West Virginia standards alignment

• SS.C.17

  Covered

  Assess the influence of the media on public opinion and on the decisions of elected officials and the bureaucracy: • bias in reporting and editorials • push-pull polls and selective reporting of citizen opinions • advertising and campaign ads • reporting news out of context

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Beer — Liquid Bread
  • BVC: Cannabis — The Green Revolution
  • BVC: Coca — White Lines
  • BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message

  • · 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 8 · Reading a Craft Beer Label
  • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
  • · Ep 16 · Reefer Madness and the Language of Fear
  • · Ep 18 · Just Say No
  • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
  • · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification

  Note: Media influence on public opinion is a spine of the catalog's media-literacy strand — reading advertising for what it omits, the recurring media fallacies, the language of fear in Reefer Madness, and source evaluation modelled step by step, covering the standard's bias, advertising, and out-of-context bullets squarely.

• ELA.11.12

  Covered

  Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in an informational text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness, or beauty of the text.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Opioids — The Poppy's Promise
  • BVC: Cannabis — The Green Revolution

  • · Ep 4 · Blood-Sweetened Luxury
  • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
  • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter
  • · Ep 16 · Three Sentences, Three Policies

  Note: Determining an author's point of view where the rhetoric is particularly effective is taught directly — how style and content give a text its persuasive power — the strongest single alignment on this page.

• ELA.11.16

  Covered

  Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in influential U.S. informational texts, including the application of constitutional principles and the premises, purposes, and arguments in works of public advocacy.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
  • BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf

  • · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
  • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
  • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)

  Note: Delineating and evaluating an author's premises, claims, and reasoning — and spotting the fallacies — is taught as a transferable skill on real advocacy and informational texts.

• ELA.11.20

  Partially covered

  Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
  • BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf

  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option D, a 1,200-1,500 word research paper with a required counterargument section
  • · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
  • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
  • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: writing an evidence-based argument is taught, and evaluating claims and reasoning is taught throughout, but only the Coffee episode currently ships a graded argument paper. Where it runs, it meets this standard squarely.

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 West Virginia College- and Career-Readiness mathematics standard.
• Science — considered, deferred, not claimed this pass. West Virginia's science standards (WVBE Policy 2520.3C, adopted 2021) are NGSS-derived, so the catalog's one honest science idea — resource availability and climate shaping human activity (the substance of NGSS HS-ESS3-1) — would in principle map to a West Virginia science code. But the West Virginia-hosted and regulatory copies we could retrieve are image-only scans with no extractable, byte-faithful text, and our rule is verbatim-or-nothing. We will not alias the shared NGSS file to a West Virginia code we could not confirm against West Virginia's own printed wording, nor transcribe from a scan we cannot read exactly. Science is deferred until that verbatim text is in hand.
• West Virginia's own state structure is taught more fully than any one Civics standard names. West Virginia Civics teaches the state's singular origin (the only state formed by breaking away from another, its pro-Union western counties splitting from Virginia in 1863) and its Constitution of 1872, the plural executive with no Lieutenant Governor (the Senate President succeeds the Governor) and its weak veto, the 100-Delegate/34-Senator part-time Legislature and its 60-day session, the 2015 switch to nonpartisan judicial elections and the 2022 Intermediate Court of Appeals, the absence of any statewide citizen initiative, and the 55 counties — all from West Virginia's own sources. SS.C.20 (state and local government) and SS.C.13 (state judicial systems) host most of it, but the WVCCRS Civics standards are U.S.-system concept statements, not a West-Virginia-government checklist, so West Virginia's origin story, its plural executive, and its recent court changes have no code of their own.
• The Civics standards on parties, interest groups, and world affairs. Standards the catalog's civics does not genuinely teach are not claimed: SS.C.4 (collaboratively build a model to defend the American Republic — a classroom performance task), SS.C.16 (the evolution and function of the two-party system), SS.C.18 (the impact of special interest groups on public policy), and SS.C.21 (cooperation, competition, and conflict among nations — the United Nations, international treaties, terrorism). The catalog's civics is domestic structure, rights, and participation, so these are left unclaimed.
• Personal Finance (SS.C.30-39) — nothing. West Virginia's Civics course carries a full Personal Finance strand (postsecondary cost, income and budgeting, workforce preparedness, bankruptcy, taxes, consumer debt, banking, and investing/insurance). This catalog teaches none of it, so it meets none of these standards.
• Geography (SS.C.40-43) — checked, thin overlap, not claimed. The Civics course's Geography strand (census and demographic analysis, geopolitical research, sustainable development, and geographic information systems) is human-environment and spatial geography. The catalog's growing-belts, resource-map, and climate content is geographic in flavor, but its overlap with these specific standards is adjacency-level at best; where that content maps squarely — how trade and commodities distribute wealth and shape economies — it is claimed under the Economics standards instead, not padded into Geography.
• The remaining Economics standards (SS.C.23, 24, 27, 28, 29). Beyond SS.C.25 (supply and demand affecting price) and SS.C.26 (the role of government in a free market), the Economics strand's other standards — opportunity cost and scarcity, allocating the factors of production, the household/business/government circular flow, local-to-global business climate, and the historical evolution of currency — are not the substance of this catalog's commodity history, so they are left unclaimed rather than stretched.
• The ELA grades 9, 10, and 12 standards, and the grade-11 standards outside the reading/writing/research claims above. West Virginia's ELA standards run across four grade bands (ELA.9, ELA.10, ELA.11, ELA.12). We claim only the grade-11 informational-reading, argument-writing, and research standards the catalog's media-literacy and source-evaluation teaching genuinely meets. The literature strands, the language and speaking/listening strands, and the near-identical standards in the other grade bands are not separately claimed, to avoid mapping the same teaching against four grades' worth of duplicate codes.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. West Virginia's closest frameworks for these (its Technology and Computer Science standards, WVBE Policy 2520.14, and its world-languages standards) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no West Virginia claims this pass.