John Sudol - St. Raymond High School for Boys



Mr. Sudol 10/23/16-10/27/15 (Days 23-27)

Lesson plan (JR): English Regents Part 3 Review

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

Common Core Standards Addressed: RL.11-12.1-6, 9-10; w.11-12. 2(All), 4, 5, 7, 9(a), 10; SL.11-12.1(A, c, d, e), 4, 6; L.11-12.1, 2, 3, 4(A, B), 5, 6

PRAYER

discussion/ACTIVITY

10/23: The NYS English Regents Part 3 will test your ability, specifically, to “identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy develops this central idea.

Part 3: The Text-Analysis Response

Task Format:

▪ One fictional/literary document.

▪ One 1+ page (2-3 paragraph) essay.

Essay Guidelines:

▪ Introductory Paragraph: State the overall theme of the piece of literature you are analyzing and at least one literary element/device (tone, structure, characterization, setting, etc.) the author uses to enhance or make obvious that theme.

▪ Body Paragraphs: Give at least two examples of the literary passage of the authors use of the literary device you have selected; for each of these, you must explain:

o How and why the author has utilized that literary device in each of those cases,

o How and why the author’s usage of that device is effective in each of those cases per se, and

o How the author’s usage of that device in each of those cases contributes to/enhances the overall theme of the piece.

Tips and Guidelines: Reading Techniques

• Annotate. You should write any questions, comments, and ideas you have about the passage in the margins and above/below the lines of the passage itself. It is much easier to generate ideas about the passage as you are reading it that you can then turn into arguments in your essay than to try and create and utilize these arguments after all is said and done.

Rubrics for the Part 3 Essay

When writing your Part 3 essay, you will be graded against the following guidelines:

• Content and Analysis: the extent to which the response conveys complex ideas and information clearly and accurately in order to respond to the task and support an analysis of the text.

• Command of Evidence: the extent to which the response presents evidence from the provided text to support analysis.

• Coherence, Organization, and Style: the extent to which the response logically organizes complex ideas, concepts, and information using formal style and precise language.

• Control of Conventions: the extent to which the response demonstrates command of conventions of standard English grammar, usage, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

10/24

The teacher will discuss strategies for writing a Part 3 essay using the excerpt below, including essay thesis, structure, literary element analysis, tone, etc.

10/25 – 10/26

Students will present their written practice essay stubs on “Two Views of the River” orally and will receive verbal feedback from the teacher in the first half of the period; students will begin their in-class homework Part 3 essay in the second half of the period today and will finish it by the end of the period tomorrow. Students are allowed to utilize the Regents literary terminology sheet distributed to them in class last week for these exercises.

10/27

Written English Regents Part 3 in-class test. Students are NOT allowed to utilize the Regents literary terminology sheet distributed to them in class last week for these exercises.

HOMEWORK

▪ 10/23: Study the requirements of the Part 3 essay as explained to you in class. Also, read “Two Views of the River.”

▪ 10/24: In your notebooks, complete the introductory and first body paragraph of a Part 3 style essay for Twain’s “Two Views of the River”; we will discuss your work at the beginning of class tomorrow.

▪ 10/25 – 10/26: Study all previously distributed material in preparation for writing Part 3-style essays in class.

▪ 10/27: Complete SAT Vocab worksheet # 5.

Text Analysis Response Discussion Passage 10/24 – 10/25

Your Task:

Closely read the text provided on pages 20 and 21 and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text. You may use the margins to take notes as you read and scrap paper to plan your response. Write your response in the spaces provided on your essay booklet.

Guidelines: Be sure to:

• Identify a central idea in the text

• Analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Examples include: characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.

• Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis

• Organize your ideas in a cohesive and coherent manner

• Maintain a formal style of writing

• Follow the conventions of standard written English

Text

...It turned out to be true. The face of the water [Mississippi River], in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot’s eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen any thing like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: “This sun

means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body

ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?”

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

—Mark Twain

excerpted and adapted from Life on the Mississippi, 1901

Harper & Brothers Publishers

Text Analysis Response: In-Class Homework 10/26

Your Task:

Closely read the text provided on pages 20 and 21 and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text. You may use the margins to take notes as you read and scrap paper to plan your response. Write your response in the spaces provided on your essay booklet. Note: this assignment is graded and will be counted as a 10-point in-class homework assignment.

Guidelines: Be sure to:

• Identify a central idea in the text

• Analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Examples include: characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.

• Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis

• Organize your ideas in a cohesive and coherent manner

• Maintain a formal style of writing

• Follow the conventions of standard written English

Text

...I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation[1], unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like[2] as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath[3] and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean[4], why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”...

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation[5]; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion and appearance, that alluvion[6] which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui[7], below freshet[8] and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter[9], and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet, I have always been regretting that I was not wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

—Henry D. Thoreau

excerpted from Walden, 1910

Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

Text Analysis Response: Test 10/27

Your Task:

Closely read the text provided on pages 20 and 21 and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text. You may use the margins to take notes as you read and scrap paper to plan your response. Write your response in the spaces provided on your essay booklet. Note: this assignment is graded and will be counted as a 10-point test.

Guidelines: Be sure to:

• Identify a central idea in the text

• Analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Examples include: characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.

• Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis

• Organize your ideas in a cohesive and coherent manner

• Maintain a formal style of writing

• Follow the conventions of standard written English

TEXT

...And so the battle was staged between a crippled, sane boy and a hostile, sane, secretly savage though sometimes merciful world.

Can I climb man-made mountains, questioned Joseph Meehan. Can I climb socially constructed barriers? Can I ask my family to back me when I know something more than they, I now know the heinous[10] skepticism so kneaded down constantly in my busy sad world. What can a crippled, speechless boy do, asked Joseph, my handicap curtails my collective conscience, obliterates[11] my voice, beckons ridicule of my smile and damns my chances of being accepted as normal. ...

How do I conquer my body, mused the paralysed boy. Paralysed I am labeled, but can a paralytic move? My body rarely stops moving. My arms wage constant battle trying to make me look a fool. My smile which can be most natural, can at times freeze, thereby making me seem sad and uninterested. Two great legs I may have, but put my bodyweight on them and they collapse under me like a house of cards. How then can I convey to folk that the strength in my legs can be as normal as that of the strongest man? Such were boy Joseph’s taunting posers, but he had one more fence that freezed his words while they were yet unspoken.

But fate was listening and fate it was that had frozen his freedom. Now could fate be wavering in her purpose? Credence[12] was being given to his bowed perceptions – could fate avow him a means of escape?

Writing by hand failed. Typing festered hope. The typewriter was not a plaything. Boy Joseph needed to master it for the good of his sanity, for the good of his soul. Years had taught him the ins and outs of typewriting, but fate denied him the power to nod and hit the keys with his head-mounted pointer. Destruction secretly destroyed his every attempt to nod his pointer onto the keys. Instead great spasms gripped him rigid and sent his simple nod into a farcical effort which ran to each and every one of his limbs.

Eva Fitzpatrick had done years of duty trying to help Joseph to best his body. She told him everything she knew about brain damage and its effects. The boy understood, but all he could do was to look hard into her humble eyes and flick his own heavenwards in affirmation. ...

Eva’s room was crested by creative drawings. Her manner was friendly, outgoing, but inwardly she felt for her student as he struggled to typewrite. Her method of working necessitated that her pupil be relaxed so she chatted light-hearted banter as she all the while measured his relaxation. The chatting would continue, but when Joseph saw his teacher wheel the long mirror towards the typing table he knew that they were going to play typing gymnastics.

Together they would struggle, the boy blowing like a whale from the huge effort of trying to discipline his bedamned body. Every tip of his pointer to the keys of the typewriter sent his body sprawling backwards. Eva held his chin in her hands and waited for him to relax and tip another key. The boy and girl worked mightily, typing sentences which Eva herself gave as a headline to Joseph. Young Boyblue honestly gave himself over to his typing teacher. Gumption[13] was hers as she struggled to find a very voluntary tip coming to the typewriter keys from his yessing head.

But for Eva Fitzpatrick he would never have broken free. His own mother had given up on him and decided that the typewriter was no help at all. She had put the cover on the machine and stored it away. She felt hurt by defeat. Her foolish heart failed to see breathing destructive spasms coming between her son and the typewriter. But how was a mother to know that hidden behind her cross was a Simon[14] ready and willing to research areas where she strode as a stranger. How could she know that Eva brought service to a head and that science now was going to join forces with her. Now a new drug was being administered to the spastic boy and even though he was being allowed to take only a small segment of Lioresal[15] tablet, he was beginning already to feel different. The little segments of Lioresal tablet seemed harmless, but yet they were the mustard seeds of his and Eva’s hours of discovery.

Now he struggled from his certainty that he was going to succeed and with that certainty came a feeling of encouragement. The encouragement was absolute, just as though someone was egging him on. His belief now came from himself and he wondered how this came about. He knew that with years of defeat he should now be experiencing despair, but instead a spirit of enlightenment was telling him you’re going to come through with a bow, a bow to break your chain and let out your voice.

At the very same hour fate was also at work on Eva. When it was least expected she sensed that music of which he sampled. She watched Joseph in the mirror as he struggled to find and tip the required keys. Avoiding his teacher’s gaze, he struggled on trying to test himself. Glee was gamboling[16] but he had to be sure.

Breathing a little easier, his body a little less trembling, he sat head cupped in Eva’s hands. He even noticed the scent of her perfume but he didn’t glance in the mirror. Perhaps it won’t happen for me today he teased himself but he was wrong, desperately, delightfully wrong. Sweetness of certainty sugared his now. Yes, he could type. He could freely hit the keys and he looked in the mirror and met her eyes. Feebly he smiled but she continued to study him. Looking back into her face he tried to get her response, but turning his wheelchair she gracefully glided back along the corridor to his classroom. ...

—Christopher Nolan

excerpted from Under the Eye of the Clock, 1987

Weidenfeld and Nicolson

-----------------------

[1] resignation — patient acceptance

[2] Spartan-like — simply

[3] swath — long strip

[4] mean — inferior, lowly, of little value

[5] perturbation — disturbance

[6] alluvion — flood

[7] point d’appui — point of support

[8] freshet — overflowing stream

[9] cimeter — sword

[10] heinous — hateful

[11] obliterates — blots out

[12] credence — belief

[13] gumption — perseverance, toughness

[14] a Simon — Biblical reference to Simon of Cyrene who helped Jesus carry his cross

[15] Lioresal — a medication to treat skeletal muscle spasms

[16] gambolling — skipping

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