2.0
Writing
Applications
2.2
Write
responses to literature:
a.
Develop interpretations exhibiting careful reading, understanding, and insight.
b.
Organize interpretations around several clear ideas, premises, or images from
the
literary
work.
c. Justify interpretations through sustained use of examples
and textual evidence.
Poetry Students write in-class essays analyzing new
material, that is a poem the student has never seen before. Students will closely read poetic text,
develop understandings and write interpretations that include the technical
features of poetry when relevant.
Rubric:
10 Students earning the highest score will immediately
see the connection in subject and tone to the poem “Good Hours.” Both poems depict the speaker walking past
the furthest city light at night. And
both poems have a similar tone, a poetic mixture of sadness and joy, the joy of
solitude and the sadness of alienation. Artists have long associated this mixture with
melancholy. But this poem goes much
further, describing the “saddest city lane” and the falling of the rain, and acknowledging that the speaker averts his
eyes and is unwilling to explain himself to the night watchman on his
beat. This is alienation by choice. The ambivalence of the speaker’s emotions
emerges in the imagery he uses. He stops
the sound of his feet at the cry from a neighboring street, but realizes the
cry has nothing to do with him. The brightness
of the moon sits in the darkness of the sky, but the speaker is caught
somewhere in-between: “One luminary clock against the sky/Proclaimed the time
was neither wrong nor right.” He begins
and ends the poem with the same line: “I have been one acquainted with the
night.” It is a time of great
uncertainty for him. The better papers
will note that the poem is written in tercets (three line stanzas), but ends
with a couplet. They may also recognize
the inter-locking rhyme scheme. The
middle rhyme of each tercet becomes the dominant rhyme of the next tercet [aba
bcb cdc ded]. The ebb and flow of the
rhythm and the rhyme advances the somber mood and ambivalent tone of the poem. These papers will be well-written with only 1
or 2 minor errors.
8 Students
earning this score point may or may not connect this poem to “Good Hours.” They will, however, understand the sadness of
the tone and the ambivalence of the poet.
They will cite lines in the poem to support this interpretation. They may or may not make technical
observations concerning meter and rhyme. These papers will be moderately
well-written. Any errors will be easily
correctible.
6 Students
earning this score point will understand the poem on some level. They will tend to summarize, or tell the
story of, the poem. They will recognize,
on some level, that the poet, walking at night, is sad and the imagery reflects
this. These papers will be competently
written, but may not cite much evidence from the poem or recognize its
structure.
4 These
essay writers will be somewhat confused by the text. They may offer little in the way of
insight. They may, for instance, wonder
why the poet is even out at night walking.
Their writing may be illogical in part and will display multiple serious
errors in the conventions of standard written English.
2 The
student will be consistently confused by literary text and will demonstrate
little control over its elements. They
may write only briefly, but what they do write will be deeply flawed and bear
little connection to the text they are analyzing.
Note: Students may give themselves odd numbered scores
that reflect descriptors from two or more score points. A student may say, for instance, “some of
score-point 6 aligns with my paper; but so does some parts of score-point
8. I think I deserve a 7.”
Rationale for score
[be sure to
write a detailed explanation of your score below]:
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