states and Ukraine in the Holocaust, particularly the events depicted in a film like Defiance–i.e. the role of the Einsatzgruppen in the early days of the the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
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.
“soul music: Style of U.S. popular music sung and performed primarily by black musicians, having its roots in gospel music and rhythm and blues. The term was first used in the 1960s to describe music that combined rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz, and rock music and that was characterized by intensity of feeling and earthiness. In its earliest stages, soul music was found most commonly in the South, but many of the young singers who were to popularize it migrated to cities in the North. The founding of Motown Records in Detroit and Stax-Volt in Memphis did much to encourage the style. Its most popular performers include James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
During the month of June Mark’s Text Terminal will offer a four-lesson unit on Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021, Oscar-winning documentary, Summer of Soul. As you probably know, this film compellingly documents, using the long-lost footage the late Hal Tulchin shot, of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival held in Mount Morris Park, now known as Marcus Garvey Park.
Without further ado, and in keeping with the general practice at Mark’s Text Terminal of keeping the documents up front (ahead of my bloviation, that is) in posts, here is the first lesson plan of the Summer of Soul unit. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Black Arts Movement, which I think is particularly salient to both this lesson and this unit. Here is a worksheet to guide research into the principals–spread across 50 years–involved in the production of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and the long overdue documentary on it, Summer of Soul. Finally, here is the poster or handbill (or both) from the event itself.
Now, if you would like to develop this unit further (there is plenty of room for that, it seems to me, particularly if your students are interested), here is the unit plan. To write additional lessons, should you want it, here is the lesson plan template. If you write further lessons for this unit, and want to create materials using the format in these documents, here is the worksheet template.
Finally, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the A.M.E. Church (i.e. the African Methodist Episcopal Church) that I stacked in the planning materials folder for future use. One direction this unit might go further with, or serve as a jumping-off point for another unit, say, on the Black Church, using Henry Louis Gates’ recent series on the subject to explore the connection between the Black Church and the Civil Rights Movement. There was a a gospel day at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival–including, movingly, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sharing a microphone–and the film performs a badly needed service in making the connection not only between the Black Church and the Civil Rights Movement explicit, but also the connection between the Black Church and soul music. I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I listen to some old O’Jays records, it sounds like the men in the group left their church choir rehearsal and went straight to Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s recording studio. “Love Train,” in fact, is arguably a gospel song.
OK: more (perhaps considerably more) said than necessary. If this material interests you, stay tuned for the next three Fridays at Mark’s Text Terminal to collect the next three lessons.
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, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, film/television/photography, high-interest materials, music, philosophy/religion, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, united states history
“Ito Jinsai: (1627-1705) Japanese Confucian scholar. The son of a lumberman, he devoted himself to scholarship. He opposed the authoritarian Neo-Confucianism of the Tokugawa shogunate and advocated a return to the authentic teachings of Confucius and Mencius. He helped establish the Kogaku school of Neo-Confucianism, and with his son founded the Kogi-do academy in Kyoto, which was run by his descendants until 1904. His writings include Gomojigi (1683), a commentary on Confucianism that tried to develop a rational basis for morality and the pursuit of happiness.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Ryunosuke Akutagawa: (1892-1927) Japanese short-story writer. Akutagawa’s skill in the short story led to the 1935 special prize in his name for aspiring writers. Known for taking forgotten tales from medieval collections and imbuing them with a modern psychology, Akutagawa’s stories are often eerie and bizarre yet frighteningly realistic. His best-known stories, ‘Yabu no naka’ (1922; tr ‘In a Grove,’ 1952) and ‘Rashomon‘ (1915; tr 1952), inspired Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon. Akutagawa excelled at exploring the dark and twisted channels of the human spirit, but his later autobiographical works reveal the darkening despair such exploration invited. Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927. Among his autobiographical works are ‘Aru aho no issho’ (1927; tr ‘A Fool’s Life,’ 1970) and his posthumous ‘Haguruma’ (1927; tr ‘Cogwheels,’ 1982).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
For the final Friday of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2022 is this reading on Lao Tzu along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
I don’t know about you, but I still reel (in the intransitive sense of “to waver or fall back as from a blow” and “to walk or move unsteadily”) today from the events earlier this week in Uvalde, Texas–not to mention the racist attack in Buffalo, New York. Our union has asked us to wear all black to work today in mourning for the victims. I plan to do so, but I can’t help think that this gesture–sincere though it may be–is a first cousin to the “thoughts and prayers” platitudes federal legislators intone after a mass shooting in this country. Of course many of the officials who mouth this hypocritical crap also accept campaign contributions, then work on behalf of, the National Rifle Association (NRA), the lobbying organization that stands as the chief obstacle to sensible gun reform in the United States.
So I ask you Senators Romney, Burr, Blunt, Tillis, et al, when will you put aside your useless thoughts and prayers and actually do something to prevent military-grade weapons from falling into the hands of angry teenagers? When will you renounce the NRA and repudiate its campaign contributions? How about an unequivocal statement about racist killers and the right-wing media stars who egg them on?
How many more dead children, murdered by gunfire, gentlemen, before you act? How many more dead churchgoers before you turn away the gun industry’s campaign contributions? How long, if nothing else, until you get the hell out of the way so someone else can put an end to this insanity?
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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