Homework for Friday and Monday

Prep. test tomorrow
Rewrite critical essay by Monday
Poem due Monday

Homework for Thursday

Object of the Preposition Ex. D
Poem due Monday
Object of the Preposition Quiz on Friday
THINK about a good idea for your story!

Homework for Wednesday, Feb. 24

Rules of the Game Object of the Preposition B-C pp. 63-65

Grammar

Do Ex A of Objects of the Preposition

The Monkey's Paw - Due Friday

“The Monkey’s Paw”

Comprehension Questions

1. What is the initial mood of the story? How is the weather juxtaposed with the inside atmosphere in the parlor?

2. Who are the initial characters in the room?

3. Who is the old man who comes to the door? What do we learn about his background and his character?

4. What is a “fakir”? (Look this up.) Why did the fakir place a spell on the paw?

5. What was the first man’s third wish? How might this be an example of foreshadowing?

6. What does the paw immediately do after the first wish? What can you infer from this?

7. What does Mr. White see in the fire the night of his first wish? How is this an example of foreshadowing?

8. What are the family's feelings about the wish in the morning?

9. How do the Whites come to receive the 200 pounds?

10. Why does Mrs. White want the monkey's paw? What is the second wish?

11. What do you think Mr. White’s third wish is?

12. What is ironic about Mr. White’s first wish?

13. Before making his first wish, Mr. White says, “It seems to me I’ve got all I want.” In your opinion, what point is the author making?

14. What about the author’s writing made this story so suspenseful? How did the author succeed in keeping you enthralled and invested?  

15. What is your opinion of the ending? Do you think it ended too abruptly or mysteriously? How would you change it if you could?

16. Look up “Arabian Nights.” (Mentioned in the second page, Line 93.) What story from this compilation of stories do you think Mrs. White is alluding to? How is this an allusion? 

The Lottery Questions - Due Thursday

Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery" – Discussion and Analysis Questions

Answer the following questions in complete sentences. Use evidence from the story to support your answers.

1. Why has Jackson chosen common people for her characters? How does this choice make the story more disturbing and close to home?

2. What is the setting like in the beginning of the story? How is this mood and setting ironic?

3. What seems to have been the original purpose of the lottery? What do people believe about it?

4. Why do you think it is important that the original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost? What do you think this detail is actually so important and symbolic?

5. Why have some of the villages given up this practice? Why hasn't this one?

6. What is the significance of Tessie's final scream, "It isn't fair, it isn't right"? What aspect of the lottery does she explicitly challenge; what aspect goes unquestioned?

7. This is a different sort of story when you read it for the second time. What elements (such as Mrs. Hutchinson's attempt to have her daughter, Eva, draw with the family) might take on a different meaning the second time through?

8. Some critics insist that the story has an added symbolic meaning. Do you agree? If so, what is Shirley Jackson trying to tell us about ourselves?  (Hint: Consider that this story was written right after WWII during the height of the rise of Communism and the Soviet Union.)

9.  Is the lottery a collective act of murder? Is it morally justified? Is tradition or collective compliance (look this up) sufficient justification for such actions?

10. What current practices occur in American today that could be compared to the lottery? Consider types of violent acts justified by religious beliefs or values. Or consider blind allegiance to tradition that may not be quite as extreme as the lottery but just as disturbing and irrational.

Homework Tonight

Do Ex. D p. 60.
Appositives test on Friday.
Finish Critical Essay Outline with quotes. Rough draft of the essay is due Friday.

Critical Review Outline- Due Wednesday at the end of class

House of the Scorpion Critical Review Outline

I. Introduction and Brief summary of book (3-5 Sentences.)

II.  Ways in which the book was effective/ successful: (Include 1 specific quote)

                        1.

                        2.

                        3.

III. Ways in which the book fell short, disappointed you as a reader, or ways the book might be revisited. (Include 1 specific quote)

                        1.

                        2.

                       

                        3.

Concluding sentence. (Why it was still valuable or not)

Appositive Homework Due Wed.

Do pp. 58-59 Ex. B-C

New York Times Review Homework

Tonight read the NYT review. Highlight words you don't know and areas of bias, criticism, and opinion.

November 17, 2002

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

CHILDREN'S BOOKS; Disorder at the Border

By Roger Sutton

THE HOUSE OF THE SCORPION

By Nancy Farmer. 380 pp. New York:

$17.95. (Ages 12 and up)

PARENTS of today's young adolescents might remember when drug book meant ''Go Ask Alice'' or ''Angel Dust Blues'' -- cautionary tales of use synonymous with abuse. While Nancy Farmer's latest novel, ''The House of the Scorpion,'' has as its setting the vast poppy farm of a drug baron, it is unconcerned with the perils of addiction, and its roots reach rather farther back into children's literature -- to ''Pinocchio,'' for starters.

Matteo Alacrán is a clone, made from a cell taken from El Patrón, the elderly (really elderly; he's 142 when the book begins) undisputed leader of the Farmers, the men who control the sinister borderlands of the United States and Aztlán, formerly Mexico. Although the law states that a clone must have ''its'' (a pronoun the author uses with pointed effect) consciousness destroyed at birth, Matt has his -- or are they El Patrón's? -- faculties intact. He's going to need all of them to find out just who he is, what he is and why he was created.

These are questions of literature, of course, and like Collodi (or Spielberg, in ''A.I.'') before her, Nancy Farmer uses a boy who wants desperately to be human to get readers to think about what that means, and how far they are willing to expand their definition. Our empathy for Matt is established from the start, when we meet him living in isolation with a loving guardian, Celia, in the far reaches of the poppy fields in a cottage that is cozy but nonetheless a prison.

When three children -- the first Matt has ever seen who weren't on television -- happen by and discover him, Matt thinks he's found friends, but only until they and, more important, their father, see what is stamped on his foot: ''Property of the Alacrán Estate.'' The revelation of Matt's existence and his condition to the denizens of the estate puts into play the plot of allies (one of the children; his guardian, Celia; and a swaggering bodyguard) and enemies (just about everybody else). El Patrón's loyalties extend only as far as himself, but does his concept of himself extend to Matt?

It's a big, ambitious tale, and Nancy Farmer's readers will be used to that; indeed, ''The House of the Scorpion'' is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for young people's literature. Her novels ''The Ear, the Eye and the Arm'' and ''A Girl Named Disaster,'' both Newbery Honor books, are also large-scale stories in which children battle inner demons and ferocious villains in a series of perilous adventures through hostile but richly conceived landscapes. Assisting all of these children are helper figures of folkloric dimension. Matt's is the bodyguard Tam Lin, in legend a captive of the faeries, here a fugitive from Scottish justice who serves as Matt's compass both moral and geographical, giving him the tools he needs to escape his fate and find his future.

Tam Lin is a welcome benevolence in a novel abounding in creepily gothic images: the cows gestating the clone embryos (''their bodies were exercised by giant metal arms that grasped their legs and flexed them as though the cows were walking through an endless field''); the ''eejits,'' surgically brain-damaged laborers and servants who perform the repetitive tasks on the estate; a mindless clone screaming as its body serves its purpose, organ transplant, while Matt watches and recognizes their horrifying kinship.

The author ably keeps her elements in balance, so that the Dr. Frankenstein moments never become gratuitous; in fact, the unemotional narration at times seems detached, wary of lingering too long in any one place. The best scenes are the ones for which we get to stick around for a while -- when Matt is kept for months in a sawdust-filled pen like an animal by a malevolent housekeeper, or later, when he escapes the estate and finds himself in a home for lost boys. The first scene is harrowingly desolate; the second has plenty of spirit and even some humor, as Matt finds himself leading a revolt.

While the question of Matt's humanity drives the novel, it gets answered and then dropped too easily; still, it's an enormous credit to Farmer that the story, character development and theme grow all of a piece. Details about how the Farms came to be, how Mexico became Aztlán and how Matteo Alacrán Primero became El Patrón become part of Matt's story as well: we learn them as he does, and his knowledge moves the narrative forward.

Although ''The House of the Scorpion'' is nominally science fiction, its conventions are primarily those of realistic fiction, with more than a whiff of the old-fashioned adventure tale, the kind we rarely see these days outside the fantasy genre. Both critics and young readers appreciate books about children in trouble, the former for reasons more high-minded than the latter. Although adults like to look for the social lesson in tales of dreadful circumstance, kids know that trouble is more exciting than contentment. Ask Pinocchio.

Drawing: Detail of jacket illustration by Russell Gordon for ''The House of the Scorpion.''