Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment Two: Student Readings
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7 / INT: High School Hallway
In a crowded hallway, MARIA and CHUCK have a conversation.
CHUCK: Later, baby.
MARIA: Later, stud-muffin.
CHUCK: (snaps fingers) I’m talking about you.
MARIA: (snaps back) You.
INT: High School Classroom
MR. MOORE leads a classroom of advanced students. These students include MARIA, DARLENE, SARAH, SIMONE, ALAN, TANNIS, and ERIC.
MR. MOORE: How do we really measure the cost of World War II?
DARLENE: Twenty-two million casualties.
SARAH: And the cost and property damage of more than three trillion dollars.
TANNIS: And destruction throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
MR. MOORE: Yes, but I’m talking about the devastation to families, the division of nations. You know, it’s not just winners and losers. Humanity suffers. I’m finished now, Alan. Yes?
ALAN: Okay, Mr. Moore, we all know war is hell, but why always emphasize the negative side? / MR. MOORE: Great! Why don’t you give us some pointers on the upbeat side of war, Alan.
ALAN: Well sure. World War II did give us a number of scientific and technological advances.
MR. MOORE: Yeah and a lot of mini-series, so what’s your point?
MARIA: What kind of scientific advances come out of war? Nuclear bombs? Swiss Army Knives? Alan, we’re facing the annihilation of three billion people. Studies show that when…
CHUCK enters the room.
CHUCK: Hey, Mr. Moore. I’ve got some office stuff here for you…ahh, class isn’t over yet, is it?
MR. MOORE: No. Not quite, Chuck. You want to spend the last few minutes with us? Take a seat.
CHUCK: Cool!
MR. MOORE: So, Maria. (Maria is fixated on Chuck) Maria? Maria, you were talking about three billion people.
MARIA: That’s a lot of people, Mr. Moore.
ALAN: Hey, don’t forget that war increases the need for arms ammunitions which reduces unemployment. Maria?
MARIA: That sounds good too, Alan.
ALAN: So, you agree with me?
MARIA: Sure, what do I know about war and icky things like that?
DARLENE: Icky? Icky!
Source B: “Concrete was a Company Town”
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Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
1 Concrete was a company town, home of the Lone Star Cement Company. The streets and houses and cars were grey with cement dust from the plant. On still days a pall of dust hung in the air, so thick they sometimes had to cancel football practice. Concrete High overlooked the town from a hill whose slopes had been covered with cement to keep them from washing away. By the time I started there, not long after the school was built, its cement banks had begun to crack and slice, revealing the chicken wire over which they had been poured.
2 The school took students from up and down the valley. They were the children of farmers, waitresses, loggers, constructional workers, truck drivers, itinerant laborers. Most of the boys already had jobs themselves. They worked not to save money but to spend it on their cars and girlfriends. Many of them got married while they were still in school, they dropped out to work full-time. Others joined the army or the marines – never the navy. A few became petty criminals. The boys of Concrete High tended not to see themselves as college material.
3 The school had some good teachers, mostly older women who didn’t care if they were laughed at for reciting poetry, or for letting a tear fall while they described the Battle of Verdun. There were not many of them.
4 Mr. Mitchell taught civics. He also acted as unofficial recruiter for the army. He had served during World War II in “the European Theater,” as he liked to say, and had actually killed men. He sometimes brought in different items he had taken from their bodies, not only medals and bayonets, which you could buy in any pawnshop, but also letters in German and wallets with pictures of families inside. Whenever we wanted to distract Mr. Mitchell from collecting essays we hadn’t written, we would ask about the circumstances of his kills. Mr. Mitchell would crouch behind his desk, peer over the top, then roll into the middle of the room and spring to his feet yelling da-da-da-da-da. But he praised the courage and discipline of the Germans, and said that in his opinion we had fought on the wrong side. We should have gone into Moscow, not Berlin. As far as the concentration camps were concerned, we had to remember that nearly all of the Jewish scientists had perished there. If they had lived, they would have helped Hitler develop his atomic bomb before we developed ours, and we would all be speaking German today.
5 Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining Communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, “What is your favorite amendment?” We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer – “The Right to Bear Arms” – except for a girl who answered “Freedom of Speech.” For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked down on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I.
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Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
Source C: “Boy Brains, Girl Brains” by Peg Tyre
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Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
1 Three years ago, Jeff Gray, the principal at Foust Elementary School in Owensboro, Ky., realized that his school needed help--and fast. Test scores at Foust were the worst in the county and the students, particularly the boys, were falling far behind. So Gray took a controversial course for educators on brain development, then revamped the first- and second-grade curriculum. The biggest change: he divided the classes by gender. Because males have less serotonin in their brains, which Gray was taught may cause them to fidget more, desks were removed from the boys' classrooms and they got short exercise periods throughout the day. Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings. Because boys have higher levels of testosterone and are theoretically more competitive, they were given timed, multiple-choice tests. The girls were given multiple-choice tests, too, but got more time to complete them. Gray says the gender-based curriculum gave the school "the edge we needed." Tests scores are up. Discipline problems are down.
2 Gray is part of a new crop of educators with a radical idea--that boys and girls are so biologically different they need to be separated into single-sex classes and taught in different ways. In the last five years, brain researchers using sophisticated MRI and PET technology have gathered new information about the ways male and female brains develop and process information. Studies show that girls, for instance, have more active frontal lobes, stronger connections between brain hemispheres and "language centers" that mature earlier than their male counterparts. Critics of gender-based schooling charge that curricula designed to exploit such differences reinforce the most narrow cultural stereotypes. But proponents say that unless neurological, hormonal and cognitive differences between boys and girls are incorporated in the classroom, boys are at a disadvantage.
3 Most schools are girl-friendly, says Michael Gurian, coauthor with Kathy Stevens of a new book, "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life," "because teachers, who are mostly women, teach the way they learn." Seventy percent of children diagnosed with learning disabilities are male, and the sheer number of boys who struggle in school is staggering. Eighty percent of high-school drop-outs are boys and less than 45 percent of students enrolled in college are young men. To close the educational gender gap, Gurian says, teachers need to change their techniques. They should light classrooms more brightly for boys and speak to them loudly, since research shows males don't see or hear as well as females. Because boys are more-visual learners, teachers should illustrate a story before writing it and use an overhead projector to practice reading and writing. Gurian's ideas seem to be catching on. More than 185 public schools now offer some form of single-sex education, and Gurian has trained more than 15,000 teachers through his institute in Colorado Springs.
4 To some experts, Gurian's approach is not only wrong but dangerous. Some say his curriculum is part of a long history of pseudoscience[1] aimed at denying equal opportunities in education. For much of the 19th century, educators, backed by prominent scientists, cautioned that women were neurologically unable to withstand the rigors of higher education. Others say basing new teaching methods on raw brain research is misguided. While it's true that brain scans show differences between boys and girls, says David Sadker, education professor at American University, no one is exactly sure what those differences mean. Differences between boys and girls, says Sadker, are dwarfed by brain differences within each gender. "If you want to make schools a better place," says Sadker, "you have to strive to see kids as individuals."
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Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
Source D - Quotes
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgments. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
“To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.”
― Bell Hooks
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Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
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Grade 10 District Benchmark Assessment 2 English Language Arts
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[1]Pseudoscience isan approach or practice that resembles science but makes claims that are not basedonresearch grounded in the scientific method.