Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Betty Friedan. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. In other words, a basic introduction to this seminal figure in the modern feminist movement.
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.
“Art can never be totally legislated to any system, even those that reward obedience and send dissidents to hard labor and death; not can it, in our specifically compromised system, be really free. It may push up through cracked macadam, by the merest means, but it needs breathing space, cultivation, protection to fulfill itself, Just as people do. New artists, young or old, need education in their art, the tools of their craft, chances to study examples from the past and meet practitioners in the present, get the criticism and encouragement of mentors, learn that they are not alone. As the social compact withers, fewer and fewer people will be told Yes, you can do this; this also belongs to you. Like government, art needs the participation of the many in order not to become the property of a powerful and narrowly self-interested few.”
Excerpted from: Hunter, J, Paul, Alison Booth, and Kelly J. Mays. The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Ninth Edition. New York: Norton, 2007.
March is Women’s History Month. Mark’s Text Terminal observes the occasion with documents posts and quotes dealing with women’s myriad contributions to the world. To begin the month, here is a reading on Margaret Sanger and a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
Incidentally, I am well aware that Margaret Sanger is a controversial figure–and so is the organization she founded, Planned Parenthood, which issued this manifesto on Ms. Sanger, addressing her involvement with the eugenics movement in the United State and analyzing whether or not she was racist. This is an extremely complicated topic; if you type “Margaret Sanger and eugenics” you will receive page after page of results, many of them highly ideologically charged.
What Margaret Sanger did accomplish, to the offense of many, was to make contraception available to couples who could then, literally, plan their parenthood. Contraception is a sin in the Catholic church, though many Protestants also take umbrage at the idea that a woman has the right to control her own body. Planned Parenthood at this point in its history has established a history of providing healthcare (and yes, the occasional abortion, still legal for now) to low-income patients. For these reasons, Planned Parenthood has become a target of choice for the anti-feminist right wing of the Republican party. Margaret Sanger’s poor choice of ideological fellow travelers has made her a tool of activists who seek to destroy Planned Parenthood.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on Kwanzaa. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and one comprehension question. In other words, it doesn’t exactly do justice to its topic.
However, there is a lot of open space in this document, which means there is room to ask more questions about Kwanzaa. Like almost everything else on this blog, this is a Microsoft Word document. You may download it and modify it for the needs of your students.
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.
For the final Friday of Black History Month 2022. this week’s Text is a reading on Louis Armstrong along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Because I grew up with Mr. Armstrong (I was eleven years old when he died), he has always been a part of my life. He often appeared on the 1960s variety shows–which I have come to think of as the last gasp of Vaudeville–and I loved watching him perform. At a very young age I became familiar with Louis Armstrong’s music by way of my father’s tendency to play jazz programming on public radio at mealtimes.
Mr. Armstrong has lately crossed my radar screen in the form of a remark made by Troy Maxson, the principal character in August Wilson’s magisterial play, Fences. No one, I think, would dispute Louis Armstrong’s enormous and in every respect indelible influence on Jazz. Like all living things, though, Jazz evolved. Bebop, Jazz for listening rather than dancing, developed in the early 1940s in New York City. When the the recording ban of 1942-44 ended in the United States the innovators and stars of Bebop, foremost among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, became widely available to the listening public.
Louis Armstrong heard in Bebop’s frenetic pace and “weird notes” what he called “Chinese music.” Mr. Armstrong believed Bebop artists mostly played for one another, not the audience listening to them. In act one, scene four (page 48 of the Plume edition) of Fences, Troy’s son Lyons, a musician, invites Troy to a club to hear Lyons play. Troy declines with the comment that he doesn’t care for “Chinese music.” I very much doubt this allusion is coincidental, so there’s one obscure note in the play to point out to students reading it (at the risk of revealing my hamster wheel of a mind to the readers of this blog).
It’s also worth mentioning, should you be teaching Fences (this is my first time through this masterpiece) that Troy works as a garbage collector; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the time of his death in Memphis, was in that city to support the cause of striking sanitation workers. This too, I suppose, I reject as a coincidence. The Pittsburgh Cycle, as Mr. Wilson’s plays are known, is also known variously as the Century Cycle and the American Century Cycle. This is drama, yes, but it is also history.
So this post is an appropriate conclusion to Black History Month 2022. Women’s History Month 2022 begins on 1 March. As always, Mark’s Text Terminal will observe this imperfect, indeed inadequate (as it too is only a month long–scarcely enough time to detail the manifold contributions of women to this world) month with posts and Weekly Texts on topics in women’s history.
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, New York City, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, drama/theater, music, professional development, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, united states history
“Claude McKay: (1889-1948) Jamaican-born poet and novelist. McKay, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, became the first black best-selling author with his Home to Harlem (1928), the story of a black soldier returning home after World War I. Among his other novels are Banjo (1929), dealing with an international company of drifters on the waterfront in Marseilles, and Banana Bottom (1933), one of the great early Caribbean novels celebrating Caribbean popular culture from the point of view of a female protagonist. His verse was published in the collections Songs of Jamaica (1912), Constab Ballads (1912), Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920), and Harlem Shadows (1922). His autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), presents the odyssey of the black intellectual journeying from the Caribbean to America, Europe, and North Africa, and back to the U.S.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Liberia. This is a full-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading with six comprehension questions. This is probably suitable as an independent practice assignment (aka homework). My own sense is that the history of racism in the United States warrants a deeper, more critical look at the motivations of the American Colonization Society in encouraging freed slaves to migrate to Africa.
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.
“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
Barbara C. Jordan, Statement before House Judiciary Committee considering impeachment of Richard Nixon, 25 July 1974
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the on the Brown versus Board of Education case. This is a full-page worksheet with a two-paragraph–six-sentence–reading and six comprehension questions. This document joins a number of other materials (including, apparently, an earlier version of this document) on Brown, which you can find here by searching “Brown v Board.”
Depending on what you need you students to know about this landmark civil rights case, however belated even in 1954, this document will either provide you with a short but solid lesson (like most of the entries from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, this one packs a lot of information into a a pair of short paragraphs. But if you want students to understand that school segregation in the United States continues on a de facto basis, well, you’ll need something a little stronger, so to speak.
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 for 18 February 2022, observing week III of Black History Month 2022, is a reading on Magic Johnson along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This material has been of sufficiently high interest to students I have served over the years that I have tagged it as such.
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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