An American Journey - lyfordcisd.net

Unit

4An American

JourneyUnit OverviewEver since the Pilgrims traveled to America, the concept of the “journey” has been part of the American experience. In this unit you will study the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which traces the physical and emotional journey of a woman striving for self-expression. You will then examine the ways that you present yourself in a variety of situations on your own journey to self-expression.

Essential Questions

How can an author’s style construct and reflect identity?

How do communication skills enhance self-expression?

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An American JourneyContents

Learning Focus: Journey of Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .286

Activities:

4.1 Previewing the Unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .287

4.2 Who Was Zora Neale Hurston? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .288 *Teleplay: Zora Is My Name, directed by Neema Barnette Memoir: “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” by Zora Neale Hurston

4.3 The Harlem Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293

4.4 Hurston’s Colorful Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .295 *Teleplay: Zora Is My Name, directed by Neema Barnette Short Story: “Sweat,” by Zora Neale Hurston

4.5 Janie’s Return Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .311 * Novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

4.6 Nanny’s Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .314 Poetry: “Mother to Son,” by Langston Hughes

4.7 Nanny, Janie, and Logan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .318

4.8 Janie’s New Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .320

4.9 The Two Sides of Janie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .323

4.10 Discussion Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .325

4.11 The End of a Long Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .327 Excerpts from critical reviews

4.12 Oprah Winfrey Presents… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .331 *Film: Their Eyes Were Watching God, directed by Darnell Martin

Embedded Assessment 1 Writing an Analytical Essay . . . . . . . . .334

GoalsCTo explore an American

classic that addresses the concept of “journey”

CTo analyze the writer’s rich and complex writing style as a model for making deliberate stylistic choices

CTo investigate the communication demands of a career and to prepare to meet those demands

CTo use media production elements and speaking and listening skills to construct a presentation of self that is appropriate for the audience

AcAdEMic VocABuLAry

Motif

Résumé

Unit

4

284 SpringBoard® English Textual Power™ Level 6

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Learning Focus: Communicating Myself to Others . . . . . . . . . . . . .337

4.13 My Communication Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .338

4.14 Career Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .339

4.15 Creating a Résumé . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .342

4.16 Social Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .344 Article: “Narcissism on the Internet isn’t risk-free,” by Eric Gwinn Article: “Web of Risks,” by Brad Stone with Robbie Brown Article: Excerpt from “Potential employers monitoring student social networking Web sites,” by Matt McGowan

4.17 Practicing for a Job Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353

Embedded Assessment 2 Using Communication Skills to Present Myself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .355

unit reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .358

*Texts not included in these materials.

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285

Learning Focus: Journey of Discovery“Ah been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’ is just where Ah been dis year and a half y’all ain’t seen me.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

One of the great literary discoveries in recent years has been Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Unappreciated by some of Hurston’s male contemporaries upon its first publication in 1937, the novel slipped out of print until Alice Walker (The Color Purple) brought it back to the public eye in the 1970s. Since then, Hurston’s story of Janie Crawford, a woman on a journey of self-discovery, has received wide acclaim by diverse readers and has made its own journey into the canon of American literature.

As with any great book, you will read Their Eyes Were Watching God with many purposes. Among your purposes will be reading to analyze Hurston’s innovative use of literary and stylistic elements. You will also analyze Hurston’s distinctive style, as she expertly integrates a variety of voices into one novel. Hurston is noted for her gifted storytelling and honoring oral tradition, including dialect, which can be both biting and humorous. An author’s use of dialect validates the oral traditions of a people, a time, and a place. Through their choice of dialect, authors create a representation of the spoken language, which helps record the history of language as it evolves over generations. Some of the literary elements to look at in Hurston’s writing include:

Ccharacterization

Csetting

Cplot

Cmotifs

Hurston’s distinctive use of stylistic elements includes:

Cfigurative language, including metaphors, similes, and personification

Cdiction

Cimagery

Csyntax

Cstructure/organization

Cpoint of view

Ctone

Independent Reading: In this unit, you will read a novel exploring the concept of a “journey” as an essential characteristic of achieving one’s American Dream. For independent reading, select a novel, nonfiction book, or a collection of essays or short stories about the American experience and a journey of discovery that is of interest to you.


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ActIvIty

4.1Previewing the UnitSUGGESTED LEArNING STrATEGIES: Marking the text, think-Pair-Share, close Reading, Skimming/Scanning, Summarizing/Paraphrasing, Graphic Organizer

Essential Questions 1. How can an author’s style construct and reflect identity?

2. How do communication skills enhance self-expression?

Unit Overview and Learning FocusPredict what you think this unit is about. Use the words or phrases that stood out to you when you read the Unit Overview and the Learning Focus.

Embedded Assessment 1What knowledge must you have ( what do you need to know) to succeed on Embedded Assessment 1? What skills must you have (what must you be able to do)?

Unit 4 • An American Journey 287

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Activity

4.2 Who Was Zora Neale Hurston? SUGGESTED LEarninG STraTEGiES: Predicting, Notetaking, Marking the text, think-Pair-Share, Drafting, Brainstorming, Scanning

“Hurston became an orphan at nine, a runaway at fourteen, maid and manicurist before she was twenty, and with one dress and a dream managed to become Zora neale Hurston, author and anthropologist.”

—Alice Walker

1. Based on this statement, what can you infer about Zora neale Hurston’s character?

2. Take notes as you watch the production Zora Is My Name.

Observation Notes Comments and Questions

3. review your notes and craft a general perception about Zora neale Hurston.

4. if Zora neale Hurston were present, what questions would you like to ask her?

5. as you read Zora neale Hurston’s memoir, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” follow your teacher’s instructions for annotating the text in a guided reading.


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I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating1 circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses; the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter.2 Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a

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Activity 4.2

A b O u t t h e A u t h O r

Born in 1891, Zora neale Hurston was an american anthropologist and writer who wrote her best-known works during the Harlem renaissance. Hurston grew up in the small town of Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black township. Hurston’s idyllic childhood was interrupted by the death of her mother when Hurston was only 13. She struggled to finish high school, which she still had not accomplished by age 26. Despite her early struggles, Hurston went on to graduate from Barnard College. Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered her master work. She died in 1960.

M e m o i r

by Zora Neale Hurs ton

1 extenuating: lessening or seeming to lessen the seriousness of by giving excuses 2 first-nighter: a person who attends the opening performance of a play, opera, or

similar production

My Notes


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queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course, negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first “welcome-to-our-state” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me, for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn’t know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county — everybody’s Zora.

But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders,3 as Zora. When I disembarked from the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown — warranted not to rub nor run.

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation4 more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.5

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said, “On the line!” The Reconstruction said, “Get set!” and the generation before said, “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and

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My Notes

Who Was Zora Neale Hurston? Activity 4.2

3 oleanders: evergreen shrubs with fragrant flowers of white, pink, or red 4 pigmentation: coloration due to the presence of pigments in the tissue 5 oyster knife: a reference to the saying “The world is my oyster.”

Ancestor uses the Latin prefix ante meaning “before.” Anterior, antecedent, and antebellum also rely on this prefix.

Word ConneCtions


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nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think — to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira.6 I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

For instance at Barnard.7 “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen — follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai8 above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something — give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer9 we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

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My Notes

Activity 4.2

6 Hegira: Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina in ad 622; hence, any trip or journey, especially one made to escape a dangerous or undesirable situation

7 Barnard: the college in New York City from which Hurston graduated in 1928 8 assegai: a slender spear or javelin with an iron tip, used in southern Africa 9 veneer: a thick surface layer of find wood or costly material laid over a base of common

material; any attractive but superficial appearance


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Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then I am so colored.

At certain times I have no race. I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red, and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water10 diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is a brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held — so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place — who knows?

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My Notes

Who Was Zora Neale Hurston? Activity 4.2

10 first-water: of the best quality and purest luster

notice the variety Hurston achieves in the sentences in this last paragraph. She uses simple, compound, compound-complex sentences, sentence fragments, inverted word order, commands, and questions. The variety shows a sophisticated mastery of words and sentence structure.

&Grammar UsaGe


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Activity

The Harlem RenaissanceSUGGESTED LEarninG STraTEGiES: Notetaking, Quickwrite, KWHL chart, think-Pair-Share, Discussion Groups

4.3

Your teacher will share information with you on the Harlem renaissance. Use a chart like the one below to keep track of the information you learn from your teacher’s presentation.

What beliefs and goals did Hurston share with the Harlem Renaissance?

In what ways did Hurston follow her own path?

Quickwrite: after learning a little bit about the Harlem renaissance, what questions do you have that you would like to explore further?

Use the KWHL chart on the next page to organize and explore your questions about the Harlem renaissance. Use a variety of sources to gather information and prepare a brief presentation of your findings. Your questions may be related to politics, writers, music of the era, history, places, and social developments.


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Activity 4.3 The Harlem Renaissance

What i Know

(activating prior knowledge)

What i Want to Learn

(research questions)

How i might learn

(useful sources)What i Learned

Polit

ics

and

Bel

iefs

Mus

icW

rite

rs

Working with a small group, craft a creative and informative presentation that demonstrates your research; you will present this to your classmates.


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Activity

Hurston’s Colorful LanguageSUGGESTED LEarninG STraTEGiES: Previewing, Skimming/Scanning, Marking the text, think-Pair-Share, Oral interpretation, Graphic Organizer, SiFt, Drafting, close Reading

4.4

1. Zora neale Hurston was a respected anthropologist. Mules and Men is a collection of folklore that Hurston compiled. One of the tales, “Why Women always Take advantage of Men,” is performed in the teleplay Zora Is My Name. as you watch this production, take notes on the guiding questions below.

What does this folk tale seem to say about the relationships between men and women?

How are the props, the set, and the sound effects used as symbols?

2. not only did Hurston collect folklore, she also wrote short stories. Preview one of Hurston’s most famous short stories, “Sweat,” by scanning Chunk 1 and underlining unfamiliar words. You will see that Hurston reproduces the actual speech of the characters.

3. Try to figure out the unfamiliar words you underlined by using the context. next, work with a small group to formulate some “pronunciation rules” for figuring out how to say the words. Use the graphic organizer on the next page to guide your work. Some examples have been provided for you.


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continued

Activity 4.4 Hurston’s Colorful Language

Characters Say We Say

dat, wid

skeer

ah

fuh

that, with (“th” is often replaced by “d”)

scare (so “keer” must mean care)

1. Hurston is known for using different levels of diction, including dialect, in her writing. review the information below. Then find examples of each level that Hurston uses in Chunk 1 of “Sweat.” Mark the text by color-coding the examples.

High or formal diction usually contains language that creates an elevated tone. it is free of slang, idioms, colloquialisms, and contractions. it often contains polysyllabic words, sophisticated syntax, and elegant word choice.

Neutral diction uses ordinary language and vocabulary without elaborate words and may include contractions.

informal or low diction is the language of everyday use. it is relaxed and conversational. it often includes common and simple words, idioms, slang, jargon, and contractions.

Dialect is a subgroup of a language with its own vocabulary and grammatical features. Writers often use regional dialects or dialects that reveal a person’s economic or social class.

Literary termsDiction is a writer’s choice of words.

Dialect is the distinctive language, including the sounds, spelling, grammar, and diction, of a specific group or class of people.

Word ConneCtions

along with dialects, africa has given us many musical words that we have incorporated into English. among them are banjo, bongo, jazz, jive, marimba, and merengue.


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Activity 4.4

3. Your teacher will lead you in a guided reading of “Sweat.” as the text is read, use the questions in the My notes section of the text to guide your reading of each chunk. annotate the chunk according to the directions given in the margin. Be prepared to use your annotations to support your ideas in a discussion.

4. after reading Chunk 3, look for similarities and differences among the porch talkers you saw in the video production of the folk tale that Hurston recorded called “Why Women always Take advantage of Men” and the men on the porch in “Sweat.”

Porch talkers“Why Woman always Take

advantage of Men” “Sweat”


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Activity 4.4

continued

by Zora Neale Hurs ton

It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a wash-woman, and Monday morning meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she returned the clean things. Sunday night after church, she sorted them and put the white things to soak. It saved her almost a half day’s start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that she brought home. It was so much neater than a number of bundles lying around.

She squatted in the kitchen floor beside the great pile of clothes, sorting them into small heaps according to color, and humming a song in a mournful key, but wondering through it all where Sykes, her husband, had gone with her horse and buckboard.

Just then something long, round, limp and black fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor beside her. A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw that it was the big bull whip her husband liked to carry when he drove.

She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him.

“Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me—looks just like a snake, an’ you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes.”

“Course Ah knowed it! That’s how come Ah done it.” He slapped his leg with his hand and almost rolled on the ground in his mirth. “If you such a big fool dat you got to have a fit over a earth worm or a string, Ah don’t keer how bad Ah skeer you.”

“You aint got no business doing it. Gawd knows it’s a sin. Some day Ah’m gointuh drop dead from some of yo’ foolishness. ’Nother thing, where you been wid mah rig? Ah feeds dat pony. He aint fuh you to be drivin’ wid no bull whip.”

Chunk 1Underline the words and phrases that Hurston uses to characterize Delia and Sykes.

Chunk 1Underline the words and phrases that Hurston uses to characterize Delia and Sykes.

Chunk 2Mark the words and phrases that indicate conflict(s) in the story.

Chunk 2Mark the words and phrases that indicate conflict(s) in the story.

S h o r t S t o r y

Hurston’s Colorful Language

MyNotes


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Activity 4.4

continued

“You sho is one aggravatin’ nigger woman!” he declared and stepped into the room. She resumed her work and did not answer him at once. “Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white folks’ clothes outa dis house.”

He picked up the whip and glared down at her. Delia went on with her work. She went out into the yard and returned with a galvanized tub and set it on the washbench. She saw that Sykes had kicked all of the clothes together again, and now stood in her way truculently, his whole manner hoping, praying, for an argument. But she walked calmly around him and commenced to re-sort the things.

“Next time, Ah’m gointer kick ’em outdoors,” he threatened as he struck a match along the leg of his corduroy breeches.

Delia never looked up from her work, and her thin, stooped shoulders sagged further.

“Ah aint for no fuss t’night, Sykes. Ah just come from taking sacrament at the church house.”

He snorted scornfully. “Yeah, you just come from de church house on a Sunday night, but heah you is gone to work on them clothes. You ain’t nothing but a hypocrite. One of them amen-corner Christians—sing, whoop, and shout, then come home and wash white folks clothes on the Sabbath.”

He stepped roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter-skelter as he crossed the room. His wife gave a little scream of dismay, and quickly gathered them together again.

“Sykes, you quit grindin’ dirt into these clothes! How can Ah git through by Sat’day if Ah don’t start on Sunday?”

“Ah don’t keer if you never git through. Anyhow, Ah done promised Gawd and a couple of other men, Ah aint gointer have it in mah house. Don’t gimme no lip neither, else Ah’ll throw ’em out and put mah fist up side yo’ head to boot.”

Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf. She was on her feet; her poor little body, her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her.

“Looka heah, Sykes, you done gone too fur. Ah been married to you fur fifteen years, and Ah been takin’ in washin’ for fifteen years. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!”

“What’s that got to do with me?” he asked brutally.

“What’s it got to do with you, Sykes? Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittles more times than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it.”

MyNotes

Expect comes from the Latin prefix ex- meaning “out of” and the Latin verb spectare meaning “to look.” Spectator and spectacle come from the same root.

Word ConneCtions


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Activity 4.4

continued

MyNotes She seized the iron skillet from the stove and struck a defensive pose, which act surprised him greatly, coming from her. It cowed him and he did not strike her as he usually did.

“Naw you won’t,” she panted, “that ole snaggle-toothed black woman you runnin’ with aint comin’ heah to pile up on mah sweat and blood. You aint paid for nothin’ on this place, and Ah’m gointer stay right heah till Ah’m toted out foot foremost.”

“Well, you better quit gittin’ me riled up, else they’ll be totin’ you out sooner than you expect. Ah’m so tired of you Ah don’t know whut to do. Gawd! how Ah hates skinny wimmen!”

A little awed by this new Delia, he sidled out of the door and slammed the back gate after him. He did not say where he had gone, but she knew too well. She knew very well that he would not return until nearly daybreak also. Her work over, she went on to bed but not to sleep at once. Things had come to a pretty pass!

She lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail. Not an image left standing along the way. Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream that had been pressed from her heart. Her tears, her sweat, her blood. She had brought love to the union and he had brought a longing after the flesh. Two months after the wedding, he had given her the first brutal beating. She had the memory of his numerous trips to Orlando with all of his wages when he had returned to her penniless, even before the first year had passed. She was young and soft then, but now she thought of her knotty, muscled limbs, her harsh knuckly hands, and drew herself up into an unhappy little ball in the middle of the big feather bed. Too late now to hope for love, even if it were not Bertha it would be someone else. This case differed from the others only in that she was bolder than the others. Too late for everything except her little home. She had built it for her old days, and planted one by one the trees and flowers there. It was lovely to her, lovely.

Somehow, before sleep came, she found herself saying aloud: “Oh well, whatever goes over the Devil’s back, is got to come under his belly. Sometime or ruther, Sykes, like everybody else, is gointer reap his sowing.” After that she was able to build a spiritual earthworks against her husband. His shells could no longer reach her. Amen. She went to sleep and slept until he announced his presence in bed by kicking her feet and rudely snatching the cover away.

“Gimme some kivah heah, an’ git yo’ damn foots over on yo’ own side! Ah oughter mash you in yo’ mouf fuh drawing dat skillet on me.”



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Delia went clear to the rail without answering him. A triumphant indifference to all that he was or did.

The week was as full of work for Delia as all other weeks, and Saturday found her behind her little pony, collecting and delivering clothes.

It was a hot, hot day near the end of July. The village men on Joe Clarke’s porch even chewed cane listlessly. They did not hurl the cane-knots as usual. They let them dribble over the edge of the porch. Even conversation had collapsed under the heat.

“Heah come Delia Jones,” Jim Merchant said, as the shaggy pony came ’round the bend of the road toward them. The rusty buckboard was heaped with baskets of crisp, clean laundry.

“Yep,” Joe Lindsay agreed. “Hot or col’, rain or shine, jes ez reg’lar ez de weeks roll roun’ Delia carries ’em an’ fetches ’em on Sat’day.”

“She better if she wanter eat,” said Moss. “Sykes Jones aint wuth de shot an’ powder hit would tek tuh kill ’em. Not to huh he aint. “

”He sho’ aint,” Walter Thomas chimed in. “It’s too bad, too, cause she wuz a right pritty li’l trick when he got huh. Ah’d uh mah’ied huh mahseff if he hadnter beat me to it.”

Delia nodded briefly at the men as she drove past.

“Too much knockin’ will ruin any ’oman. He done beat huh ’nough tuh kill three women, let ’lone change they looks,” said Elijah Moseley. “How Sykes kin stommuck dat big black greasy Mogul he’s layin’ roun wid, gits me. Ah swear dat eight-rock couldn’t kiss a sardine can Ah done throwed out de back do’ ’way las’ yeah.”

“Aw, she’s fat, thass how come. He’s allus been crazy ’bout fat women,” put in Merchant. “He’d a’ been tied up wid one long time ago if he could a’ found one tuh have him. Did Ah tell yuh ‘bout him come sidlin’ roun’ mah wife—bringin’ her a basket uh pee-cans outa his yard fuh a present? Yessir, mah wife! She tol’ him tuh take ’em right straight back home, cause Delia works so hard ovah dat washtub she reckon everything on de place taste lak sweat an’ soapsuds. Ah jus’ wisht Ah’d a’ caught ’im ’roun’ dere! Ah’d a’ made his hips ketch on fiah down dat shell road.”

“Ah know he done it, too. Ah sees ’im grinnin’ at every ’oman dat passes,” Walter Thomas said. “But even so, he useter eat some mighty big hunks uh humble pie tuh git dat lil’ ’oman he got. She wuz ez pritty ez a speckled pup! Dat wuz fifteen yeahs ago. He useter be so skeered uh losin’ huh, she could make him do some parts of a husband’s duty. Dey never wuz de same in de mind.”

“There oughter be a law about him,” said Lindsay. “He aint fit tuh carry guts tuh a bear.”

Chunk 3Underline the opinions of the men on the porch regarding Delia, Sykes, and Bertha.

Chunk 3Underline the opinions of the men on the porch regarding Delia, Sykes, and Bertha.

MyNotes


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MyNotes Clarke spoke for the first time. “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in ’im. There’s plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’ sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ’em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ’em jes lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws ’em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it, an’ hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein’ a cane-chew an’ in de way.”

“We oughter take Sykes an’ dat stray ’oman uh his’n down in Lake Howell swamp an’ lay on de rawhide till they cain’t say ‘Lawd a’ mussy.’ He allus wuz ... ovahbearin’ ..., but since dat white ’oman from up north done teached ‘im how to run a automobile, he done got too biggety to live—an’ we oughter kill ‘im,” Old Man Anderson advised.

A grunt of approval went around the porch. But the heat was melting their civic virtue and Elijah Moseley began to bait Joe Clarke.

“Come on, Joe, git a melon outa dere an’ slice it up for yo’ customers. We’se all sufferin’ wid de heat. De bear’s done got me!”

“Thass right, Joe, a watermelon is jes’ whut Ah needs tuh cure de eppizudicks,” Walter Thomas joined forces with Moseley. “Come on dere, Joe. We all is steady customers an’ you aint set us up in a long time. Ah chooses dat long, bowlegged Floridy favorite.”

“A god, an’ be dough. You all gimme twenty cents and slice way,” Clarke retorted. “Ah needs a col’ slice m’self. Heah, everybody chip in. Ah’ll lend y’ll mah meat knife.”

The money was quickly subscribed and the huge melon brought forth. At that moment, Sykes and Bertha arrived. A determined silence fell on the porch and the melon was put away again.

Merchant snapped down the blade of his jackknife and moved toward the store door.

“Come on in, Joe, an’ gimme a slab uh sow belly an’ uh pound uh coffee—almost fuhgot ‘twas Sat’day. Got to git on home.” Most of the men left also.

Just then Delia drove past on her way home, as Sykes was ordering magnificently for Bertha. It pleased him for Delia to see.

“Git whutsoever yo’ heart desires, Honey. Wait a minute, Joe. Give huh two bottles uh strawberry soda-water, uh quart uh parched ground-peas, an’ a block uh chewin’ gum.”

With all this they left the store, with Sykes reminding Bertha that this was his town and she could have it if she wanted it.



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The men returned soon after they left, and held their watermelon feast.

“Where did Sykes Jones git da ‘oman from nohow?” Lindsay asked.

“Ovah Apopka. Guess dey musta been cleanin’ out de town when she lef ’. She don’t look lak a thing but a hunk uh liver wid hair on it.”

“Well, she sho’ kin squall,” Dave Carter contributed. “When she gits ready tuh laff, she jes’ opens huh mouf an’ latches it back tuh de las’ notch. No ole grandpa alligator down in Lake Bell ain’t got nothin’ on huh.”

Bertha had been in town three months now. Sykes was still paying her room rent at Della Lewis’—the only house in town that would have taken her in. Sykes took her frequently to Winter Park to “stomps.” He still assured her that he was the swellest man in the state.

“Sho’ you kin have dat lil’ ole house soon’s Ah kin git dat ’oman outa dere. Everything b’longs tuh me an’ you sho’ kin have it. Ah sho’ ‘bominates uh skinny ’oman. Lawdy, you sho’ is got one portly shape on you! You kin git anything you wants. Dis is mah town an’ you sho’ kin have it.”

Delia’s work-worn knees crawled over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary many, many times during these months. She avoided the villagers and meeting places in her efforts to be blind and deaf. But Bertha nullified this to a degree, by coming to Delia’s house to call Sykes out to her at the gate.

Delia and Sykes fought all the time now with no peaceful interludes. They slept and ate in silence. Two or three times Delia had attempted a timid friendliness, but she was repulsed each time. It was plain that the breaches must remain agape.

* * *

The sun had burned July to August. The heat streamed down like a million hot arrows, smiting all things living upon the earth. Grass withered, leaves browned, snakes went blind in shedding and men and dogs went mad. Dog days!

Delia came home one day and found Sykes there before her. She wondered, but started to go on into the house without speaking, even though he was standing in the kitchen door and she must either stoop under his arm or ask him to move. He made no room for her. She noticed a soap box beside the steps, but paid no particular attention to it, knowing that he must have brought it there. As she was stooping to pass under his outstretched arm, he suddenly pushed her backward, laughingly.

“Look in de box dere Delia, Ah done brung yuh somethin’!”

Chunk 4Chunk 4

Literary termsFigurative language goes beyond literal meanings by using words or phrases to describe one thing in terms of another.

MyNotes


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She nearly fell upon the box in her stumbling, and when she saw what it held, she all but fainted outright.

“Sykes! Sykes, mah Gawd! You take dat rattlesnake ’way from heah! You gottuh. Oh, Jesus, have mussy!”

“Ah aint gut tuh do nuthin’ uh de kin’—fact is Ah aint got tuh do nothin’ but die. Taint no use uh you puttin’ on airs makin’ out lak you skeered uh dat snake—he’s gointer stay right heah tell he die. He wouldn’t bite me cause Ah knows how tuh handle ’im. Nohow he wouldn’t risk breakin’ out his fangs ’gin yo’ skinny laigs.”

“Naw, now Sykes, don’t keep dat thing ’roun’ heah tuh skeer me tuh death. You knows Ah’m even feared uh earth worms. Thass de biggest snake Ah evah did see. Kill ’im Sykes, please.”

“Doan ast me tuh do nothin’ fuh yuh. Goin’ roun’ trying’ tuh be so damn astorperious. Naw, Ah aint gonna kill it. Ah think uh damn sight mo’ uh him dan you! Dat’s a nice snake an’ anybody doan lak ’im kin jes’ hit de grit.”

The village soon heard that Sykes had the snake, and came to see and ask questions.

“How de hen-fire did you ketch dat six-foot rattler, Sykes?” Thomas asked.

“He’s full uh frogs so he caint hardly move, thass how Ah eased up on ’im. But Ah’m a snake charmer an’ knows how tuh handle ‘em. Shux, dat aint nothin’. Ah could ketch one eve’y day if Ah so wanted tuh.”

“Whut he needs is a heavy hick’ry club leaned real heavy on his head. Dat’s de bes ’way tuh charm a rattlesnake.”

“Naw, Walt, y’all jes’ don’t understand dese diamon’ backs lak Ah do,” said Sykes in a superior tone of voice.

The village agreed with Walter, but the snake stayed on. His box remained by the kitchen door with its screen wire covering. Two or three days later it had digested its meal of frogs and literally came to life. It rattled at every movement in the kitchen or the yard. One day as Delia came down the kitchen steps she saw his chalky-white fangs curved like scimitars hung in the wire meshes. This time she did not run away with averted eyes as usual. She stood for a long time in the doorway in a red fury that grew bloodier for every second that she regarded the creature that was her torment.

That night she broached the subject as soon as Sykes sat down to the table.

Chunk 5Underline the words and phrases the characters use to describe each other.

Chunk 5Underline the words and phrases the characters use to describe each other.


MyNotes


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“Sykes, Ah wants you tuh take dat snake ’way fum heah. You done starved me an’ Ah put up widcher, you done beat me an Ah took dat, but you done kilt all mah insides bringin’ dat varmint heah.”

Sykes poured out a saucer full of coffee and drank it deliberately before he answered her.

“A whole lot Ah keer ’bout how you feels inside uh out. Dat snake aint goin’ no damn wheah till Ah gits ready fuh ’im tuh go. So fur as beatin’ is concerned, yuh aint took near all dat you gointer take ef yuh stay ’roun’ me.”

Delia pushed back her plate and got up from the table. “Ah hates you, Sykes,” she said calmly. “Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh. Ah done took an’ took till mah belly is full up tuh mah neck. Dat’s de reason Ah got mah letter fum de church an’ moved mah membership tuh Woodbridge—so Ah don’t haftuh take no sacrament wid yuh. Ah don’t wantuh see yuh ’roun’ me a-tall. Lay ’roun’ wid dat ’oman all yuh wants tuh, but gwan ’way fum me an’ mah house. Ah hates yuh lak uh suck-egg dog.”

Sykes almost let the huge wad of corn bread and collard greens he was chewing fall out of his mouth in amazement. He had a hard time whipping himself up to the proper fury to try to answer Delia.

“Well, Ah’m glad you does hate me. Ah’m sho’ tiahed uh you hangin’ ontuh me. Ah don’t want yuh. Look at yuh stringey ole neck! Yo’ rawbony laigs an’ arms is enough tuh cut uh man tuh death. You looks jes’ lak de devvul’s doll-baby tuh me. You cain’t hate me no worse dan Ah hates you. Ah been hatin’ you fuh years.”

“Yo’ ole black hide don’t look lak nothin’ tuh me, but uh passle uh wrinkled up rubber, wid yo’ big ole yeahs flappin’ on each side lak uh paih uh buzzard wings. Don’t think Ah’m gointuh be run ’way fum mah house neither. Ah’m goin’ tuh de white folks bout you, mah young man, de very nex’ time you lay yo’ han’s on me. Mah cup is done run ovah.” Delia said this with no signs of fear and Sykes departed from the house, threatening her, but made not the slightest move to carry out any of them.

That night he did not return at all, and the next day being Sunday, Delia was glad she did not have to quarrel before she hitched up her pony and drove the four miles to Woodbridge.

She stayed to the night service—“love feast”—which was very warm and full of spirit. In the emotional winds her domestic trials were borne far and wide so that she sang as she drove homeward,

Jurden water, black an’ col’

Chills de body, not de soul

An’ Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time.

Chunk 6Underline the references to the snake.

Chunk 6Underline the references to the snake.

MyNotes


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MyNotes


She came from the barn to the kitchen door and stopped.

“Whut’s de mattah, ol’ satan, you aint kickin’ up yo’ racket?” She addressed the snake’s box. Complete silence. She went on into the house with a new hope in its birth struggles. Perhaps her threat to go to the white folks had frightened Sykes! Perhaps he was sorry! Fifteen years of misery and suppression had brought Delia to the place where she would hope anything that looked towards a way over or through her wall of inhibitions.

She felt in the match safe behind the stove at once for a match. There was only one there.

“Dat [man] wouldn’t fetch nothin’ heah tuh save his rotten neck, but he kin run thew whut Ah brings quick enough. Now he done toted off nigh on tuh haff uh box uh matches. He done had dat ’oman heah in mah house, too.”

Nobody but a woman could tell how she knew this even before she struck the match. But she did and it put her into a new fury.

Presently she brought in the tubs to put the white things to soak. This time she decided she need not bring the hamper out of the bedroom; she would go in there and do the sorting. She picked up the pot-bellied lamp and went in. The room was small and the hamper stood hard by the foot of the white iron bed. She could sit and reach through the bedposts—resting as she worked.

“Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time.” She was singing again. The mood of the “love feast” had returned. She threw back the lid of the basket almost gaily. Then, moved by both horror and terror, she sprang back toward the door. There lay the snake in the basket!

He moved sluggishly at first, but even as she turned round and round, jumped up and down in an insanity of fear, he began to stir vigorously. She saw him pouring his awful beauty from the basket upon the bed, then she seized the lamp and ran as fast as she could to the kitchen. The wind from the open door blew out the light and the darkness added to her terror. She sped to

the darkness of the yard, slamming the door after her before she thought to set down the lamp. She did not feel safe even on the

ground, so she climbed up in the hay barn.

There for an hour or more she lay sprawled upon the hay a gibbering wreck.

Finally, she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage. Hours of this. A period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out of this an awful calm.


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“Well, Ah done de bes’ Ah could. If things aint right, Gawd knows taint mah fault.”

She went to sleep—a twitchy sleep—and woke up to a faint gray sky. There was a loud hollow sound below. She peered out. Sykes was at the wood-pile, demolishing a wire-covered box.

He hurried to the kitchen door, but hung outside there some minutes before he entered, and stood some minutes more inside before he closed it after him.

The gray in the sky was spreading. Delia descended without fear now, and crouched beneath the low bedroom window. The drawn shade shut out the dawn, shut in the night. But the thin walls held back no sound.

“Dat ol’ scratch is woke up now!” She mused at the tremendous whirr inside, which every woodsman knows, is one of the sound illusions. The rattler is a ventriloquist. His whirr sounds to the right, to the left, straight ahead, behind, close under foot—everywhere but where it is. Woe to him who guesses wrong unless he is prepared to hold up his end of the argument! Sometimes he strikes without rattling at all.

Inside, Sykes heard nothing until he knocked a pot lid off the stove while trying to reach the match safe in the dark. He had emptied his pockets at Bertha’s.

The snake seemed to wake up under the stove and Sykes made a quick leap into the bedroom. In spite of the gin he had had, his head was clearing now.

“‘Mah Gawd!” he chattered, “ef Ah could on’y strack uh light!”

The rattling ceased for a moment as he stood paralyzed. He waited. It seemed that the snake waited also.

“Oh, fuh de light! Ah thought he’d be too sick”—Sykes was muttering to himself when the whirr began again, closer, right underfoot this time. Long before this, Sykes’ ability to think had been flattened down to primitive instinct and he leaped—onto the bed.

Outside Delia heard a cry that might have come from a maddened chimpanzee, a stricken gorilla. All the terror, all the horror, all the rage that man possibly could express, without a recognizable human sound.

MyNotes

Hurston uses sentence fragments to describe what Delia sees and hears. “all the terror, all the horror, all the rage…intermittent whirr of the reptile.” These noun phrases focus on sounds and actions. Hurston continues to describe the scene with a series of participial phrases modifying nouns: “The shade torn violently down, a huge brown hand seizing the window….” Because participles are verb forms, these phrases emphasize the action of verbs and create a vivid scene.

&Grammar UsaGe


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A tremendous stir inside there, another series of animal screams, the intermittent whirr of the reptile. The shade torn violently down from the window, letting in the red dawn, a huge brown hand seizing the window stick, great dull blows upon the wooden floor punctuating the gibberish of sound long after the rattle of the snake had abruptly subsided. All this Delia could see and hear from her place beneath the window, and it made her ill. She crept over to the four-o’clocks and stretched herself on the cool earth to recover.

She lay there. “Delia, Delia!” She could hear Sykes calling in a most despairing tone as one who expected no answer. The sun crept on up, and he called. Delia could not move—her legs were gone flabby. She never moved, he called, and the sun kept rising.

“Mah Gawd!” She heard him moan, “Mah Gawd fum Heben!” She heard him stumbling about and got up from her flower-bed. The sun was growing warm. As she approached the door she heard him call out hopefully, “Delia, is dat you Ah heah?”

She saw him on his hands and knees as soon as she reached the door. He crept an inch or two toward her—all that he was able, and she saw his horribly swollen neck and his one open eye shining with hope. A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from that eye that must, could not, fail to see the tubs. He would see the lamp. Orlando with its doctors was too far. She could scarcely reach the Chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heat while inside she knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew.

Discussion: identify where the narration shifts from a third-person narrator to Delia’s character. analyze the impact of narration when the narrator’s point of view shifts.

MyNotes



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after you have finished reading “Sweat,” look back through the text and find examples of foreshadowing for the story’s ending. List them in the space below.

Hurston’s upbringing and love of reading made her well-versed in the Bible, and Biblical allusions are a hallmark of her writing style. What are some of the Biblical allusions you noticed in “Why Women always Take advantage of Men” and “Sweat”? Use the chart below to identify and explain how the allusions create meaning in the text.

Biblical Allusions Effect on the Text

4. at the beginning of the story, you discussed the whip as a symbol in the story. Discuss other symbols that you noticed in the story. Be sure to include details from the story for support.

Literary termsForeshadowing is the use of hints and clues to suggest what will happen later in a plot.

Allusions are references to someone or something that is known from another source, such as history, religion, or literature.

a writer’s style is the distinctive way he or she uses language.


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Stylistic Elements How They Contribute to Tone/Theme

Symbols

images

Figurative Language

Literary termstone is the attitude a writer takes toward a subject. theme is the insight about life that is revealed in a work.

Once you have finished reading “Sweat,” use SiFT to help you analyze the story. Focus on how the symbols, images, and figurative language Hurston uses in the story reveal her tone and a theme found in the story.

Writing Prompt: Using your teacher’s model, write an analysis of Hurston’s short story “Sweat” on separate paper. Choose a method of prewriting and then draft your analysis, weaving in quotes from the text as support.


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Activity

4.5Janie’s Return HomeSUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Word Map, Quickwrite, visualizing, think-Pair-Share, Oral interpretation, Sketching, Graphic Organizer, Rereading

1. On separate paper, create a web using the words horizons/dreams as the central focus. On your web, write the connotations and denotations of those words. For example, one word associated with horizons would be hopes.

Horizons/ Dreams

Quickwrite: After completing your web, write a reflection about the imagery associated with these two words.

Janie’s Return from a Long Journey 2. Read the first two paragraphs of Chapter 1 of Their Eyes Were

Watching God. What distinctions do the first two paragraphs make between men and women?

3. What questions do these paragraphs raise for you?

Word ConneCtions

Analogies may use geographical terms to compare relationships. For example, in continent : Africa :: state : Ohio, each set of words equals each other. Complete this analogy.

Ocean : island :: desert :

a. tree b. sand c. oasis d. dune


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Activity 4.5 Janie’s Return Home

4. Male students: Interpret and analyze the first paragraph. Note your findings and be prepared to present them to the female students in your class.

Female students: Interpret and analyze the second paragraph. Note your findings and be prepared to present them to the male students in your class.

The Porch Sitters 5. As Hurston describes the woman, where she has been, and the

people who see her return, she uses evocative imagery. List several of the images and the senses they appeal to in the space below. How do these images impact the reader?

Literary termsimagery is language that evokes a mental picture or physical sensation through vivid details that appeal to the senses.

Image Senses the Image Appeals To


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5. How does the porch serve as a metaphor for judgment?

Reread the porch scene and look for any information “Mouth Almighty,” or the porch sitters, reveal about the protagonist, Janie.

6. What story does Janie have to tell? Who is her audience?

Activity 4.5

Literary termsA metaphor makes a comparison between two dissimilar things in which one thing is spoken of as if it were another.


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Activity

Nanny’s Life4.6

SUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Marking the text, think-Pair-Share, Double-Entry Journal, Graphic Organizer , close Reading, Rereading, Drafting, Sketching, Word Map

A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

Fascinated with jazz rhythms and the lyrics of blues music, Langston Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. A major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, plays, and nonfiction. His works captured and celebrated the colorful culture of black America.

P o e t r y

by Langston Hughes

Well, son, I’ll tell you:Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.It’s had tacks in it,And splinters,And boards all torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor — Bare.But all the timeI’se been a-climbin’ onAnd reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners,And sometimes goin’ in the darkWhere there ain’t been no light.So boy, don’t you turn back.Don’t you set down on the steps ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.Don’t you fall now — For I’se still goin’, honey,I’se still climbin’,And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

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1. Identify the key metaphor in the poem “Mother to Son,” and comment on its effectiveness.

2. How might the poem change if it were written from the son’s point of view?

Literary termsPoint of view is the perspective from which a literary work is told.

Activity 4.6

Word ConneCtions

A metaphor is a form of analogy, as is a simile. A metaphor is an implied analogy, while a simile is an explicit analogy.


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continued

Activity 4.6 Nanny’s Life

3. Hurston organized Their Eyes Were Watching God as a frame novel, in which the first and last chapters form a frame for the story that Janie tells her friend Pheoby. Can you think of other stories, books, or films that use a frame structure?

4. Consider the following sentences from Chapter 2: “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” Why do you think Hurston chose to juxtapose opposing images as she presents the central simile?

5. As you continue reading Chapter 2, use your own double-entry journal (modeled below) to take notes on the figurative language Hurston uses.

Literary termsA simile compares two dissimilar things using a word such as like, as, than, or resembles.

chapter 2: Exploring Figurative languageFigurative language from Chapter 2 Analysis, Commentary, reflection…


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6. Within the first two chapters of Hurston’s novel, what images do you see repeated? What might these motifs represent?

7. Sketch Janie’s family tree.

8. Once you have finished reading Chapter 2, compare and contrast the voice of Nanny to the voice of Hughes’s narrator in “Mother to Son.” Create a graphic organizer on separate paper to record your thinking.

9. One of the hallmarks of Hurston’s writing style is her use of narrative voice. List all the narrators you find in Chapter 2. As you continue to read Their Eyes Were Watching God, pay attention to the way Hurston skillfully shifts between different narrative voices.

10. You have seen how Hurston compares Janie’s life to a tree and Nanny’s life to a very different tree. On a separate sheet of paper, create a visual representation of your own life, using a tree as a metaphor. Under your visual representation, write an explanation of the tree metaphor you have created.

Activity 4.6

AcADEMic vOcABULARy

A motif is a recurrent theme, subject, character type, or image that becomes a unifying element in a text.


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Activity

4.7 Nanny, Janie, and Logan SUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Quickwrite, Predicting, Discussion Groups, close Reading, Rereading

Chapters 3 and 4Quickwrite: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Write a speculative response on what the upcoming year will hold for Janie. Will this year be the year that asks questions or one that answers them? Will this be the year that does both?

Your teacher will assign you to discussion groups. Discuss the questions that follow and take notes relating to the events in Chapters 3 and 4.

1. As Janie evaluates her marriage to Logan Killicks, Hurston presents the recurring image of the horizon (page 25): “The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” Discuss how Janie’s frustration helps her growing self-awareness.


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2. Nanny desires that Janie would have a life far different from her own and Leafy’s. Discuss what Nanny desires for Janie and what actions Nanny takes to realize this desire. Read the text closely to identify examples of irony in Nanny’s actions and the result of them.

3. What symbolic act does Janie perform when she leaves Logan? Examine the paragraph that begins, “The morning road air….” How does Hurston’s word choice reveal her tone toward this development of the plot?

4. Reread the paragraph that begins, “Joe Starks was the name….” Who is the narrator? Why do you think Hurston choose to present Joe’s introduction in this way? What is the impact of the shift in point of view from omniscient to Joe Starks’s character?

5. Chapter 4 ends with Janie’s leaving for Green Cove Springs with Joe Starks. Predict how Janie and Joe’s relationship will develop after she runs out on Logan. Will her dream become truth? How do the motifs of the horizon and of the pear tree and bees factor into Janie’s leaving?

Activity 4.7

Literary termsirony is a discrepancy between expectations and reality.


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Activity

4.8 Janie’s New LifeSUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Questioning the text, close Reading, Graphic Organizer, think-Pair-Share, Discussion Groups, Rereading

Chapter 5 1. Read Chapter 5 and then write three questions for each of the

following levels of questions:

• Literal (what the text says)

• Interpretive (what the text means)

• Universal (why it matters)

Literal Interpretive Universal

What does Joe Starks say when the audience requests that Janie speak?

Based on Joe Starks’s statements about women, what can the reader infer?

How does society define male and female roles?

2. Share your questions with your classmates. With your class, choose three questions that best identify the central issues of Chapter 5. Write those questions below.


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Activity 4.8

Chapter 6As an anthropologist, Hurston collected stories, conversations, and other aspects of oral tradition that she then infused into her writing. As you read Chapter 6, watch for elements of humor such as tall tales/hyperbole, parody, and riddles.

3. In the space below, list examples for each element of humor, and describe its effect.

Example from the Chapter Effect

Tall Tales/Hyperbole

Parody

Riddles


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Think about the characters, setting, and conflicts in Chapters 5 and 6. Then write analytical responses to the interpretive questions below.

4. Why does Joe pamper the mule he bought from Matt Bonner? What effect does his special treatment have on the mule? Do you see any parallels in his treatment of Janie?

5. Hurston often used Eatonville, her real-life childhood home, as a setting in her work. Describe Eatonville as it is presented in Their Eyes Were Watching God. What effect is the young town having on Joe, Janie, and their marriage?

6. “She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” When have you seen evidence of the two sides of Janie in Chapters 5 and 6? What is the reason for this disparity?

Writing Prompt: Using blues music as inspiration, craft a poetic reflection of “Janie’s Blues” on separate paper.

Activity 4.8 Janie’s New Life


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Activity

4.9The Two Sides of Janie SUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: close Reading, Marking the text, Predicting, Shared Reading, Graphic Organizer

Chapters 7 and 8 1. After reading the first two paragraphs of Chapter 7, describe how the

author’s imagery expresses Janie’s sense of her marriage.

2. As you read Chapters 7 and 8, use this graphic organizer to record characters’ actions and emotional responses.

Important Plot Developments Adjectives to Describe Janie’s Emotional Response

Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9 3. Use the chart above to create a two-sided mask with which you

explore Janie’s inner self in contrast to her outer self. The mask should include descriptive adjectives, relevant quotes, and symbolic representations of Janie’s character.


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Activity 4.9 The Two Sides of Janie

4. A close rereading of the second paragraph in Chapter 9, which begins “Janie starched and ironed her face…” will reveal several interesting stylistic choices that Hurston makes. Look carefully at these elements of style and take notes in the chart below about what you find.

Writing Prompt: Choose one of these stylistic techniques and write about how it affects the tone of the paragraph or the chapter. Be sure to weave in a quote from the novel to illustrate your points.

Stylistic Element Examples from Chapter 9 Effect on Tone

Diction

Figurative Language

Syntax

Structure or Organization

Point of View


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Activity

4.10Discussion Groups SUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Discussion Groups, Questioning the text, Notetaking

You have approached the first half of Their Eyes Were Watching God in a variety of ways, such as shared reading, oral interpretation, and guided reading. For the second half of the novel, you will move to greater independence, reading on your own and participating in student-led discussion groups.

The remaining chapters of the novel can be divided into these broad chunks:

Chapters 10 to 13 (Janie and Tea Cake in Eatonville);

Chapters 14 to 19 (Janie and Tea Cake on the Muck).

You will read Chapter 20 with your class in the next activity.

1. For each chapter from 10–19, you will write literal, interpretive, and universal questions to help guide your group discussions. Use the following topics to help you create questions and guide your discussion of the novel:

• Elements of Hurston’s style (figurative language, diction, tone, imagery, syntax, structure) that impressed members of the group.

• Janie’s literal journey through a variety of settings as well as her figurative journey.

• Hurston’s recurring motifs, such as the pear tree and the horizon.

• How Janie uses her voice or does not use her voice, as well as how her voice changes.

• Hurston’s approach to point of view and shift in narration/point of view.

• How an author’s style constructs and reflects a character’s identity (one of the unit’s essential questions).

• Important themes of the novel.

2. At the first meeting of your discussion group, create a schedule for reading, making sure that your schedule reflects the timeline provided by your teacher. Make sure that each group member writes down the reading schedule in his or her calendar; it is imperative for each member of the group to maintain the reading schedule in order for discussions to be effective.

3. A notetaking guide is provided for you. You may copy this guide onto separate paper or modify it to fit your discussions; just be sure to take good notes during each discussion. These notes will help you understand the novel and prepare for writing an analytical essay.


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You might use the following notetaking guide as a model for your notes, or create something similar to capture your discussions.

A. Complete before meeting with your discussion group.

Activity 4.10 Discussion Groups

Today’s date: Reading assignment:

Interpretive questions based on the reading assignment

Universal questions based on the reading assignment

Today’s topics:

Topic 1: Topic 2:

Notes: Notes:

B. Notes during the group’s discussion.

C. Individual reflection on today’s group discussion.


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Activity

4.11

1. As Chapter 20 is read aloud, use a double-entry journal like the model below to record and analyze the imagery and/or figurative language that surfaces in the text.

Passages from Chapter 20: Rich Imagery, Figurative language Interpretation, Analysis, Reflection

2. Revisit Chapter 1 and make connections between the images that surfaced initially in the novel and those that come at the end of the novel.

Chapter 1 Chapter 20 Analysis and Commentary

theFrameStoryHurston chose to organize this novel by having Chapters 1 and 20 frame Janie’s telling of her story to Pheoby. By the end of the novel, if you return to the first scene, you have a much clearer understanding of Janie’s perception of her life and her “grand journey.”

3. After rereading the first chapter, on separate paper write an interior monologue that captures the thoughts that may be going through Janie’s mind as she walks past the porch sitters upon her return to Eatonville.

The End of a Long JourneySUGGESTED LEARninG STRATEGiES:Double-EntryJournal,Drafting,SharingandResponding,think-Pair-Share,Questioningthetext,Markingthetext

Unit4 • An American Journey 327

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continued The End of a Long JourneyActivity4.11

Thematic Statementnow that you have read the novel and discussed it at length, think about the major themes presented in it.

4. Write a thematic statement in which you synthesize your understanding of the novel’s literary elements and explain how they informed your interpretation of the author’s purpose.

Critical ResponsesMuch has been written in response to Their Eyes Were Watching God. Henry Louis Gates says, “The curious aspect of the widespread critical attention being shown to Hurston’s texts is that so many critics embracing such a diversity of theoretic approaches seem to find something new at which to marvel in her texts.”

5. Read the assessments that follow and annotate them in the margins, comparing each one to your understanding of the themes of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

It is folklore fiction at its best, which we gratefully accept as an overdue

replacement for so much faulty local color fiction about Negroes. But

when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a

story convincingly—which is Miss Hurston’s cradle gift, come to grips

with motive fiction and social document fiction? Progressive southern

fiction has already banished the legend of these entertaining pseudo-

primitives whom the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep

over and envy. Having gotten rid of condescension, let us now get over

oversimplification!

(Alain Locke

Opportunity, June 1, 1938)

328 SpringBoard® English Textual Power™Level6

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Critical Responses (continued)

In fact, when she [Janie] first talks with Pheoby, she speaks not of romance

and adoration of Tea Cake but of experiences much wider than love or even

Tea Cake as an individual: “Ah been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life,”

she tells her; “Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’ is just

where Ah been dis year and a half y’all ain’t seen me” (18). In contrast to some

readers’ focus on romance and Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake, living—not

just loving—is what Janie stresses in reviewing her own experience. Such a

focus is also the omniscient narrator’s. When in the book’s final images, Janie

pulls in her horizon “like a great fish-net,” it is “life” (286)—including, but

certainly not limited to love—that she finds in its meshes. When Janie does

speak to Pheoby about love, it is not to depict her relationship with Tea Cake

as perfect or necessarily even the sole love of her life but to describe love

as many-faceted and ever-changing. Love, for a woman who is supremely

confident and self-affirming, “ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same

thing everywhere and do the same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak

de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore

it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (284). As Janie here suggests, she

emerges from the novel as no conventional romantic heroine searching to

duplicate her relationship with Tea Cake or turning away from life because

of the futility of doing so but as an autonomous black woman who faces the

future in a spirit of engagement and openness to the flux of experience, “the

dawn and doom” she has learned make up love and life.

(Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, “Mink Skin or Coon Hide”:

The Janus-faced Narrative of Their Eyes Were Watching God )

In a rich prose (which has, at the same time, a sort of nervous sensibility) she

tells the tale of a girl who wanted things sweet with mah marriage, lak when

you sit under a pear tree and think. Janie did not get sweetness when her

Grandma married her to Mister Killicks with his sixty acres of West Florida

land, and his sagging belly, and his toenails that looked like mules’ foots; and

Activity4.11

Omniscient is formed from two Latin words: omnis meaning “all” and scientia meaning “knowledge.” Omnipotent, omnibus, and omnivorous use the prefix omnis, while science and scientist use the root.

Word ConneCtions


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Activity4.11 The End of a Long Journey

she didn’t get it when she ran off with Joe Starks and got to be the Mayor’s

wife, and sat on her own store porch. But when Tea Cake came along with his

trampish clothes and his easy ways and his nice grin that made even a middle-

aged woman like Janie sort of wishful the minute she sets eyes on him, he

handed her the keys of the kingdom, and their life together (what there was

of it) was rapture and fun and tenderness and understanding—the perfect

relationship of man and woman, whether they be black or white.

(Sheila Hibben, The New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review,

September 26, 1937)

The story of Janie’s life down on the muck of Florida Glades, bean picking,

hunting and the men shooting dice in the evening and how the hurricane

came up and drove the animals and the Indians and finally the black people

and the white people before it, and How Tea Cake, in Janie’s eyes the ‘son of

Evening Son,’ and incidentally the best crap shooter in the place, made Janie

sing and glitter all over at last, is a little epic all by itself. Indeed, from first to

last this is a well nigh perfect story—a little sententious at the start, but the

rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor.

(Lucille Tompkins, The New York Times Book Review,

September 26, 1937)

6. On separate paper, craft three or four interpretive and universal questions about the four critical interpretations. You will then use these questions in a Socratic seminar with your peers.

WritingPrompt: Choose one of the critical reviews and defend, challenge, or qualify it, being sure to weave in quotes from the novel for support.

Critical Responses (continued)

When you use direct quotations, you must identify the words quoted with quotation marks to avoid plagiarism. if you set apart an entire quote in a separate paragraph (as is done with the critical responses), you do not need to use beginning and ending quotation marks. if the quoted text includes a quotation within it, that quotation is set with double quotation marks.

if you use quoted text within a regular paragraph (not set apart on separate lines) that also includes a quotation, use the double quotation marks to identify the entire quoted passage and single quotation marks around the embedded quotation.

&Grammar UsaGe


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Activity

4.12

Filmmakers who adapt a novel face the challenge of conveying their interpretation of the major themes of the work. A close examination of the film adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God offers you the opportunity to critique a media production of Hurston’s novel. You will watch the last approximately 28 minutes of the film, taking notes about what the filmmakers chose to add, to alter, and to delete, and the effects of these choices.

1. First, refresh your memory by scanning Chapter 14, when Janie and Tea Cake arrive on the muck, to the end of the novel. Make a list of the major elements and scenes found here that are essential to conveying the major themes of the novel.

2. What do you know about Oprah Winfrey, the producer of this film? List the accomplishments she would have on her résumé.

3. Using your list from question 1, what do you predict Oprah Winfrey will focus on in this film adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God?

4. As you watch the last part of the film, use the graphic organizer on the next page to take notes on what the filmmakers chose to add, alter, and delete. Most importantly, think about the effects of these choices.

Oprah Winfrey Presents… SUGGESTED LEArninG STrATEGiES:Skimming/Scanning,Notetaking,think-Pair-Share,DiscussionGroups,GraphicOrganizer,RevisitingPriorWork


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Activity4.12 Oprah Winfrey Presents… Ad

d

• What do film techniques add to the text? Consider visual images, camera angles and movement, framing, music, lighting, diegetic and nondiegetic sound, and so on.

• What do the actors add to characterization?

• Are any plotlines added?

What is the effect of these additions?

Alte

r

• What elements and scenes from the book are present but altered? in what ways?

• Which scenes in the film present a mood that differs from the mood in the parallel scene from the novel? in what ways?

What is the effect of these alterations?

Del

ete

• What did the filmmakers leave out? What is the effect of these deletions?


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Activity4.12

Revisiting and Revising Your Writing 5. Over the course of this unit, you have drafted several short pieces of

writing. You have also studied Zora neale Hurston’s style extensively. Choose a piece of your own work and revise it, making deliberate stylistic choices. You might consider the following:

• infuse figurative language.

• Consider whether the diction you use is consistent with your audience and purpose.

• Experiment with different kinds of diction.

• Focus on syntax by varying your sentence patterns and kinds of sentences.

• Change the structural or organizational pattern.

• Employ a different point of view or narrative voice.

6. in a writing group, share your revision, explain your stylistic choices, and get feedback on your work from your peers.


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Embedded Assessment 1 Writing an Analytical Essay

SUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Drafting, Self-Editing/Peer Editing

Assignment

Write an analytical essay in which you discuss how a key theme in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is expressed through her style and use of literary elements.

Steps

Planning

1. During your reading you have studied the literary elements and traced several aspects of style in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

2. Based on your class discussions and notes, identify a theme of the novel that you think is significant.

3. Examine the effect of Hurston’s style and use of literary elements on the theme you have identified in her novel.

4. Create a thesis statement that captures your thinking. Then, use a prewriting strategy to explore ideas and create an organizational plan for your essay. Consider the order of your topics and the details and examples you can include to support each topic.

Drafting

5. Draft your essay. If you want, you might consult with your peers when necessary to restructure and organize ideas.

Revising

6. Read your essay carefully, looking closely at the stylistic choices you made in your initial draft. Revise your essay to reflect deliberate stylistic choices. Revise your essay to reflect an appropriate organizational structure and a clear analysis of how Hurston advances theme through style and literary elements.

7. Working in peer response groups, review the Scoring Guide criteria and solicit feedback to assist you with further revision.

8. Edit your essay, using available resources to prepare your work for publication. Make corrections in grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

TECHNOLOGY TIP Use word processing software to create your final draft. Format your essay attractively, use margins of at least one inch, and choose a font that is appropriate for academic writing.


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Embedded Assessment 1 continued

Embedded Assessment 1

ScoRing guiDE

Scoring criteria Exemplary Proficient Emerging

ideas A thorough and perceptive understanding of the novel and prompt creates an extraordinarily convincing text.

The analysis demonstrates an exceptional insight on the effect of elements of style and/or literary elements on theme.

Use of specific and well-chosen examples yields detailed support for the analysis.

A solid understanding of the novel and prompt creates a convincing text.

The analysis demonstrates a general understanding of the effect of elements of style and/or literary elements on theme.

Use of appropriate examples supports the position.

A superficial understanding of the novel and prompt creates an underdeveloped text.

The essay attempts to analyze the effect of elements of style and/or literary elements on theme, but it may be simplistic or replaced by summary.

Evidence to support the position may be weak or too few examples are used.

organization Organization is exceptional. Ideas move smoothly and comfortably with effective use of transitions enhancing the essay’s coherence.

Organization is clear and easy to follow. Transitions are used to move between ideas.

The essay is difficult to follow. It may lack transitions and jump too rapidly between ideas.

use of Language

Stylistic choices in language are exceptional.

The writer successfully weaves textual evidence from the novel into his/her own prose and demonstrates strong control and mastery of standard writing conventions.

Stylistic choices in language are clear and appropriate.

The writer weaves textual evidence from the novel into his/her own prose accurately.

The writer demonstrates control of standard writing conventions. Though some errors may appear, they do not seriously impede readability.

Stylistic choices in language are less mature.

At times, the writer attempts to incorporate textual evidence from the novel into his/her own prose yet may do so awkwardly or inaccurately.

There are frequent errors in standard writing conventions that interfere with the meaning.

Evidence of the Writing Process

The essay demonstrates thoughtful planning, significant revision, and careful editing for grammar and conventions in preparing a publishable draft.

The essay demonstrates adequate planning, revision, and editing for grammar and conventions in preparing a publishable draft.

The essay lacks evidence of planning, revision, and/or editing for grammar and conventions. The draft is not ready for publication.

unit 4 • An American Journey 335

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Writing an Analytical Essay

ScoRing guiDE

Scoring criteria Exemplary Proficient Emerging

Additional criteria

Comments:


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Learning Focus: Communicating Myself to Others “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.” — Tao Lzu

One of the important goals of academic growth is to become more knowledgeable about what and how you learn, and how you use that knowledge to make future plans for academic study. As the end of school approaches, it is important for you to consider your goals for after high school and to create plans for achieving your goals. These goals will ultimately include the career of your choice and how you plan for that career. Effective self-presentation can be critical to attaining both career and personal goals.

You present yourself every day—in face-to-face situations as well as via media such as the Internet. You joke with others, you tell stories, you try to impress others. You also try to understand yourself: your talents, strengths, weaknesses, challenges, interests, skills. Understanding yourself and your motivation are essential to personal growth and to effective social, academic, and career interactions.

The ability to speak and communicate effectively is often listed by employers as a requirement for high-growth, high-performance jobs. Learning to communicate well and present yourself is a part of academic preparation. To succeed in self-presentation, you need to evaluate modes of communication, such as verbal, nonverbal, and written, and choose among them based on your communication purposes.

You can more effectively communicate yourself by focusing on your purpose, message, audience, context, and feedback from others. You are expected to present yourself in one-on-one situations, as well as in group situations. Learning good communication skills prepares you to be more comfortable and effective as a speaker, listener, and communicator.


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My Communication Skills SUGGESTED LEArnInG STrATEGIES: Brainstorming, Discussion Groups

4.13ACtivity

1. Communication and self-expression are key elements in Zora neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. What are the ways that you communicate your voice and sense of self to others?

2. In this class, you have had a number of opportunities to communicate in various ways. review the work in your portfolio to help you brainstorm a list of occasions and purposes for your communications. Categorize the ways in which you have communicated.

3. On separate paper, create a checklist for being a good communicator in the categories you have identified.

4. How has your understanding of this essential question changed: How do communication skills enhance self-expression?


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Activity

Career SearchSUGGESTED LEarninG STraTEGiES: KWHL chart, Discussion Groups, Graphic Organizer, Generating Questions, Role Playing, Notetaking

4.14

1. List two or three careers you think you might want to investigate.

2. Use KWHL to determine what you already know and what you need to know about these careers. Use the questions on the next page to help you investigate possible careers.

What i Know

(activating prior knowledge)

What i Want to Learn

(research questions)

How i might learn

(useful sources)

What i Learned

(is this career for me?)

care

er 1

care

er 2

care

er 3


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continued Career SearchActivity 4.14

3. Some questions you may want to investigate include:

• What are the characteristics of this career that interest you?

• What specific skills and abilities are needed to succeed in this career?

• What are the physical requirements, if any, of the career?

• What are the opportunities for advancement?

• What are the educational requirements for the career?

• Where can a person acquire these qualifications?

• is this career continuing to expand or is it in decline?

• How long does the average person stay in this career?

4. Write your goals for each step of the career pathway below and then add notes in response to the following questions:

• How do you picture yourself in 10 years? are you successful? Where are you living?

• is there any training or education that you will need in order to reach each step of your career pathway?

• What skills do you already possess to help you achieve your goals?

• What people do you know who will help you on your career pathway?

Twenty years?

Ten years?

Four years?

in one year?

Where will you be in six months?


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Activity 4.14

5. You will discuss how interviews are conducted. Use the space below to take notes.

6. Your teacher will pair you with another student. Your task will be to interview one another to gain information to introduce each other to small groups.

7. as you observe each introduction, take notes in the graphic organizer below about what you notice.

Verbal Communication Nonverbal Communication

includes words, pitch, tone, volume

Other:

includes movement, gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, spatial relations

Other:

8. in activity 4.13, you critiqued your own communication skills. You should now look for alignment between your communication strengths and weaknesses and the demands of the possible career you have chosen. What communication skills do you need to develop and how can you do this? On separate paper, list your goals for developing needed communication skills and an action plan for achieving them.


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Activity

Creating a Résumé4.15

1. What is a résumé? What is it used for?

2. Advice for creating a successful résumé is plentiful. Locate three Web sites or other resources (such as career advice books) that provide directions or advice for writing a résumé. List the sources below.

3. Evaluate the sources and make a list of the most useful advice, using only what you have found to be valid sources. This advice will become a checklist for helping you edit your résumé. Write down at least six tips below.

4. You have considered how your communication strengths align with requirements of your chosen field. Now brainstorm your experiences that may have helped to prepare you for your chosen field. Think about skills and abilities; your accomplishments; your activities, including volunteer work; your education, including classes you have taken/are taking and books you have read, and so on. You may want to write this information on separate paper to help you prepare for creating your own résumé. Also look at sample résumés, either in books you can find in the local library or online, to evaluate the logic of their sequencing of information.

SUGGESTED LEArNiNG STrATEGiES:Drafting,SharingandResponding,PeerEditing,Brainstorming,WordMap

AcADEMicvocABulARy

A résumé is a document that presents a person’s skills, education, and work history and experience.

342 SpringBoard® English Textual Power™level6

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Activity4.15

5. As you draft a résumé, consider these questions: What do i want to say about myself? What rhetoric can i use to “sell myself” to a prospective employer? One way to think about how to sell yourself is to develop a short summary about yourself that gives the highlights of your skills, experience, education, and personality. Try writing a short (2–3 sentences) summary in the space below. Be sure to use diction and tone that align with your purposes.

6. Many models are available to help you organize your résumé. Examine several résumé models, or templates, either through online resources or in career books. Choose a model and draft your résumé on separate paper or using a word processing program.

7. revise your résumé, using your checklist, and then show your résumé to someone outside the classroom. Ask him or her to write a brief response to your work.

TECHNOLOGY TIP if you have appropriate equipment, you may want to create a video résumé. remember to dress appropriately and present yourself in a professional manner.

1. What is a résumé? What is it used for?

2. Advice for creating a successful résumé is plentiful. Locate three Web sites or other resources (such as career advice books) that provide directions or advice for writing a résumé. List the sources below.

3. Evaluate the sources and make a list of the most useful advice, using only what you have found to be valid sources. This advice will become a checklist for helping you edit your résumé. Write down at least six tips below.

4. You have considered how your communication strengths align with requirements of your chosen field. Now brainstorm your experiences that may have helped to prepare you for your chosen field. Think about skills and abilities; your accomplishments; your activities, including volunteer work; your education, including classes you have taken/are taking and books you have read, and so on. You may want to write this information on separate paper to help you prepare for creating your own résumé. Also look at sample résumés, either in books you can find in the local library or online, to evaluate the logic of their sequencing of information.

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Activity

Social Networking 4.16

Understanding Social Networking Web sitesQuickwrite: Draft a quickwrite about social networking Web sites. Some things to consider: What purpose do they serve? Who uses them? What can you find out about someone by looking at his or her page? What experiences have you had, good and bad, with sites like this?

1. Create and administer a survey about what impression your peers want to send when they customize their personal Web pages and what they do to convey that impression. Share your findings with the class.

2. Three articles dealing with social networking sites follow. As you read these articles, consider how the information and ideas in them affect your understanding of social networking sites. As you read, keep the following questions in mind:

• What content is appropriate to put on a social networking site?

• Who are some of the audiences who read these sites?

• What are some of the standard features of a social networking page?

SUGGESTED LEArninG STrATEGiES:Quickwrite,Brainstorming,DiscussionGroups,think-Pair-Share,Markingthetext,Questioningthetext


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Activity4.16A r t i c l e

by Eric Gwinn

A new study argues that self-absorption in college students is at a new high.

“Young people born after 1982 are the most narcissistic generation in recent history,” said Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University professor and lead author of the study of college students’ attitudes about themselves.

That narcissism is helping to create a generation of Internet users who don’t think twice about putting private details online for the world to see.

Blogs and social networking Web sites — such as MySpace and YouTube, where members write and post images and video about their lives and interests - are playing a big role.

“Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism,” Twenge said in a statement. “By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube, whose slogan is ‘Broadcast Yourself.’”

The authors of the study — which has tracked college students’ attitudes about themselves yearly since 1982 — are not talking about pathological narcissistic personality disorder; just an attitude of “It’s all about me.”

“People our age really want to explore themselves and see how they compare to other people by posting up Web site profiles,” says Patrick Fishbach, a student at Loyola University Chicago.

This generation is rapidly undergoing a bumpy transformation from being merely watchers of content to creators of content. They’ve learned the visual language of ads and TV shows but aren’t remembering to target their messages.

“They’re good at being an audience, but not at being the center of attention,” says Nancy Baym, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. “They’re thinking about, ‘Who am I and how can I show myself to the world?’ They’re not thinking about parents, teachers, employers and all these other people who can see this.”

Much like the cell phone talker who has loud private conversations in public, some users forget that their friends aren’t the only ones who get the message.

“I have had friends who have written on their personal blogs about how much they hate their roommate,” says Loyola student Dave Frantz, “and then act surprised when the roommate confronts them after having found the blog.”

Social networks help young adults quickly keep tabs on friends. It’s quicker to visit online profiles to see pictures and read short notes documenting last night’s party than it is to talk about it over the phone. In the time it takes to have one phone conversation, you can flit among friends’

My Notes

Narcissismontheinternetisn’trisk-free

Audience comes from the Latin verb audire meaning “to hear.” From the same word come audio, audition, audible, and audit.

Word ConneCtions


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profiles to read what they’re doing and to leave notes of approval — and read notes they left for you on your profile.

“If you told someone, ‘Call your 30 best friends today,’ they wouldn’t do it,” says Kent Lindstrom, of the pioneering social networking site Friendster. “But they will use social networking to check in with 30 friends.”

Besides thinking only their friends will see their posts, many social network users feel they’re a small fish in an enormous pond, virtually invisible to anyone who might want to harm them.

“Some of them think, ‘Who would be really that interested in my life? There are 6 million Sarahs out there. Who would pick me out of the pile?’” says Amanda Lenhart, who studies social networking for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “It’s about putting yourself out there for your friends.”

“It’s an obvious concept now, but it wasn’t always,” Lindstrom says. “It’s similar to instant messaging or e-mail or search engines – there was a point where it didn’t exist, and then when it came, you couldn’t live without it.”

Experts suggest all Internet users take a page from Apple and other large companies, and manage and protect their identities: Don’t log into your profile at a public computer (you can leave behind your password for others to discover); let only people you know view your profile; and when you get an invite from someone you don’t know, find out as much as you can about that person before accepting the invite.

“Having a blog or being part of a social network site doesn’t increase risk,” says David Finkelhor, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who has been tracking teens’ online exposure to unwanted adult content. “Get filtering and blocking software, and be judicious about whom you talk to and the topics they raise.”

“We should start thinking of ourselves as brands and control our message,” Baym says. “That’s what we’re doing when we put ourselves out there. People don’t have a sense of their identity as something they have property rights to.”

Activity4.16 Social Networking

My Notes


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Students adore social-networking sites like Facebook, but indiscreet postings can mean really big trouble.

by Brad Stone with robbie Brown

Cameron Walker learned the hard way that sharing information online can have unintended consequences. In 2005, the sophomore at Fisher College in Boston organized a student petition dedicated to getting a campus guard fired and posted it on the popular college social network Facebook.com. Walker wrote that the guard “loves to antagonize students ... and needs to be eliminated.” It was a poor choice of words. Another student informed school officials, who logged on and interpreted the comments as threatening. Though Walker claimed he was trying only to expose the guard’s demeanor, he was expelled. He’s now enrolled at another college and admits he made a serious mistake. “I was a naive 21-year-old,” he says.

Creating a page on a social-networking site is now a cherished form of self-expression at universities around the world. Students use ad-supported services like Facebook, MySpace, TagWorld and Bebo to make friends, plan their social lives and project their personalities. The most popular site among college students is Facebook, with more than 8 million members. A student’s personal Facebook page is usually a revealing, dynamic chronicle of campus life—one clearly not meant for the eyes of parents, teachers or anyone else older than 25.

But adults are taking notice. Sites like Facebook are accessible to nearly anyone willing to spend the time to gain access: teachers, school administrators, even potential employers and the police. Such online services can create the illusion of privacy where none actually exists. Facebook, in particular, was designed to emphasize privacy and intimacy. Only other users at your school (with the same college e-mail domain name), and those in networks you join, can see your home page. But determined off-campus visitors can persuade a student or alumnus to help them access the student’s page.

What happens when the identity you reveal to friends suddenly overwhelms the façade you present to grown-ups? The results can be awkward—or worse. Photos from drunken parties, recollections of sexual escapades, profanity or threats—all these indiscretions, posted online, have gotten students suspended or expelled, or harmed job prospects. In a couple of decades, a presidential candidate may be called on to answer for a college misadventure that he or she impetuously detailed in a blog entry.

Harvard student Marc Zuckerberg and a few classmates designed Facebook in 2003 to facilitate contact among students. After it launched in early 2004, the service spread like the flu in a freshman dorm, first at Harvard and then to all 2,100 four-year colleges. Last year the company opened its

A r t i c l e

My Notes

Web of Risks

Illusion comes from the Latin verb ludere meaning “to play.” Other words that come from the same word are ludicrous, delude, allude, prelude, collusion.

Word ConneCtions


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My Notes digital doors to high schoolers. Early on, Zuckerberg left college and moved his fledgling enterprise to Silicon Valley, raising more than $35 million in venture capital. Facebook now has 100 employees and is supported by big advertisers like Apple and MasterCard.

Facebook’s founders worried about privacy. That’s why it isn’t one big network but a series of connected smaller ones. “We decided early on that you get better information flow and more trust if you limit access to just those around you,” says Zuckerberg. Besides restricting access to a student’s classmates, Facebook offers extra privacy tools. Students can limit parts of their pages, such as photos, to specific people. Still, just 17 percent of customers ever change those privacy settings.

For many students, Facebook is not only an interactive diary and yearbook, but a pervasive way to stay in touch. Mitchell Perley, an Atlanta-born student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, is typical. On his page there’s a photo with a friend at Disneyland, mentions of his membership in such Facebook groups as the Krispy Kreme Appreciation Society and listings of his favorite musicians and films. Perhaps most important, his page is linked to the pages of 99 friends at his college and 845 back home at various U.S. schools.

But not everyone’s Facebook experiences have been positive. Brad Davis was a freshman at Emory in Atlanta in 2005 when he and friends commemorated a night of drinking by posting photos of themselves in their dorm, hoisting their libations. They created a Facebook group called the Dobbs 2nd Floor Alcoholics, named after their dorm. A dorm adviser saw the photos and reported the underage imbibers. The school ordered Davis and his friends to hang anti-drinking posters on their walls, and a citation went on their records.

The consequences for Jason Johnson were more serious. He was a student at the University of the Cumberlands, a Southern Baptist school in Williamsburg, Ky., when he created his own MySpace page. Visitors to his page could hear a favorite song, learn his birthday or find out he was gay. But Cumberlands’ student handbook states that students must lead a “Christian life-style,” which the school president explained included a ban on homosexuality. When school officials discovered Johnson’s page, he was expelled. He hired a lawyer, who got the school to rescind the expulsion and let Johnson transfer with his academic record intact.

Students’ indiscriminate postings may also get them into trouble when they’re applying for a job or to graduate school. The postings could still be accessible online despite students’ efforts to delete them. Even though companies are loath to admit it, researching candidates on social networks is becoming as easy and prevalent as entering their names into Google. Laurie Sybel, a director of career development at Vermont Technical College, had never looked at Facebook until she got a call from a big company about the internship application of a 19-year-old. The student was being rejected, Sybel

Social Networking


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recalls, because executives had viewed the student’s Facebook page, which contained a photo of him holding a bottle of vodka. The company noted that the student was not only apparently breaking the law but demonstrating bad judgment by publishing the photo. In response, Vermont Technical, like other colleges, now integrates tips for social-network decorum into its career-guidance workshops.

Not all students want to temper their behavior. They point out that the Internet lets them express themselves and find like-minded souls. Still, adults aren’t likely to stop prying any time soon. That means students who use Facebook and MySpace have a new burden. The Web may seem ephemeral, but what you casually post one night might just last a digital eternity. While social networking represents a powerful tool for today’s students, they’re advised to be prudent. Even if they have no plans to run for president someday. My Notes

&Grammar UsaGenotice that the writer does not choose to quote Sybel directly. instead Sybel’s words are summarized; the summary allows the writer to condense a large amount of information into a smaller space than direct quotations would take.


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My Notes

Social Networking

by Matt McGowan

LUBBOCK, Texas — The next time a student learns he or she has been tagged in a photo from the last weekend’s party on www.facebook.com or www.myspace.com, it may be in his or her best interest to take a look.

With more than 37,000 people on Facebook’s Texas Tech University network and countless more on MySpace, students clearly are using social networking sites, but so are their future bosses.

According to a 2006 study conducted by CareerBuilder.com, 12 percent of hiring managers searched their applicants’ social networking profiles before hiring them. Of those who checked job candidates’ online network profiles, 63 percent did not hire an applicant based on what they had found on those sites.

CareerBuilder offers three tips when it comes to personal Web pages, said Theresa Chu, senior career adviser for the company: be careful, be prepared and be discreet.

Students can be careful by not posting anything on their own or their friends’ sites that they would not want an employer to see, she said. They can be prepared by anticipating any questions employers might have after investigating their personal pages.

Discreetness, Chu said, comes through closely monitoring who has access to their online profiles and access to what applicants write on others’ profiles.

“You can control what you put on your site, but you can’t always control your friends,” she said. “In terms of the comment function or being able to write on your wall on Facebook, you just want to make sure you’re monitoring those comments. If you find that it’s getting out of control, completely turn that function off.”

A r t i c l e

Potential employers monitoring student social networking Web sites


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My NotesCarol Albert, operations manager at the Eastridge Group, a multi-state group of staffing companies, said she has been in the hiring business for 16 years and routinely references applicants’ profiles on social networks after an interview and before hiring them, especially for permanent or professional positions — positions college students often fill.

“For our permanent staff, our professional staff, it’s worth a look,” she said. “It’s one of the tools, and it’s becoming more and more useful now, because practically everybody has a MySpace page.”

During 2005, in a study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 11 percent of employers reported referencing an applicant’s social networking site before hiring him or her, said Andrea Koncz, employment information manager for the association.

In a similar study conducted by the association in 2007, the number rose to 17 percent.

David Kraus, managing director of the Tech Career Service, said employers are turning to social networking sites more and more to take a closer look at job candidates, a trend that has and will continue to grow.

Because networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have become more popular in recent years, Kraus said, employers have caught wind and are utilizing their potential for background checks.

“Five years from now, or one year from now, who’s to say there won’t be something else that replaces that?” Kraus asked. “I don’t know what it’ll be, and it might take employers a few years to latch on to that, too.”

When it comes to the content of social network profiles, Jay Killough, employer relations coordinator for the university’s career service, said common sense and good judgment often are good indicators of where to draw the line between acceptable and scandalous. He recommends not post anything “your grandmother wouldn’t approve of.”. . .


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continued Social Networking

BuildingaRubrictoEvaluateSocialNetworkingPages 1. Work with your Embedded Assessment discussion group to create

norms for appropriate self-presentation on a social networking page, based on what your group has learned about these sites and their potential audiences. Build consensus about what content should and should not appear on a page.

2. next, collaborate to create a rubric for evaluating a page in terms of its appropriateness for audiences discussed in the articles. Choose three or more labels to define the levels. These will go across the top of the rubric.

3. With your group, list the standard features of a social networking page. Add these down the left side of the rubric.

4. Take a critical look at a page, considering visual appeal, and add descriptions for visual appeal to your rubric.

5. Fill in the rubric with short descriptions that clearly define criteria in each level for each feature.

6. As a group, create a social networking page for one of the characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

7. Use your rubric to evaluate a page. revise your rubric if needed.

8. Use this rubric to guide the creation of your page that you will be sharing as part of Embedded Assessment 2. Your page can be a real page that you print to show your classmates or it can be a mock-up of a page.


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Activity

4.17Practicing for a Job InterviewSUGGESTED LEarninG STraTEGiES: Brainstorming, Discussion Groups, Notetaking, Role Playing, Generating Questions, Sharing and Responding, Graphic Organizer

an interview can be stressful for both the interviewer and the interviewee, but practicing can alleviate some of the anxiety. Your teacher will form you into groups to complete the following activities:

1. Study a sample résumé, and brainstorm questions that would help you learn more about the person who created the résumé. Take notes on separate paper. Evaluate the sequence of information in the résumé.

2. now combine with another group for sharing and responding about the questions generated. Discuss what makes a good interview question, making a list of the qualities of good questions that you will use when you interview a classmate. add the list to your notes.

3. in your original groups, revise your interview questions to reflect the guidelines your group agreed upon.

4. now that you have practiced creating a résumé and have looked at a résumé from the viewpoint of an interviewer, how has your understanding of what a résumé is and what it can do been expanded?

5. Thinking from the perspective of another person is an important communication skill. reread your interview questions from the point of view of an interviewee. How would you answer each question? Take notes to capture your thinking about how you would present yourself as you answer the questions.

6. Tone and diction are both important in an interview situation. Decide what tone you want to convey and how you might do that. What kind of diction would be appropriate in an interview situation?


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Activity 4.17

continued Practicing for a Job Interview

You will role play a panel interview, using the questions your group generated. You should rotate roles, so that everyone gets a chance to interview and to be interviewed. You will use the fishbowl strategy so that students in the outer circle can provide feedback. When you are in the outer circle, you will observe one person involved in the role play. Take specific notes about all aspects of communication that you observe during the interview. Create a graphic organizer for notetaking; you might use the following format or develop one of your own.

i am observing:

role (circle one): interviewer interviewee

Verbal responses i Heard

My Thoughts

nonverbal Behaviors i Observed

My Thoughts

2. after the role play and feedback on your interview, take a moment to reflect on the experience. Think about what you have learned and how this learning will affect your work for Embedded assessment 2. Write your answer in the space below.

3. Work with your group to set norms for the panel interview for Embedded assessment 2 so that the experience will be a positive one for everyone involved. Make sure that everyone in the group has a copy of the norms.


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Embedded Assessment 2Using Communication Skills

to Present Myself SUGGESTED LEarninG STraTEGiES: Drafting, Self-Editing/Peer Editing, Discussion Groups

Assignment

Your assignment is to showcase the communication skills that you have developed in an interview with a panel of your peers in which you present your résumé and your media presentation about yourself.

Steps

1. Consider how you want to present yourself in the panel interview. For example, which of your strengths do you want to make sure the members of the panel notice? Create a plan for your self-presentation.

2. Create a résumé and revise it using the résumé checklist that your class generated.

3. Create a media presentation about yourself in the form of a social networking page and revise it based on the rubric your class agreed upon.

4. Within your Embedded assessment group, assign roles for the interview panel process. in each round, the roles include interviewee, at least two interviewers, and at least two observers. Set a schedule for interviews within the deadlines set by your teacher.

5. Share your résumé and media presentation drafts with the members of your group who will be interviewing you.

6. When you receive the résumé(s) and media presentation(s) of the group member(s) you will be interviewing, work with your partner(s) to write interview questions.

7. Complete the interview process. after each interview, every group member should write a reflection about the roles they played: interviewer, interviewee, or observer.


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Using Communication Skills to Present Myself

SCorinG GUiDE

Scoring Criteria Exemplary Proficient Emerging

résumé The content and organization of the résumé thoroughly showcase the individual’s strengths and skills. The tone and diction are positive and direct. The format follows standard résumé conventions. The overall impression of the résumé conveys a highly positive picture of the individual.

The content and organization of the résumé provide accurate details about the individual’s background and experience. it demonstrates an understanding of standard résumé conventions. The overall impression of the résumé is adequate, but not highly persuasive about the individual.

The content and organization of the résumé are unclear or disorganized at times in a way that distracts from showcasing the individual. There are frequent errors in standard conventions. There is little or no evidence that the résumé has undergone revisions to sell the individual’s details.

Media Presentation

The media presentation is engaging, well-organized, and effectively addresses the intended audience. information is skillfully communicated.

The media presentation is interesting and accurately addresses the intended audience. information is clearly communicated.

The media presentation is confusing at times and does little to address the intended audience. information is difficult to follow.

Process Throughout the entire process of planning and presenting, the group cooperates and works successfully to maintain purpose and to achieve goals.

Throughout the process of planning and presenting, the group cooperates and works together adequately.

Throughout the process of planning and presenting, the group’s cooperation is lacking and impedes their ability to maintain a purpose or achieve goals.

reflection The reflective text perceptively and thoroughly analyzes each group member’s participation and learning from the perspective of each role: interviewer, interviewee, and observer.

The reflective text clearly and adequately analyzes participation and learning from the perspective of each role: interviewer, interviewee, and observer.

The reflective text fails to sufficiently analyze participation and learning from the perspective of each role: interviewer, interviewee, and observer.


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Embedded Assessment 2continued

SCorinG GUiDE

Scoring Criteria Exemplary Proficient Emerging

Additional Criteria

Comments:


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4Unit

Reflectionan important aspect of growing as a learner is to reflect on where you have been, what you have accomplished, what helped you to learn, and how you will apply your new knowledge in the future. Use the following questions to guide your thinking and to identify evidence of your learning. Use separate notebook paper.

Thinking about Concepts 1. Using specific examples from this unit, respond to the Essential

Questions:

• How can an author’s style construct and reflect identity?

• How do communication skills enhance self-expression?

2. Consider the new academic vocabulary from this unit (Motif, résumé) as well as academic vocabulary from previous units and select 3–4 terms of which your understanding has grown. For each term, answer the following questions:

• What was your understanding of the word prior to the unit?

• How has your understanding of the word evolved throughout the unit?

• How will you apply your understanding in the future?

Thinking about Connections 3. review the activities and products (artifacts) you created. Choose those

that most reflect your growth or increase in understanding.

4. For each artifact that you choose, record, respond, and reflect on your thinking and understanding, using the following questions as a guide:

a. What skill/knowledge does this artifact reflect, and how did you learn this skill/knowledge?

b. How did your understanding of the power of language expand through your engagement with this artifact?

c. How will you apply this skill or knowledge in the future?

5. Create this reflection as Portfolio pages—one for each artifact you choose. Use the following model for your headings and commentary on questions.

Thinking About ThinkingPortfolio Entry

Concept:

Description of artifact:

Commentary on Questions:


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