TEACHING & LEARNING TEAM English I

Core Academics English Language Arts
TEACHING & LEARNING TEAM English I – Graduation Project
STUDENT PACKET
What do I have to do and when is it due?
Reading Assignment:
1. Choose your texts from anything you have read in high school. If you do not desire
to choose passages you have read in high school, included in this packet you will find
optional choices for you to pick from. To satisfy the reading assignment you must read
the following:
 Literary passage: 1 poem or 1 short story
 Informational passage: 1 essay or article
2. Read or re-read the texts and complete the required questions.
Writing Assignment:
 Write an expository essay on the prompt below or an assigned teacher prompt.
Due: .
How will I be scored?
Your project will be scored with the rubric at the end of this packet.
What questions do I answer?
Question 1.
Choose either a poem or story.
Prove you can comprehend
literary text by answering
these questions about the
passage you select.
If you choose a poem: Explain how the author creates
meaning using diction and/or imagery. Be sure to address
what the text says literally and what the text means
figuratively. Give specific examples from at least two
different stanzas. (TEKS EI.3/Fig19B)
If you choose a story: Explain how the author uses any
plot device(s) and/or any literary device(s) to develop
complex yet believable characters. Be sure to comment on
direct quotes from the story or note specific events in your
analysis. (TEKS EI.5/Fig19B)
Question 2.
Prove you can comprehend
informational text by
answering these questions
about the passage you select.
What is the author’s controlling idea? (TEKS 9.8.A)
How would you summarize this article in five sentences or
less? Be sure to include only essential information and
refrain from offering an opinion. (TEKS 9.9.A)
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What do I write an essay about?
Essay Task
Write an expository essay about
a topic assigned by your teacher
or using the listed prompt.
Read the following quotation.
First impressions can sometimes be misleading. Think
carefully about this statement.
Write an essay explaining the importance of getting to
know people before forming an opinion about them.
In your essay, be sure to:
 Clearly state your thesis. (TEKS EI.15Aii)
 Organize and develop your ideas
effectively.(TEKS EI.15Aiv)
 Use transitions to help your writing flow.(TEKS
EI.15Aiii)
 Edit your writing for grammar, mechanics, and
spelling. (TEKS EI.13D)
 Use a variety of sentence structures. (TEKS
EI.13C)
Request Feedback: This is not a timed essay. You may
receive one round of feedback before you finalize the
essay for scoring by the committee.
RC 4, 5, and 6 TEKS EI.13C, EI.13D, EI.15A, EI.17C
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
A.A. Milne
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How will I be scored?
English I – Graduation Project Rubric
Evident Not Evident
Reporting Category 2: Literary Texts
The student explained how the author created meaning using
diction and/or imagery. The student addressed literal and
figurative language and gave specific examples from at least two
different stanzas. (TEKS EI.3/Fig19.B)
OR
The student explained how the author used any plot device(s)
and/or any literary device(s) to develop complex yet believable
characters. The student commented on direct quotes from the
story or noted specific events in the analysis. (TEKS
EI.5/Fig19.B)
Reporting Category 3: Informational Texts
The student accurately explained the controlling idea and specific
purpose of an expository text (TEKS EI.8A)
The student summarized the text effectively, including only
essential information without offering an opinion (TEKS EI.9A)
Reporting Category 4: Composition
Compose an expository essay with:
an effective introduction (TEKS EI.15Ai)
a clear and effective thesis (TEKS EI.15Aii)
appropriate transitions and rhetorical devices (TEKS EI.15Aiii)
appropriate organizational structure (TEKS EI.15Aiv)
an effective conclusion (TEKS EI.15Ai)
Reporting Category 5: Revision
The student requested feedback and revised the essay in response
to feedback. (TEKS EI.13C)
Reporting Category 6: Editing
The student includes an artifact that shows evidence of ability to:
use a variety of correctly structured sentences: e.g., compound,
complex, compound-complex (TEKS EI.17C)
OVERALL PROJECT MEETS GRADUATION
REQUIREMENTS (8 out of 11 criteria met + required selfreflection)
YES NO
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PROJECT
APPENDIX
Optional Texts for Student Use
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Passage 1: Poem
“My Mother Pieced Quilts” by Teresa Palomo Acosta
they were just meant as covers
in winters as weapons
pounding January winds
but it was just that every morning I awoke to these
october ripened canvases
passed my hand across their cloth faces
and began to wonder how you pieced
all these together
these strips of gentle communion cotton and flannel
nightgowns
wedding organdies
dime store velvets
how you shaped patterns square and oblong and round
positioned
balanced
then cemented them
with your thread
a steel needle
a thimble
how the thread darted in and out
galloping along the frayed edges, tucking them in
as you did us at night
oh how you stretched and turned and re-arranged
your Michigan spring faded curtain pieces
my father’s santa fe work shirt
the summer denims, the tweeds of fall
in the evening you sat at your canvas
— our cracked linoleum floor the drawing board
me lounging on your arm
and you staking out the plan:
whether to put the lilac purple of easter against the red
plaid of winter-goinginto- spring whether to mix a yellow with blue and white and paint the
Corpus Christi noon when my father held your hand
whether to shape a five-point star from the
somber black silk you wore to grandmother’s funeral
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You were the river current
carrying the roaring notes
forming them into pictures of a little boy reclining
a swallow flying
You were the caravan master at the reins
driving your threaded needle artillery across the mosaic
cloth bridges
delivering yourself in separate testimonies
oh mother you plunged me sobbing and laughing
into our past
into the river crossing at five
into the spinach fields
into the plainview cotton rows
into tuberculosis wards
into braids and muslin dresses
sewn hard and taut to withstand the thrashings of
twenty-five years
stretched out they lay
armed/ready/shouting/celebrating
knotted with love
the quilts sing on
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Passage 2: Short Story
“The Jade Peony” by Wayson Choy
When Grandmama died at 83 our whole household held its breath. She had promised us a sign her
leaving, final proof that her present life had ended well. My parents knew that without any clear sign,
our own family fortunes could be altered, threatened. My stepmother looked endlessly into the small
cluttered room the ancient lady had occupied. Nothing was touched; nothing changed. My father,
thinking that a sign should appear in Grandmama’s garden, looked at the frost-killed shoots and cringed:
no, that could not be it.
My two older teenage brothers and my sister, Liang, age 14, were embarrassed by my parents’ behavior.
What would all the white people in Vancouver think of us? We were Canadians now, Chinese-Canadians,
a hyphenated reality that my parents could never accept. So it seemed, for different reasons, we all held
our breath waiting for something.
I was eight when she died. For days she had resisted going into the hospital . . . a cold, just a cold . . . and
instead gave constant instruction to my stepmother and sister on the boiling of ginseng roots mixed
with bitter extract. At night, between wracking coughs and deadly silences, Grandmama had her back
and chest rubbed with heated camphor oil and sipped a bluish decoction of an herb called Peacock’s
Tail. When all these failed to abate her fever, she began to arrange the details of her will. This she did
with my father, confessing finally: “I am too stubborn. The only cure for old age is to die.”
My father wept to hear this. I stood beside her bed; she turned to me. Her round face looked darker,
and the gentleness of her eyes, the thin, arching eyebrows, seemed weary. I brushed the few strands of
gray, brittle hair from her face; she managed to smile at me. Being the youngest, I had spent nearly all
my time with her and could not imagine that we would ever be parted. Yet when she spoke, and her
voice hesitated, cracked, the sombre shadows of her room chilled me. Her wrinkled brow grew wet with
fever, and her small body seemed even more diminutive.
“I – I am going to the hospital, Grandson.” Her hand reached out for mine. “You know, Little Son,
whatever happens I will never leave you.” Her palm felt plush and warm, the slender, old fingers boney
and firm, so magically strong was her grip that I could not imagine how she could ever part from me.
Ever.
Her hands were magical. My most vivid memories are of her hands: long, elegant fingers, with
impeccable nails, a skein of fine, barely-seen veins, and wrinkled skin like light pine. Those hands were
quick when she taught me, at six, simple tricks of juggling, learnt when she was a village girl in Southern
Canton; a troup of actors had stayed on her father’s farm. One of them, “tall and pale as the whiteness
of petals,” fell in love with her, promising to return. In her last years his image came back like a third
being in our two lives. He had been magician, acrobat, juggler, and some of the things he taught her she
had absorbed and passed on to me through her stories and games. But above all, without realizing it
then, her hands conveyed to me the quality of their love.
Most marvelous for me was the quick-witted skill her hands revealed in making windchimes for our
birthdays: windchimes in the likeness of her lost friend’s only present to her, made of bits of string and
scraps, in the center of which once hung a precious jade peony. This wondrous gift to her broke apart
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years ago, in China, but Grandmama kept the jade pendant in a tiny red silk envelope, and kept it always
in her pocket, until her death.
These were not ordinary, carelessly made chimes, such as those you now find in our Chinatown stores,
whose rattling noises drive you mad. But making her special ones caused dissension in our family, and
some shame. Each one that she made was created from a treasure trove of glass fragments and
castaway costume jewelry, in the same way that her first windchime had been made. The problem for
the rest of the family was in the fact that Grandmama looked for these treasures wandering the back
alleys of Keefer and Pender Streets, peering into our neighbors’ garbage cans, chasing away hungry,
nervous cats and shouting curses at them.
“All our friends are laughing at us!” Older Brother Jung said at last to my father, when Grandmama was
away having tea at Mrs. Lim’s.
“We are not poor,” Oldest Brother Kiam declared, “yet she and Sek-Lung poke through those awful
things as if -” he shoved me in frustration and I stumbled against my sister, “- they were beggars!”
“She will make Little Brother crazy!” Sister Liang said. Without warning, she punched me sharply in the
back; I jumped. “You see, look how nervous he is!”
I lifted my foot slightly, enough to swing it back and kick Liang in the shin. She yelled and pulled back her
fist to punch me again. Jung made a menacing move towards me.
“Stop this, all of you!” My father shook his head in exasperation. How could he dare tell the Grand Old
One, his aging mother, that what was somehow appropriate in a poor village in China, was an
abomination here. How could he prevent me, his youngest, from accompanying her? If she went walking
into those alleyways alone she could well be attacked by hoodlums. “She is not a beggar looking for
food. She is searching fo-r for ….”
My stepmother attempted to speak, then fell silent. She, too, seemed perplexed and somewhat
ashamed. They all loved Grandmama, but she was inconvenient, unsettling.
As for our neighbors, most understood Grandmama to be harmlessly crazy, others that she did indeed
make lovely toys but for what purpose? Why? they asked, and the stories she told me, of the juggler
who smiled at her, flashed in my head.
Finally, by their cutting remarks, the family did exert enough pressure so that Grandmama and I no
longer openly announced our expeditions. Instead, she took me with her on “shopping trips,” ostensibly
for clothes or groceries, while in fact we spent most of our time exploring stranger and more distant
neighborhoods, searching for splendid junk: jangling pieces of a vase, cranberry glass fragments
embossed with leaves, discarded glass beads from Woolworth necklaces …. We would sneak them all
home in brown rice sacks, folded into small parcels, and put them under her bed. During the day when
the family was away at school or work, we brought them out and washed every item in a large black pot
of boiling lye and water, dried them quickly, carefully, and returned them, sparkling, under her bed.
Our greatest excitement occurred when a fire gutted the large Chinese Presbyterian Church, three
blocks from our house. Over the still-smoking ruins the next day, Grandmama and I rushed precariously
over the blackened beams to pick out the stained glass that glittered in the sunlight. Small figure bent
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over, wrapped against the autumn cold in a dark blue quilted coat, happily gathering each piece like
gold, she became my spiritual playmate: “There’s a good one! There!”
Hours later, soot-covered and smelling of smoke, we came home with a Safeway carton full of delicate
fragments, still early enough to steal them all into the house and put the small box under her bed.
“These are special pieces,” she said, giving the box a last push, “because they come from a sacred
place.” She slowly got up and I saw, for the first time, her hand began to shake. But then, in her joy, she
embraced me. Both of our hearts were racing, as if we were two dreamers. I buried my face in her blue
quilt, and for a moment, the whole world seemed silent.
“My juggler,” she said, “he never came back to me from Honan . . . perhaps the famine . . .” Her voice
began to quake. “But I shall have my sacred windchime . . . I shall have it again.”
One evening, when the family was gathered in their usual places in the parlor, Grandmama gave me her
secret nod: a slight wink of her eye and a flaring of her nostrils. There was trouble in the air. Supper had
gone badly, school examinations were due, father had failed to meet an editorial deadline at the
Vancouver Chinese Times. A huge sigh came from Sister Liang.
“But it is useless this Chinese they teach you!” she lamented, turning to Stepmother for support. Silence.
Liang frowned, dejected, and went back to her Chinese book, bending the covers back.
“Father,” Oldest Brother Kiam began, waving his bamboo brush in the air, “you must realize that this
Mandarin only confuses us. We are Cantonese speakers. ”
“And you do not complain about Latin, French or German in your English school?” Father rattled his
newspaper, a signal that his patience was ending.
“But, Father, those languages are scientific,” Kiam jabbed his brush in the air. “We are now in a
scientific, logical world.”
Father was silent. We could all hear Grandmama’s rocker.
“What about Sek-Lung?” Older Brother Jung pointed angrily at me. “He was sick last year, but this year
he should have at least started Chinese school, instead of picking over garbage cans!”
“He starts next year,” Father said, in a hard tone that immediately warned everyone to be silent. Liang
slammed her book.
Grandmama went on rocking quietly in her chair. She complimented my mother on her knitting, made a
remark about the “strong beauty” of Kiam’s brushstrokes which, in spite of himself, immensely pleased
him. All this babbling noise was her family torn and confused in a strange land: everything here was so
very foreign and scientific.
The truth was, I was sorry not to have started school the year before. In my innocence I had imagined
going to school meant certain privileges worthy of all my brothers’ and sister’s complaints. The fact that
my lung infection in my fifth and sixth years, mistakenly diagnosed as TB, earned me some reprieve, only
made me long for school the more. Each member of the family took turns on Sunday, teaching me or
annoying me. But it was the countless hours I spent with Grandmama that were my real education.
Tapping me on my head she would say, “Come, Sek-Lung, we have our work,” and we would walk up the
stairs to her small crowded room. There, in the midst of her antique shawls, the old ancestral calligraphy
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and multi-colored embroidered hangings, beneath the mysterious shelves of sweet herbs and bitter
potions, we would continue doing what we had started that morning: the elaborate windchime for her
death.
“I can’t last forever,” she declared, when she let me in on the secret of this one. “It will sing and dance
and glitter,” her long fingers stretched into the air, pantomiming the waving motion of her ghost chimes;
“My spirit will hear its sounds and see its light and return to this house and say goodbye to you.”
Deftly she reached into the Safeway carton she had placed on the chair beside me. She picked out a fishshape amber piece, and with a long needle-like tool and a steel ruler, she scored it. Pressing the blade of
a cleaver against the line, with the fingers of her other hand, she lifted me up the glass until it leanly
snapped into the exact shape she required. Her hand began to tremble, the tips of her fingers to shiver,
like rippling water.
“You see that, Little One?” She held her hand up. “That is my body fighting with Death. He is in this
room now.”
My eyes darted in panic, but Grandmama remained calm, undisturbed, and went on with her work.
Then I remembered the glue and uncorked the jar for her. Soon the graceful ritual movements of her
hand returned to her, and I became lost in the magic of her task: she dabbed a cabalistic mixture of glue
on one end and skillfully dropped the braided end of a silk thread into it. This part always amazed me:
the braiding would slowly, very slowly, unknot, fanning out like a prized fishtail. In a few seconds the
clear, homemade glue began to harden as I blew lightly over it, welding to itself each separate silk
strand.
Each jam-sized pot of glue was precious; each large cork had been wrapped with a fragment of pink silk.
I remember this part vividly, because each cork was treated to a special rite. First we went shopping in
the best silk stores in Chinatown for the perfect square of silk she required. It had to be a deep pink, a
shade of color blushing toward red. And the tone had to match – as closely as possible – her precious
jade carving, the small peony of white and light-red jade, her most lucky possession. In the center of this
semi-translucent carving, no more than an inch wide, was a pool of pink light, its veins swirling out into
the petals of the flower.
“This color is the color of my spirit,” she said, holding it up to the window so I could see the delicate
pastel against the broad strokes of sunlight. She dropped her voice, and I held my breath at the wonder
of the color. “This was given to me by the young actor who taught me how to juggle. He had four of
them, and each one had a center of this rare color, the color of Good Fortune.” The pendant seemed to
pulse as she turned it: “Oh, Sek-Lung! He had white hair and white skin to his toes! It’s true, I saw him
bathing.” She laughed and blushed, her eyes softened at the memory. The silk had to match the pink
heart of her pendant: the color was magical for her, to hold the unravelling strands of her memory.
It was just six months before she died that we really began to work on her last windchime. Three thin
bamboo sticks were steamed and bent into circlets; 30 exact lengths of silk thread, the strongest kind,
were cut and braided at both ends and glued to stained glass. Her hands worked on their own
command, each hand racing with a life of its own: cutting, snapping, braiding, knotting. Sometimes she
breathed heavily and her small body, growing thinner, sagged against me. Death, I thought, He is in this
room, and I would work harder alongside her. For months Grandmama and I did this every other
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evening, a half-dozen pieces each time. The shaking in her hand grew worse, but we said nothing.
Finally, after discarding hundreds, she told me she had the necessary 30 pieces. But this time, because it
was a sacred chime, I would not be permitted to help her tie it up or have the joy of raising it. “Once
tied,” she said, holding me against my disappointment, “not even I can raise it. Not a sound must it
make until I have died.”
“What will happen?”
“Your father will then take the center braided strand and raise it. He will hang it against my bedroom
window so that my ghost may see it, and hear it, and return. I must say goodbye to this world properly
or wander in this foreign devil’s land forever.” “You can take the streetcar!” I blurted, suddenly shocked
that she actually meant to leave me. I thought I could hear the clear-chromatic chimes, see the
shimmering colors on the wall: I fell against her and cried, and there in my crying I knew that she would
die. I can still remember the touch of her hand on my head, and the smell of her thick woolen sweater
pressed against my face. “I will always be with you, Little Sek-Lung, but in a different way . . . you’ll see.”
Months went by, and nothing happened. Then one late September evening, when I had just come home
from Chinese School, Grandmama was preparing supper when she looked out our kitchen window and
saw a cat – a long, lean white cat – jump into our garbage pail and knock it over. She ran out to chase it
away, shouting curses at it. She did not have her thick sweater on and when she came back into the
house, a chill gripped her. She leaned against the door: “That was not a cat,” she said, and the odd tone
of her voice caused my father to look with alarm at her. “I cannot take back my curses. It is too late.”
She took hold of my father’s arm: “It was all white and had pink eyes like sacred fire.”
My father started at this, and they both looked pale. My brothers and sister, clearing the table, froze in
their gestures.
“The fog has confused you,” Stepmother said. “It was just a cat.”
But Grandmama shook her head, for she knew it was a sign. “I will not live forever,” she said. “I am
prepared.”
The next morning she was confined to her bed with a severe cold. Sitting by her, playing with some of
my toys, I asked her about the cat: “Why did father jump at the cat with the pink eyes? He didn’t see it,
you did.”
“But he and your mother know what it means.”
“What?”
“My friend, the juggler, the magician, was as pale as white jade and he had pink eyes.” I thought she
would begin to tell me one of her stories, a tale of enchantment or of a wondrous adventure, but she
only paused to swallow; her eyes glittered, lost in memory. She took my hand, gently opening and
closing her fingers over it. “Sek-Lung,” she sighed, “he has come back to me.”
Then Grandmama sank back into her pillow and the embroidered flowers lifted to frame her wrinkled
face. I saw her hand over my own, and my own began to tremble. I fell fitfully asleep by her side. When I
woke up it was dark and her bed was empty. She had been taken to the hospital and I was not permitted
to visit.
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A few days after that she died of the complications of pneumonia. Immediately after her death my
father came home and said nothing to us, but walked up the stairs to her room, pulled aside the drawn
lace curtains of her window and lifted the windchimes to the sky.
I began to cry and quickly put my hand in my pocket for a handkerchief. Instead, caught between my
fingers, was the small, round firmness of the jade peony. In my mind’s eye I saw Grandmama smile and
heard, softly, the pink center beat like a beautiful, cramped heart.
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Passage 4: Informational Text 1
“Family Traditions Boost Happiness” by Matthew Hutson
–Published in Scientific American (November 1, 2016)—
Some people go home for the holidays hoping just to survive, burying their attention in their phones or
football to avoid conflict with relatives. Yet research now suggests that is the wrong idea. Family
rituals—of any form—can save a holiday, making it well worth the effort of getting everyone in the same
room.
In a series of studies to be published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, hundreds
of online subjects described rituals they performed with their families during Christmas, New Year’s Day
and Easter, from tree decoration to egg hunts. Those who said they performed collective rituals,
compared with those who said they did not, felt closer to their families, which made the holidays more
interesting, which in turn made them more enjoyable. Most surprising, the types of rituals they
described—family dinners with special foods, religious ceremonies, watching the ball drop in Times
Square—did not have a direct bearing on enjoyment. But the number of rituals did. Apparently having
family rituals makes the holidays better and the more the merrier.
The study could measure only correlations between subjects’ responses, leaving causality uncertain—Do
rituals increase holiday pleasure, or do people who already enjoy the holidays choose to perform more
rituals? Yet enjoyment ratings were higher when given after, versus before, describing rituals,
suggesting that simply thinking about rituals can put a warm filter on one’s experience.
“Whatever the ritual is, and however small it may seem, it helps people to really get closer to one
another,” says Ovul Sezer, a researcher at Harvard Business School and the paper’s primary author.
“[With] some rituals we don’t even know why we do them, but they still work,” she says.
It could be that rituals offer “small, nonobvious ways” to get people to share an experience without
feeling awkward or forced, suggests Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and
one of Sezer’s co-authors. She compares that with “obvious ploys” such as saying, “Hey, everyone,
gather around the kitchen table, we’re going to play Yahtzee,” which, she notes, “might be more likely
to produce a whole lot of kickback.”
— This article was originally published with the title “The More Rituals the Merrier”
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Passage 5: Informational Text 2
“Good Relationships Are All in the Family” by Catherine Caruso
–Published in Scientific American (March 1, 2017)—
A lot can happen during a life—career changes, marriages, divorces, births, deaths, not to mention all
the small stuff in between—but childhood lays an important foundation that can last a lifetime. A longrunning study published in September 2016 in Psychological Science found that men who grew up in
warmer, more nurturing family environments had stronger relationships as older adults.
The research is a continuation of Harvard University’s Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study
of adult health and well-being that has spanned almost eight decades. At its outset in 1938, researchers
enrolled male Harvard students and inner-city Boston teens and used lengthy interviews to rate the
quality of the boys’ family environments. Different researchers then followed up with the men in midlife
to assess how successfully they were able to manage negative emotions. In the most recent study, coauthors Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and Marc Schulz, a psychologist at
Bryn Mawr College, conducted in-depth interviews with the men, now in their 80s, to determine their
level of attachment to their partners.
Waldinger and Schulz determined that regardless of socioeconomic standing the men raised in warmer
family environments used healthier strategies to manage their negative emotions in midlife and were
also more securely attached to their partners late in life. These results suggest our childhood
environment affects our relationships not only into early adulthood but for the rest of our life.
Chris Fraley, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies attachment
but was not involved in the present study, points out that so much can happen between childhood and
old age, from financial hardship to illness to divorce. “The fact that the authors found such an
association is remarkable,” he says, “and raises a number of questions about the factors that explain
why it exists.” For Schulz, the findings highlight the need for services such as family leave that support
parents and allow them to create better family environments. He also stresses the importance of good
social services that can intervene when children end up in poor or unsafe family settings. “I think the
take-home [message] is that kids may not remember specific events, particularly early in their life,”
Schulz says, “but the accumulation of loving, nurturing family environments really has an impact over a
long period.”
Waldinger and Schulz also emphasize that there are many ways to overcome having a less than idyllic
childhood, such as actively working on developing warmer, more stable relationships as an adult or
learning how to use healthier strategies to deal with negative emotions. “The bottom line,” Waldinger
says, “is that how we take care of children is just so vitally important.”
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