IB English Language and Literature Summer Reading Assignment 2017-2018: Dialectical Journal of Various Texts

NOTE: Students are expected to keep this booklet throughout your entire time in LAL in order to use it as a reference guide (for terminology, acronyms, templates, etc.) and in order to discuss the works in class. This means students are expected to bring it every day to class. Students may also leave it in their binders (which are left in their teacher’s room).

Table of Contents

I. Overview (3-5) II. List of Stylistic Devices (6-9) III. Text Type: Speeches (10-14) IV. Text Type: Letters (15-19) V. Text Type: Nonfiction Essays (20-28) VI. Text Type: Poetry (29-32)

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 2 I. OVERVIEW

Due Date. This assignment is due the first day of your IB English course (either September 5 or 6, 2017). Do NOT wait until the end of summer to begin. You will not produce quality work if you procrastinate and we are fully aware of what your work will look like if you wait until the last minute.

Process Steps. 1. Study the terms provided. 2. Read and annotate the texts provided. It is inaccurate to assume that shorter texts are easier. 3. Based on your reading, annotations, and understanding, choose which texts to which you will respond in your dialectical journal. o Standard Level: Choose three different texts (from three different text types) o Higher Level: Choose four different texts (from four different text types) 4. Complete a dialectical journal* for each chosen text. o This should be typed and in MLA format; use the chart from each template format.

*A dialectical journal is a way to closely read passages from a text, while discovering what individual words and sentences reveal about purpose, theme, etc. You must create a dialectical journal for each text you have chosen, including the appropriate question template provided.

Each Dialectical Journal Entry should include: 1. Title and author 2. In your words, a paragraph overview of author’s background. 3. In your words, a paragraph overview of the historical context of the text. 4. Complete the appropriate template (see below)

ACTSS: The Big 5 Questions to ask of almost any written text when completing analysis. Audience/Purpose Whom does the text target? What does the author wish to achieve A through the text? Content/Theme What is literally ‘happening’ in the text? What is it about? What are the C main ideas of the text? Tone/Mood How does the text make you and/or the target audience feel? Describe T the atmosphere of the text. Stylistic Devices How does the author use language to convey a sentiment or message? S What kinds of linguistic tools does he/she employ? Structure How is the text organized, literally (layout/formatting)? What kinds of S structural elements of a particular text type do you see?

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 3

Using TPMASTT for Poetry Analysis TITLE Before you even think about reading the poem or trying to analyze it, speculate on what you think the poem might be about based upon the title. Authors often conceal meaning and give clues in the title. The title is considered part of the poem, after all. PARAPHRASE Before you begin thinking about analysis and interpretation, make sure you understand the literal meaning of the poem. One of the biggest problems that students often make in poetry analysis is jumping to conclusions before understanding what is taking place in the poem. When you paraphrase a poem, write in your own words exactly what happens in the poem. Look at the number of sentences in the poem—your paraphrase should have exactly the same number. It may also be helpful for you to summarize what happens in the poem in ONE sentence. Make sure that you understand the difference between a paraphrase and a summary. METHOD Method refers to any and all poetic devices, focusing on how such devices contribute to the meaning, the effect, or both, of a poem. You may consider imagery, figures of speech (simile, metaphor, personification, symbolism, etc.), diction, point of view, and sound devices (alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, rhyme, etc.). It is not necessary that you identify all the poetic devices within the poem. The ones you do identify should be seen as a way of supporting the conclusions you are going to draw about the poem. ATTITUDE Having examined the poem's devices closely, you are now ready to explore the multiple attitudes that may be present in the poem. Examination of diction, images, and details suggests the speaker's attitude and contributes to understanding. Remember that usually the tone or attitude cannot be named with a single word. Think complexity. SHIFT Rarely does a poem begin and end the poetic experience in the same place. The poet's understanding of an experience is a gradual realization, and the poem is a reflection of that understanding or insight. Watch for the following keys to shifts: • key words (e.g., but, yet, however, although) • punctuation (e.g., dashes, periods, colons, ellipsis) • stanza divisions • changes in structure (line, stanza length or both) • irony • changes in sound that may indicate changes in meaning • changes in diction

TITLE (REVISITED) Now look at the title again, but this time on an interpretive level. What new insight does the title provide in understanding the poem?

THEME What is the poem saying about the human experience, motivation, or condition? What subject or subjects does the poem address? What do you learn about those subjects? What idea does the poet want you take away with you concerning these subjects? Remember that the theme of any literary work is stated in a complete sentence.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 4 Dialectical Journals Rubric A: Understanding of the B: Understanding of C: Organization and Criterion D: Language Text the Use and Effects of Development • How clear, varied and accurate is • To what extent does the Stylistic Features • How well organized and the language? analysis show an • To what extent does the coherent is the analysis? • How appropriate is the choice of understanding of the text, its analysis show awareness • How well is the register*, style and terminology? type and purpose, as well as of how the stylistic argument of the its possible contexts (for features of the text, such response developed? as language, structure, example, cultural, temporal, relation to audience)? tone, technique and style, are used to construct • Are the comments supported meaning? by references to the text? • To what extent does the analysis show understanding of the effects of stylistic features on the reader? 0 The work does not reach a standard described by the descriptors below. • There is little understanding • There is little • Little organization is • Language is rarely clear and of the text and context. awareness of the use of apparent. appropriate. • Comments are not supported stylistic features. • Reliance on paraphrase • There are many errors in 1 by references to the text. • There is little and summary rather grammar, vocabulary and understanding of the than analysis. sentence construction. effects of these stylistic • Little sense of register and style. features. • There is some understanding • There is some • Some organization is • Language is sometimes clear and of the text and context. awareness of the use of apparent. carefully chosen. • Comments are sometimes stylistic features. • The analysis has some • Grammar, vocabulary and supported by references to • There is some coherence but may sentence construction are fairly 2 the text. understanding of the contain elements of accurate, although errors and effects of these stylistic paraphrase, summary inconsistencies are apparent. features. and simple explanation • The register and style are to • There is little development some extent appropriate to the of the argument. task. • There is adequate • There is adequate • The analysis is • Language is clear and carefully understanding of the text awareness of the use of adequately organized. chosen. and context. stylistic features. • The analysis is generally • Adequate degree of accuracy in • Comments are mostly • There is some coherent. grammar, vocabulary and 3 supported by references to understanding of the • There is some sentence construction despite the text. effects of these stylistic development of the some lapses. features. argument. • Register and style are mostly appropriate to the task. • There is good understanding • There is good • The analysis is well • Language is clear and carefully of the text and context. awareness of the use of organized. chosen. • Comments are consistently stylistic features. • The analysis is mostly • Good degree of accuracy in 4 supported by references to • There is adequate coherent. grammar, vocabulary and the text. understanding of the • The argument is sentence construction. effects of these stylistic adequately developed. • Register and style are consistently features. appropriate to the task. • There is very good • There is very good • The analysis is • Language is very clear, effective, understanding of the text awareness of the use of effectively organized. carefully chosen and precise. and context. stylistic features. • The analysis is coherent. • High degree of accuracy in 5 • Perceptive comments are • There is good • The argument is well grammar, vocabulary and supported by consistently understanding of the developed. sentence construction. well-chosen references to effects of these stylistic • Register and style are effective the text. features. and appropriate to the task.

*“Register” refers, in this context, to the student’s use of elements such as vocabulary, tone, sentence structure and terminology appropriate to the task. AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 5 II. List of Stylistic Devices

Both lists of terms have devices applicable to multiple text types.

RHETORICAL DEVICES Abstract: Opposite to concrete; not quantifiable Aesthetic: the study or philosophy of beauty in art, literature, and nature Allusion: an indirect reference, often to another text or an historic event Ambiguity: more than one meaning, used in verbal/written/nonverbal communication Anachronism: out of time, placing something in a time where it does not belong Analogy: the comparison of two things alike in some respects Analysis: to separate into parts for inspection and evaluation Anaphora: the repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses Anecdote: a short narrative detailing the particulars of an event Annotation: explanatory or critical notes added to a text Antagonist: the force against the protagonist, that creates the conflict Antecedent: the noun to which the pronoun refers Antimetabole: the repetition of words in an inverted order to sharpen a contrast Antihero: a protagonist who is particularly graceless, inept, stupid, or dishonest Antithesis: figure of speech, using strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences or ideas Aphorism: a short, witty statement Archetype: a type of struggle or character to which different cultures relate to without prior knowledge Asyndeton: leaving out conjunctions between words, phrases, and clauses Catharsis: a moral and spiritual cleansing received Colloquial: informal conversation which differs in grammar, vocab, syntax, imagery, or connotation Concession: a reluctant acknowledgement or yielding Digression: insertion of material not closely related to the work or subject Elegiac: mournful over what has passed or been lost; often used to describe tone Epigram: a brief, witty statement Epiphany: a sudden understanding or realization Hyperbole: also known as overstatement; an exaggeration Invective: a violent verbal attack Inversion: a sentence in which the verb precedes the subject Irony: a recognition of reality different from the appearance; often, the actual intent is the opposite of what is said Juxtaposition: placing things, normally not under the same category, side by side, for emphasis Motif: a simple device that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; a recurring feature in a work AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 6 Paradox: a statement that seems to be contradictory or absurd, but contains a ring of truth Parallelism: the coordination of syntax; words/phrases are similar in structure for emphasis Parody: a writing which imitates another serious piece and pokes fun at the original Pedantic: bookish and scholarly in tone; often boring and dull Persona: the speaker, voice, or character assumed by the author of a piece of writing Personification: human-like qualities given to inanimate objects Polysyndeton: the deliberate use of a series of conjunctions Propaganda: a negative term for writing designed to sway opinion rather than present information Protagonist: the main character of a work; one who encounters the conflict Rhetorical question: a question used to achieve an awareness in the audience; no reply to the question is expected. Rhetorical shift: changing from one tone, attitude, or distance to another Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices Theme: the central idea of a story that the author expects the reader to infer Understatement: opposite of hyperbole or overstatement

LITERARY DEVICES Alliteration: Repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of words placed near each other, usually on the same or adjacent lines. A somewhat looser definition is that it is the use of the same consonant in any part of adjacent words. Example: Peter and Andrew patted the pony at Ascot. Assonance: Repeated vowel sounds in words placed near each other, usually on the same or adjacent lines. These should be in sounds that are accented, or stressed, rather than in vowel sounds that are unaccented. Example: He’s a bruisin’ loser. Consonance: Repeated consonant sounds within words placed near each other, usually on the same or adjacent lines. These should be in sounds that are accented, or stressed, rather than in vowel sounds that are unaccented. This produces a pleasing kind of near-rhyme. Example: cool soul Cacophony: A discordant series of harsh, unpleasant sounds helps to convey disorder. This is often furthered by the combined effect of the meaning and the difficulty of pronunciation. Example: My stick fingers click with a snicker Euphony: A series of musically pleasant sounds, conveying a sense of harmony and beauty. Example: Than Oars divide the Ocean, /Too silver for a seam—/Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon Onomatopoeia: Words that sound like their meanings. In “Hear the steady tick of the old hall clock”, the word tick sounds like the action of the clock. If assonance or alliteration can be onomatopoeic, as the sound ‘ck’ is repeated in tick and clock, so much the better. At least sounds should suit the tone – heavy sounds for weightiness, light for the delicate. Tick is a light word, but transpose the light T to its heavier counterpart, D; and transpose the light CK to its heavier counterpart G, and tick becomes the much more solid and down to earth dig. Example: boom, buzz, crackle, gurgle, hiss, pop, sizzle, snap, swoosh, whir, zip Repetition: The purposeful re-use of words and phrases for an effect. Sometimes, especially with longer phrases that contain a different key word each time, this is called parallelism. Example: Half a league, half a league, half a league onward...

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 7 Rhyme: Words that have different beginning sounds but whose endings sound alike, including the final vowel sound and everything following it, are said to rhyme. Example: time, slime, mime. Double rhymes include the final two syllables. Example: revival, arrival, survival. Triple rhymes include the final three syllables. Example: greenery, machinery, scenery. Rhythm: Speech rhythms (verbal stresses) that form a regular pattern of accented syllables separated by unaccented syllables. Rhythm helps to distinguish poetry from prose. Stressed syllables are labeled with an accent mark: / Unstressed syllables are labeled with a dash: – Metrical feet may be two or three syllables in length, and are divided by slashes: | Allegory: A representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning. Sometimes it can be a single word or phrase, such as the name of a character or place. Often, it is a symbolic narrative that has not only a literal meaning, but a larger one understood only after reading the entire story or poem Allusion: A brief reference to some person, historical event, work of art, or Biblical or mythological situation or character. Analogy: A comparison, usually something unfamiliar with something familiar. Example: The plumbing took a maze of turns where even water got lost. Apostrophe: Speaking directly to a real or imagined listener or inanimate object; addressing that person or thing by name. Example: O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done... Cliché: Any figure of speech that was once clever and original but through overuse has become outdated. Example: busy as a bee Connotation: The emotional, psychological or social overtones of a word; its implications and associations apart from its literal meaning. Contrast: Closely arranged things with strikingly different characteristics. Example: He was dark, sinister, and cruel; she was radiant, pleasant, and kind. Denotation: The dictionary definition of a word; its literal meaning apart from any associations or connotations. Students must exercise caution when beginning to use a thesaurus, since often the words that are clustered together may share a denotative meaning, but not a connotative one, and the substitution of a word can sometimes destroy the mood, and even the meaning, of a poem. Euphemism: An understatement, used to lessen the effect of a statement; substituting something innocuous for something that might be offensive or hurtful. Example: She is at rest. (i.e., she’s dead) Hyperbole: An outrageous exaggeration used for effect. Example: He weighs a ton. Irony: A contradictory statement or situation to reveal a reality different from what appears to be true. Example: Wow, thanks for expensive gift...let’s see: did it come with a Fun Meal or the Burger King equivalent? Metaphor: A direct comparison between two unlike things, stating that one is the other or does the action of the other. Example: He’s a zero. Metonymy: A figure of speech in which a person, place, or thing is referred to by something closely associated with it. Example: The White House stated today that... Oxymoron: A combination of two words that appear to contradict each other. Example: bittersweet Paradox: A statement in which a seeming contradiction may reveal an unexpected truth. Example: The hurrier I go the behinder I get. Personification: Attributing human characteristics to an inanimate object, animal, or abstract idea. Example: The days crept by slowly, sorrowfully. Pun: Word play in which words with totally different meanings have similar or identical sounds. Example: Like a firefly in the rain, I’m de-lighted. AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 8 Simile: A direct comparison of two unlike things using “like” or “as.” Example: He’s as dumb as an ox. Symbol: An ordinary object, event, animal, or person to which we have attached extraordinary meaning and significance. Example: A small cross by the dangerous curve on the road reminded all of Johnny’s death. Synecdoche: Indicating a person, object, etc. by letting only a certain part represent the whole. Example: All hands on deck.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 9 III. TEXT TYPE #1: SPEECHES

A. Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2017 Golden Globes Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read. Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press. But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work. But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it. O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth. One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight. As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 10 B. Lou Gehrig – Farewell to Yankee Fans on July 4, 1939 Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert - also the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow - to have spent the next nine years with that wonderful little fellow Miller Huggins - then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology - the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy! Sure, I'm lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift, that's something! When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles against her own daughter, that's something. When you have a father and mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it's a blessing! When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have had a tough break - but I have an awful lot to live for!

C. Elie Wiesel: The Perils of Indifference (April 12, 1999) Part of the Millennium Lecture series, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty- four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know—that they, too, would remember, and bear witness. And now, I stand before you, Mr. President—Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others—and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary —or Mrs. Clinton—for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here. We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations —Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin —bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 11 What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals? Of course, indifference can be tempting —more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction. Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the "Muselmanner," as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it. Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God —not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering. In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil. In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did. And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 12 If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once. And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader—and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death—Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us. No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history—I must say it —his image in Jewish history is flawed. The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo —maybe 1,000 Jews —was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people—in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don't understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims? But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the "Righteous Gentiles," whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America's largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler's Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference? And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it. And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene. Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today's justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same? What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 13 agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them—so many of them—could be saved. And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.

D. Edward VIII, King of England, Abdicates the Throne (December 11, 1936). At long last I am able to say a few words of my own. I have never wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has not been constitutionally possible for me to speak. A few hours ago, I discharged my last duty as King and Emperor, and now that I have been succeeded by my brother, the Duke of York, my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him. This I do with all my heart. You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the empire, which, as Prince of Wales and lately as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve. But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love. And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone. This was a thing I had to judge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course. I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, only upon the single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all. This decision has been made less difficult to me by the sure knowledge that my brother, with his long training in the public affairs of this country and with his fine qualities, will be able to take my place forthwith without interruption or injury to the life and progress of the empire. And he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you, and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children. During these hard days I have been comforted by her majesty my mother and by my family. The ministers of the crown, and in particular, Mr. Baldwin, the Prime Minister, have always treated me with full consideration. There has never been any constitutional difference between me and them, and between me and Parliament. Bred in the constitutional tradition by my father, I should never have allowed any such issue to arise. Ever since I was Prince of Wales, and later on when I occupied the throne, I have been treated with the greatest kindness by all classes of the people wherever I have lived or journeyed throughout the empire. For that I am very grateful. I now quit altogether public affairs and I lay down my burden. It may be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and empire with profound interest, and if at any time in the future I can be found of service to his majesty in a private station, I shall not fail. And now, we all have a new King. I wish him and you, his people, happiness and prosperity with all my heart. God bless you all! God save the King!

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 14 IV. TEXT TYPE #2: LETTERS

A. Open Letter from Apple

February 16, 2016 A Message to Our Customers The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand. This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake. The Need for Encryption Smartphones, led by iPhone, have become an essential part of our lives. People use them to store an incredible amount of personal information, from our private conversations to our photos, our music, our notes, our calendars and contacts, our financial information and health data, even where we have been and where we are going. All that information needs to be protected from hackers and criminals who want to access it, steal it, and use it without our knowledge or permission. Customers expect Apple and other technology companies to do everything in our power to protect their personal information, and at Apple we are deeply committed to safeguarding their data. Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us. For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business. The San Bernardino Case We were shocked and outraged by the deadly act of terrorism in San Bernardino last December. We mourn the loss of life and want justice for all those whose lives were affected. The FBI asked us for help in the days following the attack, and we have worked hard to support the government’s efforts to solve this horrible crime. We have no sympathy for terrorists. When the FBI has requested data that’s in our possession, we have provided it. Apple complies with valid subpoenas and search warrants, as we have in the San Bernardino case. We have also made Apple engineers available to advise the FBI, and we’ve offered our best ideas on a number of investigative options at their disposal. We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone. Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession. The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 15 The Threat to Data Security Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution. But it ignores both the basics of digital security and the significance of what the government is demanding in this case. In today’s digital world, the “key” to an encrypted system is a piece of information that unlocks the data, and it is only as secure as the protections around it. Once the information is known, or a way to bypass the code is revealed, the encryption can be defeated by anyone with that knowledge. The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable. The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe. We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data. Criminals and bad actors will still encrypt, using tools that are readily available to them. A Dangerous Precedent Rather than asking for legislative action through Congress, the FBI is proposing an unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority. The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer. The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge. Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government. We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country. We believe it would be in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the implications. While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect. Tim Cook

B. Letter from Samuel Johnson to a mother asking him to recommend her son to the Archbishop of Canterbury in order to allow him to attend university. AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 16

MADAM, I hope you will believe that my delay in answering your letter could proceed only from my unwillingness to destroy any hope that you had formed. Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general roles of action to be broken. When you made your request to me, you should have considered, Madam, what you were asking. You ask me to solicit a great man, to whom I never spoke, for a young person whom I had never seen, upon a supposition which I had no means of knowing to be true. There is no reason why, amongst all the great, I should choose to supplicate the Archbishop, nor why, among all the possible objects of his bounty, the Archbishop should choose your son. I know, Madam, how unwillingly conviction is admitted, when interest opposes it; but surely, Madam, you must allow, that there is no reason why that should be done by me, which every other man may do with equal reason, and which, indeed, no man can do properly, without some very particular relation both to the Archbishop and to you. If I could help you in this exigence by any proper means, it would give me pleasure: but this proposal is so very remote from usual methods, that I cannot comply with it, but at the risk of such answer and suspicions as I believe you do not wish me to undergo. I have seen your son this morning; he seems a pretty youth, and will, perhaps, find some better friend than I can procure him; but though he should at last miss the University, he may still be wise, useful, and happy. June 8, 1762

C. American writer John Steinbeck’s response to his eldest son Thom’s 1958 letter, in which the teenage boy confesses to have fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan while at boarding school.

New York November 10, 1958 Dear Thom: We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers. First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had. You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 17 But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it. The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it. If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also. It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good. Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it. We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can. And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away. Love, Fa

D. American author Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to Charles McCarthy, head of the Drake, North Dakota school board, upon hearing that McCarthy ordered 32 copies of Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five to be burned in the school’s furnace because of its “obscene language”.

November 16, 1973 Dear Mr. McCarthy: I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school. Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am. I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace? I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 18 turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer. If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us. After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that. I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books– books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 19 V. TEXT TYPE #3: NON-FICTION ESSAYS

A. Excerpted from The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Three Rules of Epidemics In the mid-1990s, the city of Baltimore was attacked by an epidemic of syphilis. In the space of a year, from 1995 to 1996, the number of children born with the disease increased by 500 percent. If you look at Baltimore's syphilis rates on a graph, the line runs straight for years and then, when it hits 1995, rises almost at a right angle. What caused Baltimore's syphilis problem to tip? According to the Centers for Disease Control, the problem was crack cocaine. Crack is known to cause a dramatic increase in the kind of risky sexual behavior that leads to the spread of things like HIV and syphilis. It brings far more people into poor areas to buy drugs, which then increases the likelihood that they will take an infection home with them to their own neighborhood. It changes the patterns of social connections between neighborhoods. Crack, the CDC said, was the little push that the syphilis problem needed to turn into a raging epidemic. John Zenilman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases, has another explanation: the breakdown of medical services in the city's poorest neighborhoods. "In 1990-91, we had thirty-six thousand patient visits at the city's sexually transmitted disease clinics," Zenilman says. "Then the city decided to gradually cut back because of budgetary problems. The number of clinicians [medical personnel] went from seventeen to ten. The number of physicians went from three to essentially nobody. Patient visits dropped to twenty-one thousand. There also was a similar drop in the amount of field outreach staff. There was a lot of politics — things that used to happen, like computer upgrades, didn't happen. It was a worst-case scenario of city bureaucracy not functioning. They would run out of drugs." When there were 36,000 patient visits a year in the STD clinics of Baltimore's inner city, in other words, the disease was kept in equilibrium. At some point between 36,000 and 21,000 patient visits a year, according to Zenilman, the disease erupted. It began spilling out of the inner city, up the streets and highways that connect those neighborhoods to the rest of the city. Suddenly, people who might have been infectious for a week before getting treated were now going around infecting others for two or three or four weeks before they got cured. The breakdown in treatment made syphilis a much bigger issue than it had been before. There is a third theory, which belongs to John Potterat, one of the country's leading epidemiologists. His culprits are the physical changes in those years affecting East and West Baltimore, the heavily depressed neighborhoods on either side of Baltimore's downtown, where the syphilis problem was centered. In the mid-1990s, he points out, the city of Baltimore embarked on a highly-publicized policy of dynamiting the old 1960s-style public housing high-rises in East and West Baltimore. Two of the most publicized demolitions — Lexington Terrace in West Baltimore and Lafayette Courts in East Baltimore — were huge projects, housing hundreds of families, that served as centers for crime and infectious disease. At the same time, people began to move out of the old row houses in East and West Baltimore, as those began to deteriorate as well. "It was absolutely striking," Potterat says, of the first time he toured East and West Baltimore. "Fifty percent of the row houses were boarded up, and there was also a process where they destroyed the projects. What happened was a kind of hollowing out. This fueled the diaspora. For years syphilis had been confined to a specific region of Baltimore, within highly confined sociosexual networks. The housing dislocation process served to move these people to other parts of Baltimore, and they took their syphilis and other behaviors with them."

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 20 What is interesting about these three explanations is that none of them is at all dramatic. The CDC thought that crack was the problem. But it wasn't as if crack came to Baltimore for the first time in 1995. It had been there for years. What they were saying is that there was a subtle increase in the severity of the crack problem in the mid-1990s, and that change was enough to set off the syphilis epidemic. Zenilman, likewise, wasn't saying that the STD clinics in Baltimore were shut down. They were simply scaled back, the number of clinicians cut from seventeen to ten. Nor was Potterat saying that all Baltimore was hollowed out. All it took, he said, was the demolition of a handful of housing projects and the abandonment of homes in key downtown neighborhoods to send syphilis over the top. It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium. The second, and perhaps more interesting, fact about these explanations is that all of them are describing a very different way of tipping an epidemic. The CDC is talking about the overall context for the disease — how the introduction and growth of an addictive drug can so change the environment of a city that it can cause a disease to tip. Zenilman is talking about the disease itself. When the clinics were cut back, syphilis was given a second life. It had been an acute infection. It was now a chronic infection. It had become a lingering problem that stayed around for weeks. Potterat, for his part, was focused on the people who were carrying syphilis. Syphilis, he was saying, was a disease carried by a certain kind of person in Baltimore — a very poor, probably drug-using, sexually active individual. If that kind of person was suddenly transported from his or her old neighborhood to a new one — to a new part of town, where syphilis had never been a problem before — the disease would have an opportunity to tip. There is more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words.

B. “This Is the Life” by Annie Dillard, from the Fall issue of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, published by the Center for Religious Humanism at Seattle Pacific University.

Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, bird-watching. Beyond those things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die. Another contemporary consensus might be: You wear the best shoes you can afford, you seek to know Rome's best restaurants and their staffs, drive the best car, and vacation on Tenerife. And what a cook you are! Or you take the next tribe's pigs in thrilling raids; you grill yams; you trade for televisions and hunt white-plumed birds. Everyone you know agrees: this is the life. Perhaps you burn captives. You set fire to a drunk. Yours is the human struggle, or the elite one, to achieve... whatever your own culture tells you: to publish the paper that proves the point; to progress in the firm and gain high title and salary, stock options, benefits; to get the loan to store the beans till their price rises; to elude capture, to feed your children or educate them to a feather edge; or to count coup or perfect your calligraphy; to eat the king's deer or catch the poacher; to spear the seal, intimidate the enemy, and be a big man or beloved woman and die respected for the pigs or the title or the shoes. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees. Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, necklaces, degree, murex shells, or ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 21 purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. Who is your "everyone"? Chess masters scarcely surround themselves with motocross racers. Do you want aborigines at your birthday party? Or are you serving yak-butter tea? Popular culture deals not in its distant past, or any other past, or any other culture. You know no one who longs to buy a mule or be named to court or thrown into a volcano. So the illusion, like the visual field, is complete It has no holes except books you read and soon forget. And death takes us by storm. What was that, that life? What else offered? If for him it was contract bridge, if for her it was copyright law, if for everyone it was and is an optimal mix of family and friends, learning, contribution, and joy of making and ameliorating what else is there, or was there, or will there ever be? What else is a vision or fact of time and the peoples it bears issuing from the mouth of the cosmos, from the round mouth of eternity, in a wide and parti-colored utterance. In the complex weave of this utterance like fabric, in its infinite domestic interstices, the centuries and continents and classes dwell. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky. Okay, and then what? Say you scale your own weft and see time's breadth and the length of space. You see the way the fabric both passes among the stars and encloses them. You see in the weave nearby, and aslant farther off, the peoples variously scandalized or exalted in their squares. They work on their projects they flake spear points, hoe, plant; they kill aurochs or one another; they prepare sacrifices as we here and now work on our projects. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? No one could love your children more; would you love them less? Would you change your project? To what? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox. However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, and yourself and your passions, weigh equally in the balance with those of any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow rivers, or painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted from disease then or now. Our lives and our deaths count equally, or we must abandon one-man-one-vote dismantle democracy, and assign six billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to six billion ranking whose number decreases, like gravity, with the square of the distance between us and them. What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising. Then you would know your own death better but perhaps not dread it less. Try to bring people up the wall, carry children to see it to what end? Fewer golf courses? What is wrong with golf? Nothing at all. Equality of wealth? Sure; how? The woman watching sheep over there, the man who carries embers in a pierced clay ball, the engineer, the girl who spins wool into yarn as she climbs, the smelter, the babies learning to recognize speech in their own languages, the man whipping a slave's flayed back, the man digging roots, the AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 22 woman digging roots, the child digging roots what would you tell them? And the future people what are they doing? What excitements sweep peoples here and there from time to time? Into the muddy river they go, into the trenches, into the caves, into the mines, into the granary, into the sea in boats. Most humans who were ever alive lived inside one single culture that never changed for hundreds of thousands of years; archaeologists scratch their heads at so conservative and static a culture. Over here, the rains fail; they are starving. There, the caribou fail; they are starving. Corrupt leaders take the wealth. Not only there but here. Rust and smut spoil the rye. When pigs and cattle starve or freeze, people die soon after. Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors. People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves. Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end? Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

C. “'Bossy' Is More Than a Word to Women” by Deborah Tannen

What do Sonia Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg share with innumerable other prominent women? They've all been called bossy. And why, with all the important issues women deal with, should anyone pick a fight over a word, as Sandberg's Lean In team, together with the Girl Scouts, have just done? The campaign, called "Ban Bossy," claims that the word holds women back. How can a word — especially a weak one like "bossy" — do that? It isn't even as virulent as that other word that starts with "b," which is also hurled at women. What's in a word? Sotomayor and Clinton are Exhibit A for why the word matters: that others had called them bossy was used to argue they were ill-suited for the public offices they sought. But the way this word can work against women in public life has roots that go deep — way back to the family and the playground. When I wrote You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, I was struck that girls and women are so often called "bossy." Don't men tell others what to do just as often, if not more often? I encountered the same question when I wrote a book about sisters, You Were Always Mom's Favorite! Again and again, women told me that their oldest sister was bossy. Sandberg an oldest sister So I wasn't surprised to read in Sandberg's book — right up front — that she is an oldest sister. This family dynamic throws into relief the injustice of the label: Oldest sisters are put in the position of boss in relation to younger siblings, but when they behave as that position requires, they're resented for it — and called bossy. Why does this happen to sisters more than brothers, and to prominent women but not prominent men? AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 23 Research on children at play holds a clue. Children tend to play with others of the same sex and learn to play, and talk, differently. Girls tend to use language to maintain and negotiate closeness — who's in, who's out? — by telling secrets and reassuring each other that they're the same, that no one thinks she's better than the others. Boys tend to use language to negotiate their status in the group — who's up, who's down? — by taking center stage or by talking about who's best at what. If a boy tells other boys what to do and they listen, he's the leader. That's why boys are free to — no, they're expected to — say things such as "Gimme that!" A girl who tells other girls what to do is not liked, and girls who aren't liked are often locked out. If boys aren't liked, they might be mistreated but are still allowed to play. Difference in language Given this risk of being locked out, girls have to find other ways to get their way, such as making suggestions starting with "let's." When girls and boys become women and men, those same ways of talking carry over into the workplace. I once had high-ranking women and men record everything they said for a week, then shadowed them and interviewed them and their co-workers. I found that women in authority, more often than men in similar positions, used language in ways that sounded a lot like what researchers observed among girls at play. Instead of "do this," women managers would say "let's …" or "what you could do," or soften the impact by making their statements sound like questions. In short, women at work are in a double bind: If they talk in these ways, which are associated with and expected of women, they seem to lack confidence, or even competence. But if they talk in ways expected of someone in authority, they are seen as too aggressive. That's why "bossy" is not just a word but a frame of mind. Let's agree to stop sending girls and women the message that they'll be disliked — or worse — if they exercise authority. Wait. I'll put that differently: Think twice before calling a woman at work, a girl on the playground — or your oldest sister — bossy.

D. “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell, first published in the magazine New Writing in 1936.

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans. All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 24 been flogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty. One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it. The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant. AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 25 The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth. I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home. But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 26 how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him. It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam- roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward. When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay. I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 27 In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing das and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon. Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 28 VI: TEXT TYPE #4: POETRY

A. “Mornings After” by Fleur Adcock

The surface dreams are easily remembered: I wake most often with a comforting sense of having seen a pleasantly odd film— nothing too outlandish or too intense; of having, perhaps, befriended animals, made love, swum the Channel, flown in the air without wings, visited Tibet or Chile: simple childish stuff. Or else the rare recurrent horror makes its call upon me: I dream one of my sons is lost or dead, or that I am trapped in a tunnel underground; but my scream is enough to recall me to my bed.

Sometimes, indeed I congratulate myself on the nice precision of my observation: on having seen so vividly a certain colour; having felt the sharp sensation of cold water on my hands; the exact taste of wine or peppermints. I take pride in finding all my senses operative even in sleep. So, with nothing to hide,

I amble through my latest entertainment again, in the bath or going to work, idly amused at what the night has offered; unless this is a day when a sick jerk recalls to me a sudden different vision: I see myself inspecting the vast slit of a sagging whore; making love with a hunchbacked hermaphrodite; eating worms or shit; or rapt upon necrophily or incest. And whatever loathsome images I see are just as vivid as the pleasant others. I flush and shudder: my God, was that me?

Did I invent so ludicrously revolting a scene? And if so, how could I forget until this instant? And why now remember? Furthermore (and more disturbing yet) are all my other forgotten dreams like these? Do I, for hours of my innocent nights, wallow content and charmed through verminous muck, rollick in the embraces of such frights?

And are the comic or harmless fantasies AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 29 I wake with merely a deceiving guard, as one might put a Hans Andersen cover on a volume of the writing of De Sade?

Enough, enough. Bring back those easy pictures, Tibet or antelopes, a seemly lover, or even the black tunnel. For the rest, I do not care to know. Replace the cover.

B. “Mrs. Kessler” by Edward Lee Masters

Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army, And he drew six dollars a month as a pension, And stood on the corner talking politics, Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs; And I supported the family by washing, Learning the secrets of all the people From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts. For things that are new grow old at length, They’re replaced with better or none at all: People are prospering or falling back. And rents and patches widen with time; No thread or needle can pace decay, And there are stains that baffle soap, And there are colors that run in spite of you, Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress. Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets The laundress, Life, knows all about it. And I, who went to all the funerals Held in Spoon River, swear I never Saw a dead face without thinking it looked Like something washed and ironed.

C. “Remembering Sharpeville” by Dennis Brutus What is important about Sharpeville is not that seventy died: nor even that they were shot in the back retreating, unarmed, defenseless and certainly not the heavy caliber slug that tore through a mother’s back and ripped through the child in her arms killing it Remember Sharpeville AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 30 bullet-in-the-back day Because it epitomized oppression and the nature of society more clearly than anything else; it was the classic event Nowhere is racial dominance more clearly defined nowhere the will to oppress more clearly demonstrated what the world whispers apartheid with snarling guns the blood lust after South Africa spills in the dust Remember Sharpeville Remember bullet-in-the-back day And remember the unquenchable will for freedom Remember the dead and be glad.

D. “To Change the World is Enough” by Alice Walker To change the world enough you must cease to be afraid of the poor. We experience your fear as the least pardonable of humiliations; in the past it has sent us scurrying off daunted and ashamed into the shadows. Now, the world ending the only one all of us have known we seek the same fresh light you do: the same high place and ample table. The poor always believe there is room enough for all of us; the very rich never seem to have heard of this. AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 31 In us there is wisdom of how to share loaves and fishes however few; we do this everyday. Learn from us, we ask you. We enter now the dreaded location of Earth's reckoning; no longer far off or hidden in books that claim to disclose revelations; it is here. We must walk together without fear. There is no path without us.

AISE-West IB English Summer Assignment 32