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Better Vice Club

Illinois standards alignment

Designed for high school. Below is every Illinoisstandard these courses cover: the exact code, the standard's own words, and the lesson that covers it. Where we only cover part of a standard, it says so, and says which part.

7
standards mapped
5
fully covered
2
partially covered
4
frameworks

Read this before you rely on it

  • We mapped this ourselves. This alignment was done by Better Vice Club against the published standards. It has not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by Illinois's education authority or by anyone else.
  • Every code was fetched, then transcribed word for word. Each framework below shows the date its codes and text were retrieved from the publisher.
  • Standards get revised.A code can be renumbered or its wording changed without notice, and some states publish more than one live edition of the same document. Confirm anything you file against your own jurisdiction's current requirements, using the source links below.
  • We would rather claim less. Where the courses only partly cover a standard, this page says partially covered and explains the gap. Standards we considered and could not honestly claim are listed at the bottom, with the reasons.

Subject

Filtering by course: BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison

Showing 7 standards covered by BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison. Clear filters

Illinois · Social Studies

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science — History, High School (SS.H)

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, Grades 9-12 (2017) · Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) · retrieved 2026-07-18

Illinois's History strand is stated as historical-thinking concepts (causation, sources, the struggle for justice) rather than an era survey, which is where the catalog's commodity, labor, civil-rights, and Cold-War history maps.

Read the source document →

  • SS.H.3.9-12

    Covered
    Evaluate the methods utilized by people and institutions to promote change.

    Covered by

    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 4 · Two ideas about who a union is for: the Knights and the AFL
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 5 · Haymarket, 1886
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 6 · Homestead, Pullman, and the weapon that actually broke strikes
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 3 · A workers' state with a worker problem
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 7 · 13 December 1981: the state answers (martial law)
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 8 · 1989: a union negotiates a state out of existence
    • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
    • · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Maroons
    • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Debt of Freedom
    • · Ep 11 · The Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James)

    Note: The methods of change are taught in depth: the Gilded Age labor movement's strikes and organizing, Solidarność undoing a communist state, and resistance to slavery from Maroon communities to the Haitian Revolution.

  • SS.H.7.9-12

    Covered
    Identify the role of individuals, groups, and institutions in people’s struggle for safety, freedom, equality and justice.

    Covered by

    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 16 · The colour bar: unions' own history of exclusion
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 17 · Randolph to Memphis: the labor half of the civil-rights movement
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 4 · Two ideas about who a union is for: the Knights and the AFL
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 5 · Haymarket, 1886
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 6 · Homestead, Pullman, and the weapon that actually broke strikes
    • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
    • · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Maroons
    • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Debt of Freedom
    • · Ep 11 · The Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James)
    • · The Great Migration, Lesson 11 · Politics & civil rights

    Note: Directly the catalog's spine: A. Philip Randolph and the labor half of the civil-rights movement, the industrial labor movement, enslaved people's resistance and the Haitian Revolution, and the Great Migration's political power.

  • SS.H.1.9-12

    Partially covered
    Evaluate how historical developments were shaped by time and place as well as broader historical contexts.

    Covered by

    • · 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
    • · Ep 1 · Climate Change Is Redrawing the Map
    • · Ep 3 · A Two-Degree Threat
    • · Ep 10 · Karst Limestone and Bourbon
    • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, assess a producing country's climate viability and defend the assessment
    • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
    • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
    • · Ep 11 · The Triangular Trade
    • · Ep 12 · Burning the Books (the destruction of the Mesoamerican codices)
    • · Ep 15 · From Sacred to Commodity
    • · Ep 2 · The Tea Plant and Its Climate Zones
    • · Ep 3 · The Big Producers and the Cacao Varieties
    • · Ep 4 · From New Guinea to the New World

    What we do and don't cover: Taught as the series' method — how climate, latitude, and place shaped where commodities grew and what happened there (the Columbian Exchange, the agricultural hearths) — that lens applied to commodity history, not a general survey of causation.

Illinois · Social Studies

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science — Economics and Financial Literacy, High School (SS.EC)

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, Grades 9-12 (2017) · Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) · retrieved 2026-07-18

The BVC series supplies the Economics strand through real commodity markets — scarcity and incentives, market regulation, trade, and globalization. Illinois's Financial Literacy sub-strand (SS.EC.FL) is not taught here; see notClaimed.

Read the source document →

  • SS.EC.10.9-12

    Covered
    Explain how globalization trends and policies affect social, political, and economic conditions in different nations.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 3 · The Commodity Trap
    • · Ep 7 · Who Captures the Value
    • · Ep 21 · The Smile Curve, Confirmed
    • · 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)
    • · Mexico, Lesson 7 · Mexico rewrites its labor law, and the 68-year gap that explains why
    • · Mexico, Lesson 10 · The Rapid Response Mechanism: an international labor rule with teeth
    • · Mexico, Lesson 12 · The limits, honestly: the cases the United States lost

    Note: Globalization's effects are traced through real chains — the commodity trap that keeps producing nations poor, how colonial patterns persist, and NAFTA→USMCA's effect on labor on both sides of the border.

Illinois · Social Studies

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science — Geography, High School (SS.G)

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, Grades 9-12 (2017) · Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) · retrieved 2026-07-18

The BVC Commodity Map's climate-and-place, migration, and globalization work maps onto Illinois's human- and environmental-geography standards.

Read the source document →

Illinois · Social Studies

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science — Inquiry Skills, High School (SS.IS)

Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, Grades 9-12 (2017) · Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) · retrieved 2026-07-18

Illinois threads Inquiry Skills through every social-science discipline; the catalog's media-literacy method and the Coffee project's sourced research map onto the source-evaluation and evidence standards.

Read the source document →

  • SS.IS.4.9-12

    Covered
    Gather and evaluate information from multiple sources while considering the origin, credibility, point of view, authority, structure, context, and corroborative value of the sources.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
    • · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification
    • · Ep 1 · Reading a Coffee Ad
    • · Ep 2 · Reading a Tea Ad
    • · Ep 3 · Reading a Chocolate Ad
    • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story (reading a text for what it leaves out)
    • · Ep 11 · Tiki and the Tropical Paradise
    • · Ep 15 · The Language of Doubt
    • · 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
    • · Spotting Misleading Marketing, Lesson 3 · Weasel words and what the fine print takes back
    • · Spotting Misleading Marketing, Lesson 5 · Fake reviews, astroturfing, and undisclosed #ads

    Note: Source evaluation — origin, credibility, point of view, corroboration — is modelled in every media-literacy episode and required in the Coffee project's sourced, cited research.

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 Illinois Common Core (Illinois Learning Standards) mathematics standard.
  • Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Illinois adopted the NGSS verbatim (January 2014) as its science 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.
  • Financial Literacy (SS.EC.FL) — nothing. Illinois's Economics strand carries a six-standard Financial Literacy sub-strand (income strategies, budgeting, interest and inflation, credit, investing, insurance). This catalog teaches no personal finance, so it claims none of SS.EC.FL.1-6.
  • The Illinois Civics flagship's Illinois-specific structure has no Illinois code to cite. Illinois Civics teaches the 1970 Constitution, the plural executive (uniquely both a Comptroller and a Treasurer), the partisan-elected Supreme Court, the uniquely narrow Legislative-Article initiative and the 1980 Cutback Amendment, and one of the nation's strongest home-rule traditions — from Illinois's own official sources. But the 2017 Social Science Standards are DISCIPLINARY CONCEPTS: no standard names a state's structure, so these lessons map only onto the abstract institution and participation standards (SS.CV.1, SS.CV.2, SS.CV.3). The gap is in the standards, not the course.
  • Civics standards we checked and rejected. SS.CV.5 (civic dispositions and diverse perspectives as a named concept) and SS.CV.6 (political parties, the media, and public interest groups — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis) are not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them.
  • The disciplinary standards we read and did not claim. Across History, Economics, and Geography we claim only the concept standards the catalog genuinely teaches. SS.H.2/4/5/6/11/12, SS.EC.2-4/6-8, and SS.G.1-5/7/9/10 were checked and not claimed — the change-and-continuity, market-mechanics, macroeconomic-indicator, mapping-tool, and culture standards are not this catalog's subject. The reject list is the evidence the map was not padded.

See it for yourself

Don't take the mapping on trust. Open the lesson and check it against the standard. Every course publishes its sources too.

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