California standards alignment

• 10.4.3

  Covered

  Explain imperialism from the perspective of the colonizers and the colonized and the varied immediate and long-term responses by the people under colonial rule.

  Covered by

  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
  • Kava — The Root of Peace
  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods

  • · Ep 2 · Who Grows the Tea (colonial and plantation labour)
  • · Ep 5 · Whose Knowledge Is It
  • · Ep 6 · Kava Governs
  • · Ep 17 · The Opium Wars
  • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence
  • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story, Beckford (1790) against Equiano (1789) and Mary Prince (1831) on the same plantation world
  • · Ep 3 · Two Ways of Seeing a Bean
  • · Ep 5 · Two Ways of Knowing
  • · Ep 18 · Whose Voice
  • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
  • · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
  • · Ep 11 · The Maroons
  • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution

  Note: Both perspectives and the responses, which is exactly this curriculum's method: imperial and colonial systems worked through the commodities they ran, paired first-person accounts on each side (the Whose Voice lessons), and the resistance — from Maroon communities to revolution. The parent standard asks for at least two of its named regions; the courses reach Africa, China, India, and Latin America.

• 10.4.1

  Partially covered

  Describe the rise of industrial economies and their link to imperialism and colonialism (e.g., the role played by national security and strategic advantage; moral issues raised by the search for national hegemony, Social Darwinism, and the missionary impulse; material issues such as land, resources, and technology).

  Covered by

  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
  • Kava — The Root of Peace
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis

  • · Ep 2 · Who Grows the Tea (colonial and plantation labour)
  • · Ep 5 · Whose Knowledge Is It
  • · Ep 6 · Kava Governs
  • · Ep 17 · The Opium Wars
  • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence
  • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
  • · Ep 5 · How Coca-Cola Got Its Name (biopiracy)
  • · Ep 7 · The Same Story, Six Times
  • · Ep 11 · The Debt of Freedom (the 1825 French indemnity and Haiti's modern poverty)

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: the material link — industrial economies pulling land, resources, and labor out of colonies — is taught in depth through the cash-crop systems. The standard's national-security and ideological framings (Social Darwinism, the missionary impulse) are not worked head-on.

• 12.6.1

  Partially covered

  Identify the gains in consumption and production efficiency from trade, with emphasis on the main products and changing geographic patterns of twentieth-century trade among countries in the Western Hemisphere.

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
  • Kava — The Root of Peace

  • · Ep 1 · Follow the Money: Bean to Cup
  • · Ep 2 · Who Gets Paid, Tea and Coffee Compared
  • · Ep 3 · The Commodity Trap
  • · Ep 12 · The Jimador's Share
  • · Ep 14 · Pattern 3: Labor Captures the Smallest Share (the smile curve)
  • · Ep 21 · The Smile Curve, Confirmed
  • · The Commodity Map itself, every episode pinned at its origin
  • · The Growing Belts map, production regions by latitude band and country
  • · Ep 1 · The Coffee Belt: Where Coffee Grows and Why
  • · Ep 3 · The Cacao Tree and the Narrowest Belt
  • · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: the geography of hemispheric trade in real products — coffee, sugar, chocolate — and who gains from it is the series' spine. The formal efficiency framework (comparative advantage by name) is not taught.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.6

  Covered

  Evaluate authors' differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence.

  Covered by

  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom

  • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story, Beckford (1790) against Equiano (1789) and Mary Prince (1831) on the same plantation world
  • · Ep 3 · Two Ways of Seeing a Bean
  • · Ep 5 · Two Ways of Knowing
  • · Ep 18 · Whose Voice

  Note: The strongest single alignment on this page. Ep 4 puts a planter's euphemism and passive voice directly against two first-person accounts by formerly enslaved writers, and teaches the student to assess each author's claims and evidence.

• HS-ESS3-1

  Partially covered

  Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity.

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Kava — The Root of Peace

  • · Ep 1 · Climate Change Is Redrawing the Map
  • · Ep 3 · A Two-Degree Threat
  • · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only
  • · Ep 10 · Karst Limestone and Bourbon
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, assess a producing country's climate viability and defend the assessment

  What we do and don't cover: Read this one carefully before you rely on it. This is NOT a science course, it has no laboratory work, no investigations and no scientific modelling. What it does have is precisely the content of HS-ESS3-1: resource availability and climate change shaping what humans do and where. The lessons supply the evidence; the STUDENT constructs the explanation only in the Coffee project (Option B). If your science requirement is assessed on the three-dimensional NGSS performance, this contributes to it, it does not discharge it.

What we don't claim

A standards page is only worth reading if the omissions are honest too. We looked at these and left them out:

• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no California Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. California adopted the NGSS verbatim (September 4, 2013), so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. We verified California's edits document: it touches seven clarification statements, none of them HS-ESS3-1. There is no laboratory work, no investigation, and no modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• The California Civics flagship's structure lessons have mostly no California code to cite. California Civics: How Your State Government Works teaches the 1879 constitution, the plural executive (a Lieutenant Governor elected separately from the Governor), the 120-seat Legislature, the top-two primary, and AB 37's universal mail ballots — from California's own official sources. But the 1998 Principles of American Democracy standards are overwhelmingly FEDERAL: state government enters only through the comparative 12.7 standards (lawmaking, courts, local responsibilities — which the course backs) and direct democracy through 12.6.5. The plural executive, the Legislature's shape, and California's election on-ramps have no code to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The Great Migration — California's 1998 standards never name it. An entire course teaches the Great Migration, but the 1998 document contains no standard on it: 11.2's rural-to-urban migration is the European-immigration industrial city, and 11.10.5's civil-rights diffusion names the churches, not the Migration. The Migration's content maps only where the standards name its people and politics (11.10.1, 11.10.4). The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• 10.2's named revolutions exclude Haiti. Our deep revolution is the Haitian Revolution — taught through to the 1825 indemnity. California's 10.2 compares the Glorious, American, and French Revolutions, and its philosopher list reaches Latin America only through Bolívar; Haiti is not named anywhere in the document. We do not stretch adjacency into coverage, so 10.2 is not claimed.
• Most of the Grade 12 civics standards we checked. 12.1.1-12.1.4 (the political-philosophy genealogy and the Federalist Papers as texts), 12.2.2 (economic rights), 12.2.5 (reciprocity of rights and obligations as a named concept), 12.3.1-12.3.4 (civil society), 12.4.3 (identify your current representatives — a live exercise our courses prompt but do not assess), 12.5.2 (judicial activism versus restraint), 12.5.4 (the civil-rights controversy case list), 12.6.1/12.6.3 (party history, polls and campaign funding), 12.7.1/12.7.5/12.7.8 (intergovernmental conflict resolution, public-policy formation, presidential case studies), 12.8.1-12.8.3 (media influence on political life — our media-literacy course is consumer protection, not political media analysis), and 12.9.1-12.9.6/12.9.8 (comparative systems beyond the Poland standard) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them.
• Economics standards we checked and rejected — and no economic-systems home. All of Econ 12.1 (scarcity, opportunity cost, incentives as named concepts), 12.2.1/12.2.3-12.2.10 (market mechanics as a unit), 12.3 (fiscal and monetary policy), 12.4.2/12.4.3 (the current labor market and wage theory), and 12.5 (macroeconomic measurement) are not genuinely taught. The reciprocity-versus-market-economies content — taught directly and at length — has no home either: California's 1998 economics section contains no comparative-economic-systems standard (12.9.1 in the civics section touches economic philosophies, but as regime ideology, which our courses reach only for Poland). The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• Health content areas beyond Personal and Community Health. Nutrition and Physical Activity, Growth/Development and Sexual Health, Injury Prevention and Safety, Alcohol/Tobacco/Other Drugs, and Mental/Emotional/Social Health were checked against the grades 9-12 standards and are not genuinely taught by these courses. The BVC drug-history curriculum teaches the HISTORY and policy of substances, not the health-behavior content the ATOD standards ask for (e.g., 1.1.A's health benefits of abstaining), so it claims nothing there.
• PE performance and participation standards — and no technology standard to cite. Every Course 1 and Course 2 standard that asks a student to DEMONSTRATE movement, PARTICIPATE in activity, or achieve measured fitness levels (all of Standard 1's performance halves, 2.1-2.3, 2.5, and the Standard 3 self-responsibility-in-activity outcomes) is out of reach of an online course; we claim knowledge- and planning-side standards only. And unlike Arizona (S3.H2.L2) and Arkansas (PFL.3.3), California's 2005 document predates wearables and has no technology-for-activity standard — so our tracker course's strongest PE claim has no California code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. California's closest frameworks (Computer Science, World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no California claims this pass.