TCA 2 Formative Assessment

And usually, we know what they want by what they obsess on. If I were to ask ten people to name one object from The Great Gatsby, nine of them would come up with the same item—even if they hadn’t read the title of this chapter. There it is, that green light on the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, commanding Jay Gatsby’s rapt attention and presiding over Nick Carraway’s final paragraph. This thing, the object that drives him forward to calamity, stands for everything that’s wrong with him, and also what’s right—his capacity for self-delusion, his ability to hope, his belief that some things, some people, no matter how flawed, are worthy figures of the Dream. It’s quite literally the last thing we see in the novel, before those phantom boats driving against the current. Fitzgerald was taking no chances that we might miss his point. That point is central for writers, and hence for readers, the Law of Character Clarity: To understand characters, you have to know their deepest desires. More often than not, that desire finds an emblem—an object or action—to give it tangible expression. 

Which of the following is the main purpose of the passage?

Prohibition creates a ‘new money’ class.

As their wealth grew, many Americans of the 1920s broke down the traditional barriers of society. This, in turn, provoked anxiety among upper-class plutocrats (represented in the novel by Tom Buchanan). In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice (as Gatsby famously tells Nick in the novel) is “full of money.”

“One of the many unintended consequences of Prohibition was that it created this accelerated upward social mobility,” Churchwell explains. “Fitzgerald is reflecting a preoccupation at the time that there were these upstart—as they would have said—these nouveau riche people who came from dubious backgrounds and then suddenly had all this money that they were splashing around.”

Which of the following research questions could the excerpt above best support?

Pruitt, Sarah. “How 'the Great Gatsby' Chronicled the Dark Side of the Roaring '20s.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 16 Nov. 2018, https://www.history.com/news/great-gatsby-roaring-twenties-fitzgerald-dark-side. 

Before using this source in an essay, what question should the student ask to determine if this source is credible?

The below excerpt is from a student research paper examining the representation of gender roles in the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here, the student examines the novel’s lead character, Jay Gatsby. The student’s works cited page is included beneath the passage.

A character who may seem to be the polar opposite of Tom Buchanan, but is still representative of the men of the times, is Jay Gatsby. He doesn’t seem to be the demanding masculine menace that Tom is personified as. Still, Gatsby is a man of the times becoming rich to get back with Daisy. As stated in the following quote Gatsby has the gender role of another man trying to gain Daisy as “property”, and due to her social status marriage would be unacceptable, and this situation is Gatsby's primary motivation for striving to move up the social ladder. As Gatsby puts it: “She only married you [Tom] because I was poor, and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”(Fitzgerald 100). Abiding to his gender stereotype constrictions, Gatsby uses Tom’s wealth as the only reason Daisy was his “property.” Gatsby was seriously distressed with winning Daisy back. He felt that becoming the traditional male of the time would help him as laid out in the following quote, “Authentic manhood relied largely on men's ability to control their lives and their work—and to earn a wage that enabled them to be the sole support of their family” (Lair). Gatsby tried to achieve this by becoming rich, showing how he wasn’t fearful of Tom, and trying to control the whole situation. Consequently Jay Gatsby, despite all his perks and differences, still embraced the typical man of the 1920’s.

Does the student effectively use evidence from reference materials to support their claim that Jay Gatsby is representative of men in the Roaring Twenties?

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 2018. 

Pruitt, Sarah. “How 'The Great Gatsby' Chronicled the Dark Side of the Roaring '20s.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 16 Nov. 2018, https://www.history.com/news/great-gatsby-roaring-twenties-fitzgerald-dark-side. 

A student is writing a paper about the historical context of The Great Gatsby and is using an outside source. Has the student properly formatted the Works Cited page above?

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 2018. 

Pruitt, Sarah. “How 'The Great Gatsby' Chronicled the Dark Side of the Roaring '20s.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 16 Nov. 2018, https://www.history.com/news/great-gatsby-roaring-twenties-fitzgerald-dark-side. 

If the student were to quote the article in the paper, what would be the proper in text citation?

The following excerpt is from an article by Mike Kubic entitled “The Roaring Twenties.” It begins, 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in his classic The Tale of Two Cities. The same could be said about “the Roaring Twenties,” the post-World War I decade when Americans experienced some of their best years, as well as some of their worst. It was a period when they reveled in the high jinks of what the period’s historian Nathan Miller called an “era of wonderful nonsense,” but when they also suffered the crushing consequences of what economists called “unfettered capitalism.”

The decade’s popular moniker was, in many ways, appropriate. Relieved of the pensions and shortage during World War I, proud of the way American “doughboys” helped achieve the Allies’ victory, pleased with the honors European statesmen heaped on President Woodrow Wilson for founding the League of Nations, Americans celebrated their country’s new prestige, strength, prosperity.

In which statement does the author narrow the focus to introduce the main idea?

HERE’S ONE THING I learned teaching introductory creative writing: would-be fictionists don’t understand character. When I would give the first characterization assignment, I always got back the same thing—height, weight, hair color and length or lack, size of nose, shape of mouth, number of freckles. The full package. You could take the details and paint a life-size portrait. You could, I couldn’t, but that’s a function of artistic ability, not lack of student description. What I could do, however, was hand the character sketches back with this question: what does Huck Finn look like? Or Jake Barnes? Or even Emma Bovary? 

Which inference best explains what the author wants his student writers to do?

The following is an excerpt from the chapter “The Light on Daisy’s Dock” from How to Read Novels Like a Professor. It describes a passage from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. In the novel, a mother’s family is trying to fulfill her request of being buried in her hometown - Jefferson, Mississippi.  Vardaman and Cash are the mother’s sons. 

Vardaman catches an enormous fish, nearly as big as he is, and when Anse makes him clean it himself, he confuses the fish and the mother and living and dying and about every other thing in his world, so that, when he comes out with his famous pronouncement, it shocks not because it’s outrageous but because it’s so perfectly understandable. What else would he say? Even Cash, who seems to be concerned only with making the coffin for his mother, is driven by desire. His is to feel nothing, to push feeling, with which he is profoundly uncomfortable, as far away as he can. He does this by obsessing on the box’s construction, one of his narrative chapters consisting entirely of a list of his thirteen reasons for cutting the corners on the bevel. Focus is good. Attention to detail is good. But when a person focuses that intently on a fairly straightforward bit of logic, he is seriously trying to avoid something else. Dewey Dell, the teenaged sister in this tragicomedy troupe, wants as badly as her father to get to Jefferson, where she’s heard the druggist might have a cure for her complaint. 

Which of the following choices best supports the author’s idea that characters are driven by desire?

The following is an excerpt from How to Read Novels Like a Professor from the chapter “History in the Novel/The Novel in History”.  It concludes the chapter with the following paragraphs.

The thing about history—like politics and sociology and psychology and bed-wetting—and the novel is that readers have to put in the work themselves. Is it significant when Ursula Brangwen, in D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” calls a robin, disapprovingly, “a little Lloyd-George of the air”? It is if you think it is. Lawrence, whose pacifism and marriage to a German wife (a cousin of the Red Baron, no less) caused him considerable difficulty with authorities, despised Lloyd-George (who keeps cropping up in British fiction), the prime minister during World War I. The novel is otherwise largely oblivious of the mayhem taking place just across the Channel, and the main characters encounter no difficulty when plot exigencies require a trip to the Tyrol, yet current events, along with class warfare and industrial capitalism, do inform the book. How much and in what ways each reader must decide. And that decision will alter what we find in the novel.

This condition obtains almost universally; there are hardly any novels that do not in some way reveal their historical moment. A book may be set eight hundred years in the past or many centuries in the future, may even fly the bonds of Earth to some galaxy far, far away, but it’s still a product of now, whenever its now may have been. And now is always a product of then. History will come in, whether or no. 

What is the central idea of the passage?

The following is an excerpt from the novel How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. His chapter, “The Light on Daisy’s Dock” which develops the significance of symbols in developing characterization. To exemplify such, Foster references Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In the novel, Lily is a painter.  She worries that her paintings will never be good enough to be remembered. 

And Lily Briscoe? Lily has her painting. In the first part, she is stymied in her attempt to capture the scene in front of her, to grasp the domesticity punctuated by error and aggression that is the Ramsay household. Part of what she wants is approval or acceptance; that is why the comments of Charles Tansley, Mr. Ramsay’s latest protégé, that “Women can’t write; women can’t paint” frustrate her efforts almost completely. She seeks that approval from Mrs. Ramsay, from Mr. Ramsay, and even, unwittingly and very much against her will, from the “odious” Tansley. Only in the third section, “The Lighthouse,” does she understand that it must come from the inside, from herself. It is then that she can make the bold line down the center of the canvas and finish her painting. She gets the last words of the novel, and they are about neither Mrs. Ramsay nor anyone’s approval: “I have had my vision.” That’s what it has all been about for her, the ability to have a vision, the space to pursue it, the maturity to express it in her own way, free of outside influence. Is that desire? I believe it is. 

Based on the passage, how does Lily Briscoe’s character change?

The following excerpt is from an article by Mike Kubic entitled “The Roaring Twenties.” It begins, 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in his classic The Tale of Two Cities. The same could be said about “the Roaring Twenties,” the post-World War I decade when Americans experienced some of their best years, as well as some of their worst. It was a period when they reveled in the high jinks of what the period’s historian Nathan Miller called an “era of wonderful nonsense,” but when they also suffered the crushing consequences of what economists called “unfettered capitalism.”

The decade’s popular moniker was, in many ways, appropriate. Relieved of the pensions and shortage during World War I, proud of the way American “doughboys” helped achieve the Allies’ victory, pleased with the honors European statesmen heaped on President Woodrow Wilson for founding the League of Nations, Americans celebrated their country’s new prestige, strength, prosperity.

In this paragraph, the writer references a quotation from the author Charles Dickens to introduce his idea that

The following excerpt is from a CommonLit article by Mike Kubic entitled, “The Roaring Twenties.” It states,

Herbert Hoover was elected the country’s 31st president in 1929. He was a successful mining engineer from Iowa before lending his services to the government. As President Coolidge’s secretary of commerce, Hoover recognized already in 1925 that the economy was overheating as Americans began “buying on margin” and speculating on the soaring stock market. He urged Coolidge to tighten the credit and take other steps to cool the market, but the president and his treasury secretary blocked any attempt at government intrusion into private business. Despite this setback, Hoover went on to handily win the presidential race the following year.

What details in this passage help maintain an objective tone?

The following is an excerpt from“8 Ways ‘The Great Gatsby’ Captured the Roaring Twenties –and Its Dark Side” by Sarah Pruitt.  It claims that while the novel captures the exuberance of the 1920s, it’s ultimately a portrayal of the darker side of the roaring twenties, and is a pointed criticism of the corruption and immorality lurking beneath the glitz and glamour. The article closes with the section below.

Gatsby’s dreams of winning Daisy for himself end in failure, just as America’s era of prosperity would come to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. By 1930, 4 million Americans were unemployed; that number would reach 15 million by 1933, the Depression’s lowest point.

By 1924, when Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, he seems to have already foreseen the lasting consequences of America’s heady romance with capitalism and materialism. Through his novel, Fitzgerald foreshadows the inevitability that the decadence of the 1920s—what he would later call “the most expensive orgy in history” would end in disappointment and disillusionment.

“This novel is really a snapshot of a moment when in Fitzgerald's view, America had hit a point of no return,” Churchwell says. “It was losing its ideals rapidly, and he's capturing the moment when America was turning towards the country that we've inherited.” 

Which statement best reflects the article’s conclusion? 

The following is an excerpt from How to Read Novels Like a Professor, from the chapter “History in the Novel/The Novel in History.” 

The thing about history- like politics and sociology and psychology and bed-wetting- and the novels is that readers have to put in the work themselves. Is it significant when Ursula Brangwen, in D.H. Lawrences’ Women in Love, calls a robin, disapproving, “a little Lloyd-George of the air”? It is if you think it is. Lawrence, whose pacifism and marriage to a German wife (a cousin of the Red Baron, no less) caused him considerable difficulty with authorities, despised Lloyd-George (who keeps cropping up in British fiction), the prime minister during World War I. The novel is otherwise largely oblivious of the mayhem taking place just across the Channel, and the main characters encounter no difficulty when plot exigencies require a trip to the Tyrol, yet current events, along with class warfare and industrial capitalism, do inform the book. How much and in what ways each reader must decide. And that decision will alter what we find in the novel. 

How does the paragraph’s organization contribute to the overall success of the passage?