Alright, last but not least this beautiful spring morning is this reading on the Gilded Age along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I assume I don’t need to belabor the point that this reading could very well describe our own epoch.
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.
It was the biggest civil engineering project in the history of the world when it was built, so it has global significance. But whenever I post something like this reading on the Brooklyn Bridge and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet, I do so with my erstwhile New York City colleagues in mind. This is as much about the Roebling family, father and son, who designed and built the bridge–did you know that the day-to-day superintendency of the project fell to Emily Warren Roebling, the daughter-in-law of John Roebling, who began construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? There’s some women’s history to be extracted from this material for the right learner.
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.
OK, starting out on a very gray and chilly morning considering that it is May 12, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a capital offense. Needless to say, this clears fruitful ground for a discussion of the consequence of a conviction for a capital offense, capital punishment, i.e. the death penalty.
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.
OK, because I’m not working at the moment, I have had some time–in addition to working at publishing 30-50 posts a week on this blog–to think about writing new material that parents, students, and teachers working at a digital distance from their students could profitably use during this public health crisis. After a week or so of unemployment, I started to realize that the 2020 Census of the United States presented a perfect teachable moment; there are a lot of big social studies concepts at work during the census. Moreover, as I started to think through the lesson plan, I realized that I could write something big, in the sense that it would contain a lot of documents, but also flexible, in sense that parents and teachers could expand or contract it as their children, students, and circumstances require. Now that I’ve said that, let me point out that every document in this post is in Microsoft Word, so they are flexible and adaptable to help you best respond to the needs of the kids in front of you.
Now, about a month after starting work on this, it is time to publish it. As I am wont to do, I have allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good here. I know that new ideas and therefore new questions for this lesson plan will continue to occur to me. Better to get this out than wait to get every last detail into these documents. In any case, I am confident those same thoughts will occur to users of this material; that said, if you have any questions about it, please leave a comment.
So, here is a lesson plan on using the 2020 United States census as a teachable moment. I’ve worked on this document for some time, but like most lesson plans, it may never be either completely coherent, or, indeed, complete. But for the moment, I think it’s sound.
In my classrooms, I always begin every lesson with a short exercise that I learned, while teaching in New York City, to call a “do-now.” I’ve assembled a large number of do-now worksheets for this lesson, all of them adapted from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) by E.D. Hirsch et al. For this lesson, the four most salient are–in order of relevance, I think–E Pluribus Unum, the Latin for “out of many, one.” The census, if nothing else, is an exercise in affirming that out of many places, one; as we’ve learned during the COVID19 crisis, we really are in this all together. One important dimension of the census is determining population figures for apportionment of congressional reputation. This worksheet on the Lockean concept of consent of the governed strikes me as especially important to understand in the context of the census. Given the role the census plays in our democratic elections, this worksheet on equal protection of law is undeniably germane here. In reiterating that we are all in this together, whether in stopping the spread of coronavirus or participating in civic processes like the census, this short exercise on the concept of esprit de corps also strikes me as pertinent to this lesson.
Should you need more Cultural Literacy worksheets for this lesson, or just in general, here, in basic list form, are the rest of the documents I selected as relevant to varying degrees to this lesson, to with these Cultural Literacy worksheets on: absolute monarchy; aristocracy; class; class consciousness; class structure; constitutional convention; faction; incumbent; individualism; meritocracy; nepotism; power elite; Roosevelt’s scheme to pack the Supreme Court, and vested interest. This selection ranges from quite relevant (faction, vested interest) to marginally relevant (class, class consciousness, etc.). If you need guidance on how to use these in the context of the larger lesson, drop a comment and I’ll see if I can help you make the connection and you can help your child or student understand that connection more clearly.
The census, structurally and in terms of the work performing it, is a large scale exercise in demography. That’s a word that means “the statistical study of human populations esp. with reference to size and density, distribution, and vital statistics” (Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition (Kindle Locations 118895-118896). Merriam-Webster, Inc.. Kindle Edition). That study always concludes in the issuance of a report. Demography is writing about people. Here are two word root worksheets that call upon students, in the context for this lesson, to perform a synthesis. The first is on the Greek roots demo and demi, which mean people; the second is on the Latin roots graph and graphy, which mean writing, written, recording, drawing, and science. If students complete these two worksheets, a simple question should suffice to assess understanding: “Now that you know what these word roots mean, what do you suppose demography is?” In fact, as you’ll see if you use these materials, that is the first question on the worksheet.
Finally, here is the reading and comprehension worksheet for this lesson. Now that I have that finished and posted, I do want to comment on the fact of gerrymandering, and how it might be used to extend this lesson a bit further–and raise students’ critical awareness of that current problem in our electoral system. To that end, here is a supplemental list of critical questions on gerrymandering to round out this lesson.
That’s 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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, Worksheets
Tagged argumentation, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, cultural literacy, diction/grammar/style/usage, foreign languages/linguistics, philosophy/religion, professional development, questioning/inquiry, united states history, word roots
“The Last of the Mohicans: A romantic historical novel (1826) by the US writer James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), one of The Leatherstocking Tales. This tale is set in the hills and forests of northeastern North America at the time of the French and Indian Wars of the mid-18th century, and follows the adventures of Alice and Cora Munro, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (also called Hawkeye), the unpleasant Huron leader Magua, and Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last of the Mohicans—the rest of their tribe have been killed off by the Hurons. At the end Uncas and Cora are forced to jump off a cliff to their deaths to escape their enemies.
Historically, Uncas was a 17th-century chief of the Mohegans, an Algonquian tribe of Connecticut. Cooper apparently confused the Mohegans with the Mahicans, an Algonquian confederacy along the Hudson River.
There have been a number of film versions, the finest being those from 1936, Randolph Scott as Hawkeye, and 1992, with Daniel Day-Lewis in the role.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“ailing giants Declining industries in the 1920s and 30s—coal, textiles, shipbuilding, iron and steel—which had formed the basis of Britain’s 19-century supremacy. Weakened by outdated techniques and management, falling demand and foreign competition, they accounted for the bulk of long-term unemployment.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art, united states history
“What is Babbitt’s profession? George F. Babbitt (1922), is a real estate dealer in Zenith, an average American city. He is married to Myra Babbitt; his children are named Verona and Ted.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Last but not least this morning, on a lovely spring morning, what’s more appropriate than a reading on Walt Whitman along with 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.
While wandering around in the warehouse yesterday morning, I came across this reading on the influenza epidemic of 1918 and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Given that this historical event has become something of a touchstone for understanding our current circumstances, i.e. the coronavirus pandemic, I can’t quite understand how I lost track of this material.
That is, until I read it. Over the years, I’ve developed a great deal of material based on the mostly excellent readings in the Intellectual Devotional series; I’ve also had a lot of success in using these materials. Students who would turn up their nose at a book, or a reading from a textbook (I especially understand the latter, as most corporate-published textbooks are lethal), will take on one of these–especially high-interest readings. This reading, however, is one of the weakest I’ve seen.
Which, however, provides some grist for the critical mill. Let’s start with the title of this reading. The influenza of 1918 was by any measure a pandemic–that’s why one of the John M. Barry’s book, The Great Influenza, one of the best on the subject, carries the subtitle “The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.” So, the title for the reading in this post offers students an opportunity to differentiate, and understand the difference between, an epidemic and a pandemic. The influenza of 1918 was certainly a pandemic–remember that the Greek root pan means all. This reading, in short, presents an opportunity to teach students the importance of using language with precision.
In other words, the big question this reading raises is: Was the influenza outbreak of 1918 an epidemic or a pandemic?
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.
Finally, here is the eighth and last lesson plan of “The Great Debaters” unit plan here on Mark’s Text Terminal. This is the assessment; I sought to create a document that measures thinking and memory rather than students’ ability to get the “right answer.” I wanted students to think about the readings, the movie, and, indeed, their own impressions and thinking about the unit’s content. This is my attempt (and I’ll concede happily and readily that it could use improvement, so by all means–and please!–chime in with your comments on this) to create a metacognitive assessment. I want students, again, to think about their thinking, especially in the way they used their prior knowledge of the real-life figures in the film better to understand the film itself.
I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun cognition; if the lesson goes into a second day–and I planned that it would–here is another on the noun metacognition. I would like students to walk away from this lesson with knowledge of metacognitive assessments, which I think, and research supports, are an important way of helping students to internalize and commit to memory the contents of this or any unit plan.
And, finally, here is the final assessment worksheet itself. I think there are any number of ways to use this. I prefer to conduct this as a group discussion and note-taking exercise during which students can range freely over the material and their reactions to it. Like just about everything else on this blog, this document is in Microsoft Word, so you can alter it to you and your students’ needs and circumstances.
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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