Maine standards alignment

• Reading Standard 9 (Craft and Structure)

  Covered

  Assess how perspective or purpose shapes the content and style of various texts. [Grades 9-Diploma] Analyze and evaluate how authors from various contexts (e.g. diverse, intersectional, multicultural, religious) use perspective and purpose to shape the intended content, style, and effect of various texts.

  Covered by

  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 4 · Blood-Sweetened Luxury
  • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
  • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter
  • · Ep 16 · Three Sentences, Three Policies
  • · Ep 4 · Blood-Sweetened Luxury (the abolitionist sugar boycott)
  • · Ep 8 · Selling Prohibition
  • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter (using Britain's own values against its opium policy)

  Note: Analyzing and evaluating how an author's perspective and purpose shape a text's content, style, and effect is taught directly — an author's rhetoric worked through the primary texts, and how style and content give a text its persuasive power.

• Reading Standard 11 (Integration of Knowledge and Ideas)

  Covered

  Analyze and evaluate content presented in various texts (e.g. literary, historical, visual, artistic, quantitative, and technological). [Grades 9-Diploma] a. Evaluate and synthesize multiple sources of information and various texts (e.g., literary, visual, artistic, and quantitative) in order to achieve a specific purpose or to answer a question. b. Analyze how various authors or texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take. c. Synthesize information from a range of sources (e.g., texts, experiments, simulations) into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among perspectives.

  Covered by

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

  • · Ep 10 · The Oral History That Survived (recovering Nathan “Nearest” Green's erased role)
  • · 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: Synthesizing multiple sources 'noting discrepancies among perspectives' is the whole point of the Nathan Green lesson (the documentary record against the oral record) and of putting a planter's account against two first-person accounts by formerly enslaved writers.

• Writing Standard 1 (Inquiry to Build and Present Knowledge)

  Partially covered

  Use an inquiry process to gather relevant, credible information/evidence from a variety of sources (e.g., print, digital, discussions, etc.) that build understanding of and lead to conclusions about a subject under investigation while avoiding plagiarism. [Grades 9-Diploma] a. Investigate self-generated questions by participating in sustained inquiry that builds increasingly complex knowledge or that solves a problem, refocusing inquiry and/or incorporating effective advanced searches as needed. b. Assess the credibility, accuracy, and usefulness of a variety of authoritative sources in order to synthesize relevant information that leads to logical, increasingly complex conclusions. c. Take organized notes that purposefully quote, summarize, and/or paraphrase a variety of sources while avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source. d. Follow a standard format for citation (in-text and a list of sources) that applies to task, audience, and purpose.

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection

  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, climate-vulnerability report, 3+ peer-reviewed sources, APA bibliography
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option D, primary-source research paper with an APA bibliography
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, 3+ peer-reviewed sources and an APA bibliography
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option C, interview ethics: informed consent, right to review
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, all four options are 2-3 week research projects requiring synthesis across sources

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: the full inquiry process the standard names — sustained inquiry on a self-generated question, assessing authoritative sources, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source, and following a citation format (the catalog uses APA) — is taught and practiced in the Coffee project, but only that episode currently ships a graded research assignment.

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 Maine Learning Results mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Maine adopted the NGSS in 2019 (LD 283) as its Science and Engineering standards, so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• Maine's own state structure is taught more fully than any one Civics & Government indicator names. Maine Civics teaches the Constitution of 1820 and the split from Massachusetts, the Governor as the only statewide-elected official (with the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Treasurer chosen by the Legislature), Maine as the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting and the constitutional nuance that limits it, the citizen initiative and the people's veto, the appointed Supreme Judicial Court ('Law Court'), the open town meeting and 16 counties, the unorganized territory, and the split of presidential electoral votes by district — all from Maine's own sources. Civics & Government 1 (the American political system) and 2 (how people influence government) host most of it, but the Maine Learning Results performance expectations are concept statements, not a Maine-government checklist, so ranked-choice voting, the people's veto, and the Legislature's election of the constitutional officers have no code of their own.
• Civics & Government 3 (cultural diversity; Maine Native Americans) — considered, not the catalog's focus. Civics & Government 3 is about the political and civic aspects of cultural diversity — 'the political structures and civic responsibilities of the diverse historic and current cultures of Maine, including Maine Native Americans,' and of the United States and the world. The Maine flagship teaches Maine's political structures and a civic-action habit, but it does not teach the cultural-diversity and Maine Native American political history this standard centers, so we do not claim it. (The civic-action / community-service work it also names is claimed under Civics & Government 2, its honest home.)
• The comparison-to-other-nations indicators across Civics & Government. Several Civics & Government (D) indicators require comparing the American political system, and the rights and duties of U.S. citizens, with those of OTHER nations and other forms of government in the world. This catalog's civics is domestic structure, rights, and participation, so the comparative-government half of Civics & Government 1 and 2 is the reason each is claimed partial rather than full.
• The Economics and Geography strands — considered, deferred this pass. Maine's Social Studies Learning Results also carry Economics and Geography strands, and this catalog's commodity, trade, and resource-map content plausibly reaches parts of them. But we transcribe and verify one strand document at a time, and only the Civics & Government and History strands were fetched and confirmed verbatim this pass. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so Economics and Geography carry no Maine claims yet rather than being mapped from memory.
• The ELA strands and grade bands outside the Reading/Writing claims above. Maine's ELA Learning Results run across four strands (Language, Speaking & Listening, Reading, Writing) and all grade bands. We claim only the Grades 9-Diploma Reading standards on perspective/purpose, evaluating arguments and claims, and synthesizing sources, and the Writing inquiry standard — the reading, source-evaluation, and research work the catalog genuinely does. The Language and Speaking & Listening strands, the earlier grade bands, and the Reading/Writing standards outside those claims are not separately mapped.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Maine's closest frameworks for these (its Technology / computer-science and world-languages Learning Results) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Maine claims this pass.