The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side (and over the Septic Tank)

Read the following line:


Your eyes are as green as the grass in the summer time.


This is an example of...


A) Simile
B) Hyperbole
C) Personification
D) Irony

Scroll down for the answer.

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The green eyes are being compared to the green grass, so the only two answer choices that could deal with a comparison are simile and hyperbole.  Since there is no exaggeration going on and the comparison uses as, then we can figure out that the answer is A. Simile.

A big thanks to Alison for this question!  Alison, green eyes are also symbolic of jealousy and I'm sure all of your classmates are full of envy over how smart you are.

Shameless Plug - Awesome Lord of the Flies Survival Simulation Game

 Never fear, fellow English teacher!  You Daily Dose of EOC is still here - just scroll down.  :)

 I love this book with a passion!  As far as teaching symbolism, this book really gets reluctant readers to "get it".  The book has great characters, plenty of action, and lots of good, wholesome violence to keep teenagers happy.  The only problem is that it starts so slowly.

Anyone who teaches reluctant readers knows that if you cannot hook them immediately, you've lost them.

So, while sitting in church one day when I should have been listening to the sermon, I had an idea for a game to get my students into the book.  I made it all by hand with maps, cards, the whole nine yards.  As the years went by, I get tired of replacing lost cards or materials that were marked on by various students and started to take it online.  It took a few more years to perfect it, but I think I finally have it down pat.  It has by far been the most popular page on my class web site by other teachers and it is the most mentioned lesson of mine when other teachers contact me.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/EET-_Lord-of-the-Flies_-Interactive-Survival-Game-6933163

I break my students into groups and each group represents 20 island-stranded kids.  The students decide how many rescue fires they will have, where they will be sheltered, who goes hunting, who goes fruit gathering, and if they want to go exploring.  Each round is a 'week' in the game.

First thing we do is have each group draw and Act of God card.  These cards sometimes bring good things to the group, have no effect on the group, or (more likely) bring bad karma to the group.  Then we draw cards to see what happens when they go hunting, fruit gathering, and exploring.  At this point we tally up the morale.  The morale goes up and down depending on many factors like having shelter for everybody, getting food, people dying (there are a lot of people dying), etc. 

If the morale goes below 10, then the group leader has to draw a Revolt card to see what happens.  Sometimes something good happens, but most likely something bad will.  Then it's off to see if you get rescued.  

For the teams that are left, they do it all over again for the next week with the remaining people they have left.

Sometime groups have everything perfect and it is more like a Gilligan's Island episode than a Lord of the Flies scenario.  Many groups get a good Lord of the Flies type experience, and some have so much bad luck that they make the book seem like a pleasant fairy tale.

Students are encouraged to think outside of the box and try things that are not expected. The teacher is the final say-so for what happens, so when students get creative, roll with it.

Whatever the outcome, the students experience situations that prep them for the action in the book.  Whenever I have used this game, I have found that students are more connected to the reading.

I always like it when teachers send me how their students came up with something new.  Sometimes I adjust the game to match it.  when my students started sabotaging the game to try and make their leader draw a Revolt card, I introduced a new element - Mutiny.  With some groups, that is very popular!

The game comes with the choice to either have it all online (in which case they would move objects on a screen), or to have printables for students to physically manipulate.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/EET-_Lord-of-the-Flies_-Interactive-Survival-Game-6933163

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! 

Deer

 Read the following poem, "Deer," by Bill Griffin.

Omigosh oh snap

oh horrors I heard it

so close too close

and way too big

might be one of those

Little Wolves I'll bet

there are two 

no ten a whole pack

oh God I just know

they bite

I

must

do

as

Ma

ma

said

stand

per

fect

ly

still

un

til

he

turns

a

way

then

run

like

Oh heck, it's only

you, and you've been

looking at me

all day long

and haven't even

seen me

once.

Why does the author have the middle of the poem consist of all lines being only one syllable long?

a. to show how still the deer is being

b. to give the poem a dumb bell shape

c. to show how fast the deer is moving

d. to symbolize the heart beats of the scared deer

Scroll down for the answer.

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This poem is STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS - that is, it is written in the thought process of the narrator.  This is not a common method of writing (two books that come to mind are As I Lay Dying  and The Death of Jayson Porter.  Chances are very high that you will NOT see this term on the NCFinal (or MSL or Common Exam or Smarter Balance or whatever it is called when you see this post); however, there is a chance that it will pop up, and if it does, then you know what it means!

The deer is frightened and, as all deer do when frightened, he is standing perfectly still, shown by the slow, one syllable lines.  The correct answer is A.

This is just one of several animal related poems in Bill Griffin's book, Snake Den Ridge: A Bestiary.  He is a North Carolina poet and you should check out his other works at his blog: http://griffinpoetry.com/

My Pretty Rose Tree

 Read the following poem by William Blake:

My Pretty Rose Tree

A flower was offered to me,
Such a flower as May never bore;
But I said, 'I've a pretty rose tree,'
And I passed the sweet flower o'er.

Then I went to my pretty rose tree,
To tend her by day and by night;
But my rose turned away with jealousy,
And her thorns were my only delight.

Why is the speaker's "only delight" the thorns of the rose tree?

a. the speaker is not fond of flowers, which is why he passed over the flower offered him
b. the speaker's girlfriend/wife is upset with him because of another woman is hitting on him
c. the speaker is a bitter old man with nothing but memories of better days
d. the speaker should have taken the rose offered
e. who the heck knows?


  








Scroll down for the answer.







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In this poem, the rose is symbolic of a woman.  One woman offered herself to him and he refused because he is faithful to his wife/girlfriend.  However, his wife/girlfriend is jealous and this causes problems in their relationship.

Never

Read the following excerpt from Kenneth Follet's novel Never, a novel about the beginning of a nuclear war.  Pauline Green is the president of the United States of America in this novel and has just launched an attack on North Korea in retaliation for North Korea's attack on South Korea and Japan.

Pauline had killed hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, by bombing North Korean military bases, and more would have been maimed by the blast and ravaged by the radiation.  In her head she knew she had done the right thing: General Pak's murderous regime had to be closed down.  But no amount of reasoning could make her feel all right about it in her heart.  Every time she washed her hands she thought about Lady Macbeth trying to get the blood off. 

What is the purpose of the allusion in the above passage?

a. to show how Pauline was justified in taking the action she took
b. to show how Pauline feels guilty for the deaths of those caught in the US's bombing
c. to show how guilty General Pak is from his actions
d. to let the reader know that nuclear war is never a justifiable option

Scroll down for the answer

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In order to answer this question correctly, you must:

• know what an allusion in
• be able to find the allusion in the passage
• understand how the allusion relates to the passage

Allusions are often difficult to spot because you may have never read the book being alluded to.  Allusions that may appear on the state test will probably come from Shakespeare, mythology, or the Bible.  

So, how do you find the allusion in the above passage if you do not recognize the work it is coming from?  First thing to do is to look for anything that does not belong.  We have three names: Pauline, General Pak, and Lady Macbeth.  We know from reading the blurb before the passage that Pauline is a character in the book.  We can guess that General Pak is her adversary in North Korea.  That leaves Lady Macbeth, who doesn't seem to have a role here.  That could be our allusion.  We see she is washing blood off her hands.  Given that this was a missile strike, there would be no literal blood on anyone's hands, so we can read this to be figurative.  The phrase "blood on one's hands" deals with a guilty conscience, so armed with that knowledge, we can narrow the answers to B or C.  Since it is Pauline that the passage is focused on and not General Pak, we can narrow the answer to B.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

Read the following excerpt from Fahrenheit 451.  This is a book written in the 1950s that takes place in our future.

The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune.

Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.

What is the purpose of the metaphor in this passage?

a. to explain how Mildred drowned
b. to show that Mildred cannot swim
c. to explain how Mildred listens to music
d. to show Mildred's unique fashion sense

Scroll down for the answer.








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This is a typical reading comprehension three part question. Part one, do you know what a metaphor is?  Part two, can you find the metaphor?  Part three do you understand what the metaphor means?  

The ocean is a metaphor showing how distant Mildred is when she uses the "seashell" radio.  Basically Ray Bradbury is envisioning ear buds way back in the 1950s.  Know that you know that, the other metaphor, the mosquito, makes more sense as well and adds to the understanding.  
C. is the correct answer.