Due Tuesday

Many of you need to catch up on your reading and read Hemingway's "In Another Country". If you don't have your book, the story is available online.

You will also need to finish writing down ideas for the questions below.

1. What observations can you make about the point of view of this story? What effect does this have on the reader?

2. What possible symbolism is present in the occupations of the narrator’s three main companions?

3. How is the war described on multiple occasions and what effect does this have on the story?

4. What different elements of the story contribute to a sense of isolation and alienation (or a sense of barriers prohibiting a sense of connection)?

5. What is the importance of the machines? (Hint: It’s not just ‘false hopes and promises of the modern age.’) How do the machines help to illustrate an important irony?

6. What is the importance of the major’s wife dying from pneumonia unexpectedly? What does he counsel the narrator against marriage?

For Friday

Please print the document regarding transitional elements.

SBAC practice test

The Test:

You are going to complete a practice SBAC computer based test as a "guest". Unfortunately, this means that you won't get results back, but it will be a good experience for you to experience the types of questions that you might be asked to complete. You are also going to complete an assignment based on the questions that you have to respond to. The link for the test is available here. From this link select "sign in". On the next page, select guest and grade 11. You will do the G11 ELA Practice Test. (not the performance task) Please make sure you log in as a guest and that you select the 11th grade test. I used Chrome as my browser and had no problems.

The assignment:

Number your paper for each question (1-30) and create three columns which will be labeled TEXT, QUESTION TYPE, MY REACTION. Your reactions could be done as a simple ranking like "hard, medium, easy." For example, you might have things like:

Text/ Question Type/ Reaction

1. Read about clothing/ Select sentence/ pretty easy



12. Listen about frogs/ Short response/ hard





15. Read sample text/ Revise for organization/ medium


(My apologies that I don't have time to make my chart example look like an actual chart)

When you are done with the chart, please jot down ideas for the following question.

What do I feel that we need to practice most before the actual SBAC test?


This task will take you a while to complete. If you need to break it up into different sessions, when you sign back in you may just want to click past the questions you have already answered by providing fake answers.

Due Tuesday

Please finish the Harlem Renaissance poetry assignment.

Poems are available here.

The categories for each reaction are available below.

 There will be a total of 6 ‘stations’
 After everyone has read the poems at your station, please discuss the STRUCTURE, (poem format, rhyme scheme, line length etc) STYLE (figurative language, imagery, allusions, etc.) and CONTENT (meaning, topics, etc.) of each poem.
 For each station, you must record your observations on a chart resembling the following.

Author(s):
Titles of Poems:

Structure and Style Observations:


Content Observations:


Which poem did you find most interesting/ meaningful/ compelling?