Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown!

 Read this quote by Charlie Brown from the holiday special Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown!  It occurs right after Lucy asks Charlie Brown if he would kick the football she is holding.

"Ha! You'll pull it away and I'll land flat on my back and kill myself!"

What literary term is Charlie Brown using to make his point?

a. simile
b. verbal irony
c. hyperbole
d. rhetoric device

Scroll down for the answer.






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c. hyperbole is the correct answer

Did You Ever Think as a Hearse Goes by...

Read the passage from All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque:

"I open my eyes- my fingers grasp a sleeve, an arm. A wounded man? I yell at him- no answer- a dead man. My hand gropes farther, splinters of wood- now I remember again that we are lying in the graveyard....I crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me; though Death himself lies in it."

What literary device is used to show the speaker's determination?

a. alliteration
b. irony
c. metaphor
d. personification






Scroll down for the answer.

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The correct answer is d.  A key to noticing personification is when the thing personified (in this case Death) is written with a capital letter.  Here  the speaker won't even allow that to stop him.  
However, the best wrong answer is B, since there is some irony in a dead body being used to keep the speaker alive.  

The EOC will often use answer choices that appear in the passage, but do not directly answer the question.

Thanks, Ashley from Ms. Stamey's class, for a thoroughly gruesome story.  Now I'm going to have nightmares!

What? What?

 Look at this cartoon strip:

What is most likely the word that was blanked out in the last panel?

a. something profane
b. "bingo"
c. "irony"
d. no word was there, just ". . ."








Scroll down for the answer.





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O.K., this shouldn't have been too hard.  Let's stop and think.  A teacher is putting this up, so chances are that he is not going to put something profane on the site.  So we can rule out A.  Irony is something unexpected and it would be unexpected that an irony detector detects everything but irony, so C. is a good answer.  While it might look as if he is repeating her last word, "Bingo" makes no sense, so we can rule out B.  D. would only work if the cartoonist was expecting you to figure out the joke, so it might could work.  So we have b, which works, and d, which might would work.  Always go with the sure thing.  C. is the correct answer.

Chim Chim Cher-ee

William Blake is famous for publishing two collections of poetry: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. He writes about the same subject matter from the perspective of an innocent and the perspective of someone who has lost that innocence.  There is a "Chimney Sweeper" poem in both books.

The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."

What line(s) from the poem suggests that this poem is from Songs of Experience rather than Songs of Innocence? 

A."...I am happy and dance and sing," 
B. "They are both gone up to the church to pray"
C. "And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,/Who make up a heaven of our misery." 
D. "Where are thy father and mother, say?"

Scroll down for the answer.






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The best answer is C. These lines show that the speaker is aware that he has been abandoned by his family and by a society in which people neglect some of its most vulnerable populations (like chimney sweepers). This level of self-awareness reflects that the speaker has already lost his innocence, so this poem fits into the Songs of Experience collection.

You may have noticed that this question exceeds in quality our usual fare.  That is because someone far wiser than me wrote this one.  Thanks to Ms. White for this question!  Students of Ms. White should not weep weep in notes of woe, but rather cheer and carry her around the room on your shoulders in notes of joy! 

Look, in the sky! It's a bird. It's a plane! It's Superman!

 Look at the comic book panels below.  Batman and Robin are trapped and cannot free themselves, then...

This particular piece of poor story telling is an example of which literary device?

a. rhetorical device
b. deus ex machina
c. extended metaphor
d. verisimilitude








Scroll down for the answer.











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We have several terms that you may not be familiar with. 
Rhetorical Device - anything that makes the reader look at the text from a different perspective
Deus Ex Machina - a plot device that appears only to help a character out of a sticky situation
Extended Metaphor - a metaphor that keeps going through a long passage
Verisimiltude - resembling truth

Of these, the only one that fits is b. deus ex machina.  This plot device often cheapens the story so much, that it is rarely used by good writers.

Would You Look Up in a Box? Would You with a Fox?

 

Read the following passage from We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach:

And then there was the setting, crepuscular and shadowy, everything about it perfectly calibrated for creativity, from the sultry red glow of the darkroom lights to the still and shallow pool in which her prints rested like dead leaves on the surface of a pond.

Based on the above passage, which of the following words is the best synonym for crepuscular?

a. Luminous
b. Cheerful
c. Lugubrious 
d. Darkened 

Scroll down for the answer.






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Answer: d. darkened. Crepuscular means "of, relating to, or resembling twilight; dim; indistinct." Since the author is discussing a photography dark room, darkened is the best synonym. The best wrong answer is c. lugubrious, because some do associate a gloomy quality with twilight. 

Thanks for the question, Ms. Parsons!  Now about that book cover.  For some reason, on the Internet, there are several book covers of other famous books with this title and author.  I'm not sure why.  If anyone knows, leave a comment!