TEST REVIEW: FEBRUARY 9/10

Test Review February 9 & 10

If you missed on the test review days, I distributed the readings for the test in class and gave your classmates 30 minutes to read, analyze, and make notes on them. We played a Bingo game to review the terms and practice recognizing them. I would highly suggest that you do more than just read these selections before the test. You should read them for comprehension first. After that, apply the skills that we've studied throughout this unit to the selection to the texts.

REMEMBER TO BRING ANY INCOMPLETE WORK AND/OR EXTRA CREDIT ON TEST DAY! DOING MISSING HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENTS IS GREAT TEST REVIEW.

Elements of Realism: Rejection of the Romantic hero, detailed depiction of ordinary characters, emphasis on characters inn realistic events, emphasis on characters from cities and lower classes, avoidance of the exotic, sensational, and overly dramatic, use of everyday speech patterns to reveal class distinctions, focus of the ethical struggles and social issues of real-life situations.

Literary terms: author purpose (persuade, inform, entertain), point of view, metaphor, situational irony, verbal irony, satire (parody, false praise), motivation

Elements of Naturalism: The Brute Within, Survival of the Fittest, Plot of Decline, Objective Observations of Human Behavior, Human Behavior is Controlled by Heredity and Environment

TEST TIPS

The best advice I can give you to prepare you for your test is to WORK HARD on the readings that I will give you for your test.  One of the readings is an example of Naturalism and the other is an example of satire.

You should read them for comprehension first. After that, apply the skills that we've studied throughout this unit to the selection to the texts.

If you have trouble with one of the terms, such as point of view. PRACTICE identifying point of view. Go back and flip through some of the selections and look for third person limited, third person omniscient, and third person objective.

Review your skills and apply them to these selections.

The readings for the test are underneath "Read More," but you may also see me for your copy.

Read the following passage from the short story “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane. The men in this selection are stranded at sea in a tiny boat. Although they can see land, the violence of the ocean is preventing them from reaching the shore.

"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going
to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea,
was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude
that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him,
despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an
abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The
man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at
sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still--

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important,
and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him,
he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply
the fact that there are no brick and no temples. Any visible expression
of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the
desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one
knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself."

A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says
to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

The men in the dingy had not discussed these matters, but each had, no
doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind. There
was seldom any expression upon their faces save the general one of
complete weariness. Speech was devoted to the business of the boat.

To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the
correspondent's head. He had even forgotten that he had forgotten this
verse, but it suddenly was in his mind.

"A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was a lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of
woman's tears; But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade's hand,
And he said: 'I shall never see my own, my native land.'"

In his childhood, the correspondent had been made acquainted with the
fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never
regarded the fact as important. Myriads of his school-fellows had
informed him of the soldier's plight, but the dinning had naturally
ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it
his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it
appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than the
breaking of a pencil's point.

Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was
no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet,
meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an
actuality--stern, mournful, and fine.

The correspondent plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his
feet out straight and still. While his pale left hand was upon his chest
in an attempt to thwart the going of his life, the blood came between
his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms
was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The
correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower
movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and
perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the
Legion who lay dying in Algiers.

The thing which had followed the boat and waited, had evidently grown
bored at the delay. There was no longer to be heard the slash of the
cut-water, and there was no longer the flame of the long trail. The
light in the north still glimmered, but it was apparently no nearer to
the boat. 

Sometimes the boom of the surf rang in the correspondent's
ears, and he turned the craft seaward then and rowed harder. Southward,
someone had evidently built a watch-fire on the beach. It was too low
and too far to be seen, but it made a shimmering, roseate reflection
upon the bluff back of it, and this could be discerned from the boat.
The wind came stronger, and sometimes a wave suddenly raged out like a
mountain-cat, and there was to be seen the sheen and sparkle of a broken
crest.

The captain, in the bow, moved on his water-jar and sat erect. "Pretty
long night," he observed to the correspondent. He looked at the shore.

"Those life-saving people take their time."

"Did you see that shark playing around?"

"Yes, I saw him. He was a big fellow, all right."

"Wish I had known you were awake."

Later in the night they took the boat farther out to sea, and the
captain directed the cook to take one oar at the stern and keep the boat
facing the seas. He was to call out if he should hear the thunder of the
surf. This plan enabled the oiler and the correspondent to get respite
together. "We'll give those boys a chance to get into shape again," said
the captain. They curled down and, after a few preliminary chatterings
and trembles, slept once more the dead sleep. Neither knew they had
bequeathed to the cook the company of another shark, or perhaps the same
shark.

As the boat caroused on the waves, spray occasionally bumped over the
side and gave them a fresh soaking, but this had no power to break their
repose. The ominous slash of the wind and the water affected them as it
would have affected mummies.

"Boys," said the cook, with the notes of every reluctance in his voice,
"she's drifted in pretty close. I guess one of you had better take her
to sea again." The correspondent, aroused, heard the crash of the
toppled crests.

“Advice to Youth," a satirical lecture by Mark Twain

Being told I would be expected to talk here, I inquired what sort of talk I ought to make. They said it should be something suitable to youth-something didactic, instructive, or something in the nature of good advice. Very well. I have a few things in my mind which I have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one’s tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring and most valuable. First, then. I will say to you my young friends—and I say it beseechingly, urgingly—

Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you struck him; acknowledge it like a man and say you didn’t mean to. Yes, always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

Go to bed early, get up early- this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some say get up with one thing, others with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time—it’s no trick at all.

Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young out not to lie at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain , and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail—these are requirements; these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as the sure foundation for future eminence. Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that “Truth is mighty and will prevail”—the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal. There is in Boston a monument of the man who discovered anesthesia; many people are aware, in these latter days, that that man didn’t discover it at all, but stole the discovery from another man. Is this truth mighty, and will it prevail? Ah no, my hearers, the monument is made of hardy material, but the lie it tells will outlast it a million years. An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years—except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours. A final word: begin your practice of this gracious and beautiful art early—begin now. If I had begun earlier, I could have learned how.

Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right—it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of. Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring hings that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time, at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it make one shudder.

There are many sorts of books; but good ones are the sort for the young to read. remember that. They are a great, an inestimable, and unspeakable means of improvement. Therefore be careful in your selection, my young friends; be very careful; confine yourselves exclusively to Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, The Innocents Abroad, and works of that kind.

But I have said enough. I hope you will treasure up the instructions which I have given you, and make them a guide to your feet and a light to your understanding. Build your character thoughtfully and painstakingly upon these precepts, and by and by, when you have got it built, you will be surprised and gratified to see how nicely and sharply it resembles everybody else’s.
Source: Advice to Youth Mark Twain, 1882