John Sudol



Mr. Sudol 5/17/11-5/26/11 (Days 131-137)

Lesson plan (Soph): English Regents Task III Review

Objective:  To review and practice for the literary analysis and synthesis portion of the NYS English Regents exam.

 

PRAYER

discussion/ACTIVITY

5/17

The NYS English Regents Task III will test your ability, specifically, to “comprehend, appreciate, and write about different genres of literature.” In the Task III section, you will read two different literary documents (which may be in any combination of: a poem, a short-story excerpt, a memoir, a play excerpt, a journal excerpt, or a reflective essay). You will then be required to complete a 5 item multiple-choice section and write an essay about what you have just read. Specifically, the Task III essay requires you to spot and describe a “unified theme” inherent to both essays and to point out one author’s use of a literary element.

General Guidelines for Task III

• There will only ever be 5 multiple choice items for Task III. They will usually be split either in a 3-to-2 ratio (3 for passage 1 and 2 for passage 2 or vice-versa), or else will be split in a 2-2-1 ratio (2 questions relating to each passage individually, 1 relating to both).

• The essay is only two paragraphs long, but each paragraph (which is scored on a scale from 0 to 2 on the actual Regents) has very specific requirements:

o Paragraph 1 (The Controlling Idea Paragraph): In this paragraph, you must explain how both passages discuss their subjects in the same way. Let’s say document 1 is a poem about a mountain and document 2 is a journal entry about a man’s journey through Asia: you might say how both passages show readers “the beauty of nature” or “how the natural world can inspire man” in similar ways and how they do so.

o Paragraph 2 (The Literary Element Paragraph): In this paragraph, you must explain how one author uses one literary technique or element in his or her passage and how this technique is used to show the controlling idea in that passage.

General Tips for Succeeding on Task III

▪ Review the task guidelines; make sure you know what the task is asking you to do.

▪ Read each document carefully and take notes on each to help you understand what each means.

▪ When you write, you must write about both documents; if you only write about one, you won’t be able to get more than a score of 2 (out of 4) on the essay.

Rubrics for the Task III Essay

When writing your Task III essay, you will be graded against the following guidelines:

▪ Meaning: Does your writing show that you understand what both documents were about and, more importantly, what the overall controlling idea of each document was?

▪ Development: Do you use ideas and details from both documents in your writing?

▪ Organization: Is your writing focused (or do you jump from subject to subject within your essay)?

▪ Language Use: Do you use a sophisticated style in your writing (high-level vocabulary, literary terms, etc.)? Note: in most cases, you want to talk more about the overall ideas of both passages, not literary elements (mood, reversal, the antihero, etc.) that happen to appear in each.

▪ Conventions: Is your writing grammatically correct?

5/18 – 5/19

As a means of understanding Task III in a tangible way, the teacher will distribute the literary terms sheets and explain unfamiliar terms as needed. Afterward, the teacher will ask students to complete the first three items on this sheet (the names of the two stories they have selected and the controlling idea they have developed for them) on the first of these days. On the second of these days, the teacher will review students’ self-generated controlling ideas and assist in tailoring them to the stories they have picked.

5/23-5/25

The teacher will present students with the reading passages of the January 2007 NYS English Regents Examination. After being allowed 20 minutes to read these passages, students will be asked to answer (verbally) the multiple-choice questions to this exam, and then asked about how to write an effective essay with regard to said reading passages. After discussion has concluded on the 19th, students will be presented with the Task 3 reading passages to the June 2007 English Regents and be asked to complete them by the end of the period; essays will be completed by the end of 10/21 in-class with the teacher’s help.

5/26

Students will complete the experimental English Regents Task 3 multiple choice and essay in class.

HOMEWORK

▪ 5/17: SAT Vocab worksheet # 20

▪ 5/18-5/25: Review your notes from these classes in preparation for taking a Task III quiz and writing a Task III essay (5/23-5/23)

▪ 5/26: Study for your final exam

Regents Exam Literary Terms: The following is a list of significant literary terms that may present themselves on the Regents Examination and which students should be familiar in order to do well on said exam.

▪ Allegory: An event or story that is supposed to be representative of another event or story.

▪ Alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds in a passage to create a dramatic effect in that passage.

▪ Allusion: An event or portrayal that constitutes an indirect or subtle reference to a person, event, thing, or idea.

▪ Antagonist: A character that constitutes the primary opposition to a story’s protagonist.

▪ Anticlimax: Where a series of dramatic events in a story are followed by a particularly non-dramatic one.

▪ Antihero: A protagonist who gains or wields power through nontraditional, imperfect, or undesirable means. An anti-hero may have imperfections (physical, emotional, mental, etc), a lack of “positive” qualities or an abundance of “negative” ones, or may simply justify his “bad” action by saying that he had good intentions for taking them.

▪ Aside: A side conversation by an actor intended for the audience and not heard by other characters on stage at the time the aside is given. This is different from a soliloquy in that the character giving the aside is surrounded by other characters (while those characters do not hear him/her), whereas a character giving a soliloquy is completely alone on stage.

▪ Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds in a passage to create a dramatic effect in that passage.

▪ Catharsis: The release of emotional tension of a character through that character’s (relatively) dramatic action.

▪ Character: A person portrayed within a story.

▪ Characterization: How a character is portrayed by a story’s narrator and/or author.

▪ Comic Relief: A comedic event or character that breaks up the dramatic tension of a story or, else sets up a comedic event that contrasts the drama of a story to dramatic effect.

▪ Conflict: The dramatic obstacle that a story’s protagonist must overcome.

▪ Context: The set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc. In order for a reader/audience member to understand what he/she is reading, he/she must have a context for that play or story.

▪ Contrast: To set in opposition to show difference.

▪ Dialogue: Spoken or unspoken (i.e.: body language) communication between characters.

▪ Dynamic Character: A character that changes/grows throughout the course of a story. Such change may be physical, psychological, emotional, and/or spiritual, but is, in any case, significant to cause a major change in the way the character interacts with other characters in the story.

▪ Entendre: A figure of speech; specifically, a piece of text that has a double meaning.

▪ Figure of Speech: An expressive use of language in which words take on more than their usual meaning.

▪ Foil: In literature, a character or event that prevents a character from accomplishing a necessary task.

▪ Foreshadowing: An event or character interaction that strongly suggests the occurrence of another event.

▪ Hyperbole: An exaggerated expression meant to make a point about something.

▪ Imagery: Descriptive language used to paint a verbal picture of a scene and set that scene’s mood.

▪ Innuendo: An indirect or subtle, usually derogatory implication in expression; a form of entendre in which the underlying meaning of a piece of text is “gotten” by those “in on the joke” while others only understand that text’s literal meaning and are usually the but of that joke.

▪ In Medias Res: Latin for “in the middle of things”; refers literally to a literary technique in which the reader of a story seems to be dropped into the middle of the action of that story (as if he/she missed the beginning sequence of that story and started reading it from the middle of the story’s action).

▪ Irony: An outcome of an event that is either the opposite of or mocks (makes fun of) what is appropriate or is expected in the outcome of that event.

▪ Metaphor: A linguistic comparison in which a subject is said to be something else (i.e.: “The video game was a soothing balm for all emotional pain”).

▪ Mood: The emotional atmosphere of a story that is recreated in the story’s audience.

▪ Motif: An important reoccurring image or theme in a story.

▪ Onomatopoeia: A figure of speech in which a word sounds like its contextual meaning (e.g.: “Bang”: sounds like a short, violent explosion; “Gasp” sounds like a short, violent intake of breath, etc.).

▪ Oxymoron: A contradiction in terms usually created by an adjective describing a noun in an unusual manner (e.g.: “jumbo shrimp” or “brilliant idiot”).

▪ Personification: The description of an inanimate object, event, or idea as using human actions (e.g.: “The sea roared as it pounded against the shore”).

▪ Plot: The description or unfolding of events within a story.

▪ Plot Points (within a story)

o Exposition: Where a story’s characters and conflict(s) are described.

o Rising Action: The events of a story leading up to its climax.

o Climax: The point in a story in which its protagonist confronts the story’s conflict.

o Turning Point: The decision(s) the story’s protagonist makes with regard to the story’s conflict.

o Falling Action: Events in the story that proceed from the decision the protagonist made at the story’s turning point.

o Resolution: Where any “loose ends” occurring at the story’s climax and/or turning point are “tied up” and the story comes to its natural end.

▪ Protagonist: The main character of the story to whom we, as audience members, can relate. The protagonist usually has the most “face time” in the story, is the person who confronts the story’s conflict, and who comes into conflict with the story’s antagonist.

▪ Reversal: A type of plot twist, reversals reverse the action of the story’s plot (especially with regard to the fortunes of the story’s protagonist) and are unexpected by the story’s characters or its audience, yet make sense within the context of the story when it occurs.

▪ Satire: A form of literature or literary criticism in which an author points out human flaws or failings by means of humor, sarcasm, or irony.

▪ Setting: The time and/or place in which a story takes place.

▪ Simile: A linguistic comparison using the words “like” or “as” (i.e.: The wind howled like a wolf” or “The man was as big as a tree”).

▪ Soliloquy: A speech given by a solitary character on stage. A soliloquy reveals that character’s mindset to the audience in the same way an aside does, yet is absent the distraction of other characters on stage.

▪ Static Character:

▪ Storyline Types:

o Circular: The action/events of a story end up much like they begin.

o Linear: The action/events of a story end up very differently from where they began.

o Gyric: While certain events within a story tend to repeat themselves, the overall action within the story itself progresses in a distinct, changing fashion.

▪ Stream-of-Consciousness (narrative): Where the events of a story are told from the perspective of the protagonist in an unedited, direct-from-thinking fashion, as if the audience was directly within the mind of the protagonist and can hear his/her thoughts at that point of the story.

▪ Suspense: Where suspected outcomes of a story create dramatic tension within that story until they occur. This differs from Surprise in that surprise outcomes are totally unexpected by audience members or characters until they happen and are usually intended for shock value, rather than dramatic buildup.

▪ Symbolism: The use of particular images to represent specific people, places, things, events, or ideas. The physical image of the symbol constitutes a concrete image of whatever abstract concept it is representing or vice versa (i.e.: The American Flag = Freedom; The X-in-Ball logo represents the Xbox 360 Console, etc.).

▪ Theme: The main idea, moral, or lesson of a story. Usually can be broken down into wise sayings such as “Cheaters never prosper” or “Home is where the heart is.”

▪ Tone: The emotional quality of a character’s speech within a story.

▪ Tragic Flaw: That which causes a story’s protagonist’s destruction, defeat, or downfall (usually personality traits such as greed, ambition, arrogance, etc.).

▪ Tragic Hero: A protagonist that is destroyed, defeated, or whose downfall is caused by his/her tragic flaw.

Name:______________________ 5/18/11

New York State English Regents Task III Exam – Multiple Choice

Read the literary documents and answer the following multiple-choice questions (to be turned in at the end of the period). Then, follow the guidelines on the printed sheet and write an essay based on those guidelines; you may start your essay today and you may complete your essay at home tomorrow, but you must turn your completed essay in at the beginning of class on the 29th.

Multiple-Choice Questions

Directions Select the best suggested answer to each question and write its number in the space provided below. The questions may help you think about the ideas and information you might want to use in your essay. You may return to these questions anytime you wish. Questions 1 – 5 relate to passage I (the poem). Questions 6 – 8 relate to passage II (the memoir). Questions 9 and 10 relate to both passages.

1. The narrator implies that the strength of grandmothers results from their:

(1) cheery songs (2) long lives (3) large bodies (4) hard work

2. “They touched earth and grain grew” (line 4) suggests the grandmothers’ role of:

(1) protector (2) provider (3) teacher (4) entertainer

3. In order to emphasize her feelings about her grandmothers, the narrator uses:

(1) repetition (2) onomatopoeia (3) simile (4) symbolism

4. The narrator’s feeling toward her grandmothers is best described as:

(1) resentment (2) embarrassment (3) admiration (4) concern

5. In comparison to the grandmothers, the narrator is seen as:

(1) more nurturing (2) more religious (3) less intelligent (4) less capable

6. According to the narrator, the “annual outing” celebrated the importance of:

(1) solitude (2) responsibility (3) family (4) travel

7. The comparison between the Native American chief and the grandmother (line 31) characterizes her as:

(1) courageous (2) respected (3) intelligent (4) kind

8. The narrator’s description of her mother’s reaction to the death of “Gramma” is an example of:

(1) irony (2) personification (3) alliteration (4) humor

9. Both passages reveal the theme of:

(1) grandparents’ trust (2) generational difference (3) social conflict (4) family rivalry

10. The grandmothers of Passage I differ from the grandmother in Passage II in the ability to:

(1) discipline (2) heal (3) survive (4) communicate

Thematic Literary Comparison Worksheet

Mr. Sudol 5/18-5/19

Name:_____________________________

Directions: Please fill in the information below as related to the two passages you have just read (“Lineage” and “How I Learned to Speak Italian”); we will discuss these as a class when you are done.

“Lineage” Main Idea:_____________________________

Details/Facts/Evidence showing the Controlling Idea:_________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

Literary Elements/Concepts Present________________________________________________________

“How I Learned to Speak Italian” Main Idea:_____________________________

Details/Facts/Evidence showing the Controlling Idea:_________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

Literary Elements/Concepts Present________________________________________________________

Controlling Idea of o Both Stories Together:________________________________________________

NEW YORK STATE PRACTICE REGENTS EXAM TASK III READING PASSAGES

Regents Task III Guidelines

The following was taken directly from the January 2007 New York State English Regents Exam. Using the informational documents provided to you in class, answer the multiple choice questions related to these documents on the worksheet provided to you and fill in the blanks on the worksheet on the opposite side.

Passage I: “Lineage”

My grandmothers were strong.

They followed plows and bent to toil.

They moved through fields sowing seed.

They touched earth and grain grew.

They were full of sturdiness and singing.

My grandmothers were strong.

My grandmothers are full of memories

Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay

With veins rolling roughly over quick hands

They have many clean words to say.

My grandmothers were strong.

Why am I not as they?

—Margaret Walker

from For My People, 1942

Yale University Press

Passage II

…With my grandmother there was a brief ritual phrase in her dialect mouthed by us children when we went to the old Queen Anne style house in Utica where my mother and all her brothers and sisters grew up. My grandmother was always in the kitchen, dressed in black, standing at a large black coal range stirring soup or something. My brothers and I, awkward in the presence of her foreignness, would be pushed in her direction by our mother during those holiday visits, and told “Go say hello to Gramma.”

We’d go to the strange old woman who didn’t look like any of the grandmothers of our friends or like any of those on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post around Thanksgiving time. Gramma didn’t stuff a turkey or make candied sweet potatoes and pumpkin pies. She made chicken soup filled with tiny pale meatballs and a bitter green she grew in her backyard along with broad beans and basil, things that were definitely un-American in those days. Her smell was like that of the cedar closet in our attic. She spoke strange words with a raspy sound.

When we stepped into her kitchen to greet her she smiled broadly and tweaked our cheeks. We said in a rush the phrase our mother taught us. We didn’t know what it meant. I think we never asked. And if we were to know it meant “how are you?” what difference would it have made? What further knowledge would we have had of the old woman in the shapeless black garment, with her wisps of gray hair falling out of the thick knob crammed with large old-fashioned tortoise-shell hairpins? None. We were strangers.

When on a visit upstate I had occasion to drive through Cazenovia, a village on the shores of Lake Cazenovia, it appeared to me as if in a dream. I saw again the lakeshore meadow that has always remained indelibly imprinted on my mind from childhood, but that I had thought must, by now, have vanished from the real world. That meadow, now called Gypsy Bay Park, was the site of family picnics to which we and Aunt Mary’s family proceeded from Syracuse, while the other contingent (which was by far the greater number—my mother’s three brothers, two other sisters and all their families plus our grandmother) came from Utica. Cazenovia was the approximate half-way point, and there in the meadow on the lake the cars would all pull up and baskets of food would be unloaded for the great summer reunion.…

It was Gramma who had decreed this annual outing. When two of her daughters married and moved from Utica, she had made known her wish: that the family should meet each summer when travel was easier and eat together al fresco[1]. It was her pleasure to have all her children, and their children, convene in the meadow, and spend the day eating, singing, playing cards, gossiping, throwing ball, making jokes and toasts. It was a celebration of her progeny[2] of which she, long widowed, was the visible head, the venerable ancestor, the symbol of the strong-willed adventurer who had come from the old world to make a new life and to prosper.

She was monumental. I can see her still, an imposing figure, still dressed in black although it was summer, seated on a folding camp chair (just for her) under the shade of a large, leafy elm tree. She sat there as silently as a Sioux chief and was served food, given babies to kiss, and paid homage to all day. The others spread around her, sitting on blankets on the grass, or on the running boards of their Oldsmobiles and Buicks. What made my grandmother so intriguing was the mystery of her. For, despite its gaiety, the family picnic was also a time of puzzlement for me. Who was this stranger in black with whom I could not speak? What was her story? What did she know?

What I knew of my grandmother, I heard from my mother: she believed in good food on the table and good linen on the bed. Everything else was frippery and she had the greatest scorn for those who dieted or got their nourishment through pills and potions. She knew you are what you eat and she loved America for the great range of foods that it provided to people like her, used to so little, used to making do. She could not tolerate stinginess; she lived with her eldest son and his family of eleven and did all the gardening and cooking, providing a generous table.…

We were about fifty kin gathered in that meadow, living proof of the family progress. Gramma’s sons and daughters vied to offer her their services, goods, and offspring—all that food, those cars, the well-dressed young men who would go to college. And Butch, an older cousin, would take me by the hand to the water’s edge and I’d be allowed to wade in Cazenovia’s waters, which were always tingling cold and made me squeal with delicious shock.

And yet with all that, for all the good times and good food and the happy chattering people who fussed over me and my brothers, I still felt a sense of strangeness, a sense of my parents’ tolerating with an edge of disdain this old world festa only for the sake of the old lady. When I asked my mother why Gramma looked so strange and never spoke to us, I was told, she came from the old country … she doesn’t speak our language. She might as well have been from Mars.

I never remember hearing our own mother speak to her mother, although she must have, however briefly. I only recall my astonishment at mother’s grief when Gramma died and we went to Utica for the funeral. How could mother really feel so bad about someone she had never really talked to? Was it just because she was expected to cry? Or was she crying for the silence that had lain like a chasm between them?…

—Helen Barolini

excerpted from “How I Learned to Speak Italian”

Southwest Review, Winter 1997

NEW YORK STATE PRACTICE REGENTS EXAM TASK III READING PASSAGES

Regents Task III Guidelines

The following was taken directly from the June 2007 New York State English Regents Exam. Using the informational documents provided to you in class, answer the multiple choice questions related to these documents. Then, on the back of the multiple choice answer sheet, write a unified essay about lessons learned as revealed in the passages. In your essay, use ideas from both passages to establish a controlling idea about lessons learned. Using evidence from each passage, develop your controlling idea and show how the author uses specific literary elements or techniques to convey that idea.

Passage I

A man ambushed a stone. Caught it. Made it a prisoner. Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the rest of his life.

His mother asked why.

He said, because it’s held captive, because it is the captured.

Look, the stone is asleep, she said, it does not know whether it’s in a garden or not. Eternity and the stone are mother and daughter; it is you who are getting old. The stone is only sleeping.

But I caught it, mother, it is mine by conquest, he said.

A stone is nobody’s, not even its own. It is you who are conquered; you are minding the prisoner, which is yourself, because you are afraid to go out, she said.

Yes, yes, I am afraid, because you have never loved me, he said.

Which is true, because you have always been to me as the stone is to you, she said.

— Russell Edson

from A Stone is Nobody’s, 1961

Thing Press

Passage II

…Once, when I was the only child at home, my mother went to Danang[3] to visit Uncle Nhu, and my father had to take care of me. I woke up from my nap in the empty house and cried for my mother. My father came in from the yard and reassured me, but I was still cranky and continued crying. Finally, he gave me a rice cookie to shut me up. Needless to say, this was a tactic my mother never used. The next afternoon I woke up and although I was not feeling cranky, I thought a rice cookie might be nice. I cried a fake cry and my father came running in.

“What’s this?” he asked, making a worried face. “Little Bay Ly doesn’t want a cookie?”

I was confused again.

“Look under your pillow,” he said with a smile.

I twisted around and saw that, while I was sleeping, he had placed a rice cookie under my pillow. We both laughed and he picked me up like a sack of rice and carried me outside while I gobbled the cookie.

In the yard, he plunked me down under a tree and told me some stories. After that, he got some scraps of wood and showed me how to make things: a doorstop for my mother and a toy duck for me. This was unheard of—a father doing these things with a child that was not a son! Where my mother would instruct me on cooking and cleaning and tell stories about brides, my father showed me the mystery of hammers and explained the customs of our people. His knowledge of the Vietnamese went back to the Chinese Wars in ancient times. I learned how one of my distant ancestors, a woman named Phung Thi Chinh, led Vietnamese fighters against the Han[4]. In one battle, even though she was pregnant and surrounded by Chinese, she delivered the baby, tied it to her back, and cut her way to safety wielding a sword in each hand. I was amazed at this warrior’s bravery and impressed that I was her descendant. Even more, I was amazed and impressed by my father’s pride in her accomplishments (she was, after all, a humble female) and his belief that I was worthy of her example. “Con phai theo got chan co ta” (Follow in her footsteps), he said. Only later would I learn what he truly meant.

Never again did I cry after my nap. Phung Thi women were too strong for that. Besides, I was my father’s daughter and we had many things to do together. On the eve of my mother’s return, my father cooked a feast of roast duck. When we sat down to eat it, I felt guilty and my feelings showed on my face. He asked why I acted so sad.

“You’ve killed one of mother’s ducks,” I said. “One of the fat kind she sells at the market. She says the money buys gold which she saves for her daughters’ weddings. Without gold for a dowry—con o gia—I will be an old maid!”

My father looked suitably concerned, then brightened and said, “Well, Bay Ly, if you can’t get married, you will just have to live at home forever with me!” I clapped my hands at the happy prospect.

My father cut into the rich, juicy bird and said, “Even so, we won’t tell your mother about the duck, okay?”

I giggled and swore myself to secrecy.

The next day, I took some water out to him in the fields. My mother was due home any time and I used every opportunity to step outside and watch for her. My father stopped working, drank gratefully, then took my hand and led me to the top of a nearby hill. It had a good view of the village and the land beyond it, almost to the ocean. I thought he was going to show me my mother coming back, but he had something else in mind.

He said, “Bay Ly, you see all this here? This is the Vietnam we have been talking about. You understand that a country is more than a lot of dirt, rivers, and forests, don’t you?”

I said, “Yes, I understand.” After all, we had learned in school that one’s country is as sacred as a father’s grave.

“Good. You know, some of these lands are battlefields where your brothers and cousins are fighting. They may never come back. Even your sisters have all left home in search of a better life. You are the only one left in my house. If the enemy comes back, you must be both a daughter and a son. I told you how the Chinese used to rule our land. People in this village had to risk their lives diving in the ocean just to find pearls for the Chinese emperor’s gown. They had to risk tigers and snakes in the jungle just to find herbs for his table. Their payment for this hardship was a bowl of rice and another day of life. That is why Le Loi, Gia Long, the Trung Sisters, and Phung Thi Chinh fought so hard to expel the Chinese. When the French came, it was the same old story. Your mother and I were taken to Danang to build a runway for their airplanes. We labored from sunup to sundown and well after dark. If we stopped to rest or have a smoke, a Moroccan would come up and whip our behinds. Our reward was a bowl of rice and another day of life. Freedom is never a gift, Bay Ly. It must be won and won again. Do you understand?”

I said that I did.

“Good.” He moved his finger from the patchwork of brown dikes, silver water, and rippling stalks to our house at the edge of the village. “This land here belongs to me. Do you know how I got it?”

I thought a moment, trying to remember my mother’s stories, then said honestly, “I can’t remember.”

He squeezed me lovingly. “I got it from your mother.”

“What? That can’t be true!” I said. Everyone in the family knew my mother was poor and my father’s family was wealthy. Her parents were dead and she had to work like a slave for her mother-in-law to prove herself worthy. Such women don’t have land to give away!

“It’s true.” My father’s smile widened. “When I was a young man, my parents needed someone to look after their lands. They had to be very careful about who they chose as wives for their three sons. In the village, your mother had a reputation as the hardest worker of all. She raised herself and her brothers without parents. At the same time, I noticed a beautiful woman working in the fields. When my mother said she was going to talk to the matchmaker about this hard-working village girl she’d heard about, my heart sank. I was too attracted to this mysterious tall woman I had seen in the rice paddies. You can imagine my surprise when I found out the girl my mother heard about and the woman I admired were the same.

“Well, we were married and my mother tested your mother severely. She not only had to cook and clean and know everything about children, but she had to be able to manage several farms and know when and how to take the extra produce to the market. Of course, she was testing her other daughters-in-law as well. When my parents died, they divided their several farms among their sons, but you know what? They gave your mother and me the biggest share because they knew we would take care of it best. That’s why I say the land came from her, because it did.”

I suddenly missed my mother very much and looked down the road to the south, hoping to see her. My father noticed my sad expression.

“Hey.” He poked me in the ribs. “Are you getting hungry for lunch?”…

— Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurts

excerpted from When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 1989

Doubleday

Name:______________________ 5/23/11

New York State English Regents Task III Practice Assessment

Read the literary documents and answer the following multiple-choice questions (to be turned in at the end of the period). Then, follow the guidelines on the printed sheet and write an essay based on those guidelines; you may start your essay today, but it must be completed and turned in by the end of class on the 24th.

Directions: Select the best-suggested answer to each question and write its number in the space provided on the answer sheet. The questions may help you think about the ideas and information you might want to use in your essay. You may return to these questions anytime you wish.

Passage I (the fable) — Questions 1–3 refer to Passage I.

1. According to the mother, when one takes a prisoner, one becomes:

(1) cruel (2) captive (3) safe (4) heroic

2. In lines 7 through 9 the mother and the adult son are disagreeing over:

(1) jealousy (2) debt (3) punishment (4) control

3. The fable is primarily developed through the use of:

(1) dialogue (2) allusion (3) suspense (4) description

Passage II (the autobiographical excerpt) — Questions 4–5 refer to Passage II.

4. The father’s interactions with Bay Ly reveal his disregard for:

(1) technological farming (2) historical fiction (3) international relations (4) gender roles

5. In calling “a bowl of rice and another day of life” (line 49) both payment and reward, the father is emphasizing the:

(1) continuing struggle of the people (2) generous benefits of governments

(3) limited capacity of the land (4) appropriate gratitude of farmers

On the back of this sheet of paper, write a two-paragraph Task 3 essay about the controlling idea of lessons learned. Please construct your response according to the following guidelines:

• Paragraph 1: Write a well-developed paragraph in which you use ideas from both passages to establish a controlling idea about “lessons learned” (i.e.: how does each author present the idea of people learning lessons in the same way?). Develop your controlling idea using specific examples and details from each passage.

• Paragraph 2: Choose a specific literary element (e.g., theme, characterization, structure, point of view, etc.) or literary technique (e.g., symbolism, irony, figurative language, etc.) used by one of the authors. Using specific details from that passage, in a well-developed paragraph, show how the author uses that element or technique to develop the controlling idea of “lessons learned” in that passage.

Regents Task 3 Test

Directions: Read the passages on the following pages (a poem and an excerpt from an essay) about possessions.

You may use the margins to take notes as you read. Answer the multiple-choice questions on the answer sheet

provided for you. Then construct your two-paragraph response on the back of the multiple-choice worksheet.

Passage I

“Mrs. Caldera’s House of Things”

You are sitting in Mrs. Caldera’s kitchen,

You are sipping a glass of lemonade

And trying not to be too curious about

The box of plastic hummingbirds behind you,

The tray of tineless1 forks at your elbow.

You have heard about the back room

Where no one else has ever gone

And whatever enters, remains:

Refrigerator doors, fused coils,

Mower blades, milk bottles, pistons, gears.

“You never know,” she says, rummaging

Through the cedar chest of recipes,

“When something will come to use.”

There is a vase of pencil tips on the table,

A bowl full of miniature wheels and axles.

Upstairs, where her children slept,

The doors will not close,

The stacks of magazines are burgeoning,2

There are snowshoes, lampshades,

Bedsprings and picture tubes,3

And boxes and boxes of irreducibles!4

You imagine the headline in the Literalist Express:

House Founders5 Under Weight Of Past.

But Mrs. Caldera is baking cookies,

She is humming a song from childhood,

Her arms are heavy and strong

They have held babies, a husband,

Tractor parts and gas tanks,

What have they not found a place for?

It is getting dark, you have sat for a long time.

If you move, you feel something will be disturbed,

There is room enough only for your body.

“Stay awhile,” Mrs. Caldera says,

And never have you felt so valuable.

— Gregory Djanikian

from Poetry Magazine, May 1989

1tineless — without prongs

2burgeoning — growing

3picture tubes — a tube in a television receiver that translates the received signal into a picture

4irreducibles — broken down to most basic form

5founders — collapses

Passage II

It was a silver Seiko watch with a clasp that folded like a map and snapped shut. The stainless-steel casing was a three-dimensional octagon with distinct edges, too thick and ponderous, it seems now, for a thirteen-year-old. Four hands—hour, minute, second, and alarm—swept around a numberless metallic blue face. I received it for my bar mitzvah;1 a quarter century later I can, in my mind, fingernail the button just one click to set the alarm hand—not too far, or I’ll change the time—and pull out the other, obliquely positioned button to turn on the alarm. When the hour hand finally overcame the angle between itself and the alarm hand, a soft, deep mechanical buzzing would ensue2—a pleasant hum long since obliterated by hordes of digital beeps. I haven’t seen my watch for twenty years, but I still hear that buzz, feel its vibrations in my wrist. …

Another machine still lingering in the afterlife: the 1973 Datsun 1200 my dad handed down to me to run into the ground, which I eventually did. A bottom-of the line economy model, “the Green Machine,” as my friends called it, looked like a vehicle out of Dr. Seuss, but it always started and got forty miles to the gallon—a cause for nostalgia, indeed, in these simmering, gas-guzzling days. I can still see the schematic four-gear diagram on the head of the stick shift and feel the knob—and the worn transmission of the gears—in my right hand. The radio had five black cuboid push-buttons for preset stations: the two on the left each sported the AM in white indentations, and the other three said FM. It took almost the entire ten-minute ride to school for the anemic defogger to rid the windshield of its early-morning dew. One day that teary outward view was replaced, at forty

miles an hour, by green. A rusted latch had finally given out, and the wind had opened the hood and slapped it all the way back against the glass. Luckily, the glass didn’t break, and I could see enough through the rust holes to avoid a collision as I braked. Whenever the friend I drove to school was not ready to go, her father would come out and wait with me, looking the Green Machine up and down and shaking his head.

What does it mean that some of my fondest memories are of technology? Have we begun our slide toward the ineluctable3 merging of man and machine? Are Walkman headphones in the ears the first step toward a computer chip implanted in the brain? Or is it merely that inanimate objects, whether Citizen Kane’s wooden [sled] “Rosebud” or my own handheld electronic circuitry, by virtue of their obliviousness to the passage of time, seize our longing? As photographs do, these objects capture particular periods of our lives. The sense memory of turning that clock-radio knob, or shifting that gear stick, fixes the moment in time as well as any photograph. Just as we painstakingly fit photos into our albums or, in the new age, organize them into computer folders and make

digital copies for safekeeping, so I hang on to the impression of a stainless-steel wristwatch that once applied a familiar force of weight to my left wrist. …

— Marshall Jon Fisher

excerpted from “Memoria ex Machina”

Summer 2002, Doubletake

1bar mitzvah — Jewish ceremony recognizing a boy’s attainment of adulthood and religious duty at

age 13

2ensue — follow

3ineluctable — not to be avoided, changed, or resisted

Name:___________________________ 5/25/2011

REGENTS TASK 3 TEST

Multiple-Choice Questions

Directions: Select the best suggested answer to each question and write its number on the answer sheet.

Passage I (the poem) — Questions 1–3 refer to Passage I.

1. The phrase “And whatever enters, remains” (line 8) reveals Mrs. Caldera to be someone who:

(1) keeps promises (2) demands attention (3) saves things (4) dominates others

2. The description of Mrs. Caldera’s cookie baking suggests that she is:

(1) bitter over her children leaving home (2) grateful to escape reality

(3) regretful over past mistakes (4) content with the life she’s lived

3. The form of the poem can best be described as

(1) sonnet (2) free verse (3) elegy (4) dramatic monologue

Passage II (the essay excerpt) — Questions 4–5 refer to Passage II.

4. By calling the noises from his new watch “hordes of digital beeps” (line 9) the author reveals that he feels:

(1) threatened (2) emotional (3) clumsy (4) motivated

5. The term “afterlife” (line 12) most likely refers to:

(1) expectations (2) remedies (3) beliefs (4) memories

Essay Response

Directions: Write your response on the back of this sheet of paper. Be sure to complete both paragraphs.

• Paragraph 1: Write a well-developed paragraph in which you use ideas from both passages to establish a controlling idea about possessions. Develop your controlling idea using specific examples and details from each passage.

• Paragraph 2: Choose a specific literary element (e.g., theme, characterization, structure, point of view, etc.) or literary technique (e.g., symbolism, irony, figurative language, etc.) used by one of the authors. Using specific details from that passage, in a well-developed paragraph, show how the author uses that element or technique to develop the passage.

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[1] “al fresco”: In the open air

[2] “progeny”: Offspring

3 Danang — seaport in central Vietnam

4Han — Chinese Dynasty

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