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ACTIVITY 1.18 continued
8 As students are reading, monitor their progress. Be sure they are engaged with the text and annotating unknown words and events, responses, and reflections. Evaluate whether the selected reading mode is effective.
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SCAFFOLDING THE TEXT-DEPENDENT QUESTIONS
5. Craft and Structure (RI.11–12.5) Paragraph
4 ends very differently than it starts. Describe how the narrator reveals the important details in the paragraph. How do the details at the beginning—and the narrator’s reflections on them—differ from the details at the end? How do those differences affect you as a reader?
6. Key Ideas and Details (RI.11–12.1) What
is the narrator’s attitude toward shooting
the elephant in paragraphs 5 and 6? Provide evidence from the text to support your answer. How does the narrator describe the elephant’s behavior and the importance of the animal in Burma? What does he say about his intentions?
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70 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Senior English
ACTIVITY 1.18
continued
Reading with a Cultural Criticism Lens
My Notes
some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when I 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 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 Dravidian5 coolie,6 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 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.
Chunk 3
5 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 white 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 metaled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet plowed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side toward 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.
6 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 want in the least to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
5 Dravidian: belonging to an ancient race in India 6 coolie: servant
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.