9th Grade Writing Prompt - Pre-AssessmentName: ______
Read and annotate (mark up the text) the following essay. When you are finished, answer the prompt.
PROMPT: Explain why it is important for each person to discover his own talents. Incorporate examples from
the text. In addition, you may use personal experience or history to support your argument in a multi-
paragraph essay.
“A Perfect Future”
“He’s just like a life-sized doll for you to play with, isn’t he?” my parents’ friends said as they cooed over my new baby brother in his crib.
I didn’t agree with them. He wasn’t a doll, and I wasn’t a little girl playing with her Dressie Bessie doll. I was eleven years old, old enough to change diapers, warm bottles of milk, and take care of my brother when my parents went out. I certainly knew the difference between a doll baby and a real baby, whatever those adults might think.
What’s more, I had big plans for my brother Cory. He was going to be a child prodigy – a boy genius.
Since I was already eleven, I figured I was already too old to be a prodigy at anything. I decided that my parents had not put enough effort into developing my talents at an early age, but Cory was just starting out. I would get in there while he was young, teach him everything he needed to know. He would be just like me, only better – smarter, more athletic, more popular – and he would owe it all to me!
The day Cory came home from the hospital, I was ready with a stack of picture books I’d checked out of the library. My parents have a photograph of me reading one of them to him. In the photo, a two week-old Cory smiles up at me with a huge toothless grin.
That was probably the last recorded instance of the two of us enjoying the same book. As Cory got older, I tried to interest him in all the books I’d loved as a little kid. No dice. He wanted to pick out his own reading material, things like comic books, and of all things, books about architecture. Architecture! I’d never been interested in that. How could Cory be?
When Cory was four years old, I was fifteen and the captain of my high school chess team. I studied chess strategy, practiced moves, and learned jealously about eight-year-old chess grandmasters – the child prodigies of the chess world. It was too late for me, I thought, but not for Cory. I brought him up to my room, sat him on my bed, and started teaching him the names of the chess game pieces. “This is boring,” he said, and went downstairs to play with his crayons. At this rate he was never going to make it as a boy genius.
Okay, so maybe Cory would be a sports hero instead, I thought. When I was younger, I’d loved any kind of ballgame. If only my unathletic parents would have spent more time playing catch with me or had bought me all the sports equipment and lessons I wanted, maybe I would have been a decent athlete instead of the last one picked for every team. Well, I wasn’t going to let that happen to Cory. I dragged him outside at every opportunity and tried to teach him to dribble a basketball or kick a soccer ball. Nothing doing. As soon as I’d let him, he’d escape back inside to his pencils and sketchbooks full of comic-book superheroes. If only he wanted to be a superhero instead of just drawing them.
After that, I got older, moved away to college, and started a job. I had my own life to live, so Cory would just have to get along without my help. He played around with his computers, dabbled in his paints, and made his own way through elementary school and junior high. He didn’t get better grades than I had made. He wasn’t any more athletic than I had been.
It wasn’t the perfect future I’d imagined for my baby brother, but he seemed happy enough, I supposed. Anyway, I finally realized that it was silly to try to make him act out my fantasies about who he was going to be and how he was going to live his life. He was a person, after all, not a doll for me to play with.
Cory finished high school this year. He won a scholarship to one of the best art schools in the country. Last week I sat in The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and watched as he was awarded a gold medal and a silver medal in a national competition for young artists. Then I walked over to The Corcoran Museum of Art to see the book cover he’d designed. It was framed and hanging on the wall with other examples of the best student art in the nation.
“These kids are incredible,” I heard one museum visitor tell her husband.
“Prodigies!” he agreed.
I just smiled.
Name______
Pre-Assessment
A Perfect Future
Directions: Read the short story A Perfect Future and answer the following questions. You may refer to the story to answer the questions.
- Write an example of a simile from the story.
______
- The word “prodigy” means______
- Circle the letter of the group of words that defines architecture.
- the study of books
- the study of airplanes
- the building of houses
- none of the above
- Create a graphic organizer that shows what experiences Cory’s sister tried and what Cory thought of those activities. Your graphic organizer maybe a chart, graph, diagram, drawing, cluster, web, mind map, Venn diagram or any other organizer.
- Who is telling the story (point of view) and how do you know? Use details and examples from the story to support your answer.
______