Page 49 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade7_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 1.5
continued
analyzing Language
My Notes
in any class activity until I brought my mother to school. I knew that meant a beating. That evening I thought about telling Mama that the teacher wanted to see her, but I didn’t get up the nerve. I didn’t get it up the next day, either. In the meantime I had to sit in the back of the room, and no kid was allowed to sit near me. I brought some comic books to school and read them under my desk.
14 Mrs. Conway was an enormously hippy woman. She moved slowly and always had a scowl on her face. She reminded me of a great white turtle with just a dash
of rouge and a touch of eye shadow. It was not a pretty sight. But somehow she made it all the way from the front of the room to the back, where I sat reading a comic, without my hearing her. She snatched the comic from me and tore it up. She dropped all the pieces on my desk, then made me pick them up and take them to the garbage can while the class laughed.
15 Then she went to her closet, snatched out a book, and put it in front of me.
16 “You are,” she sputtered, “a bad boy. A very bad boy. You cannot join the rest of
the class until your mother comes in.” She was furious, and I was embarrassed.
17 “And if you’re going to sit back here and read, you might as well read something worthwhile,” she snapped.
18 I didn’t touch the book in front of me until she had made her way back to the front of the class and was going on about something in long division. The title of the book was East o’ the Sun and the West o’ the Moon. It was a collection of Norwegian fairy tales, and I read the first one. At the end of the day, I asked Mrs. Conway if I could take the book home.
19 She looked at me a long time and then said no, I couldn’t. But I could read it every day in class if I behaved myself. I promised I would. For the rest of the week I read that book. It was the best book I had ever read. When I told Mrs. Conway I had finished, she asked me what I liked about the book, and I told her. The stories were full of magic events and interesting people and witches and strange places. It differed from Mystery Rides the Rails, the Bobbsey Twins, and a few Honeybunch books I had come across.
20 I realized I liked books, and I liked reading. Reading a book was not so much like entering a different world—it was like discovering a different language. It was a language clearer than the one I spoke, and clearer than the one I heard around me. What the books said was, as in the case of East o’ the Sun, interesting, but the idea that I could enter this world at any time I chose was even more attractive. The “me” who read the books, who followed the adventures, seemed more the real me than the “me” who played ball in the streets.
21 Mrs. Conway gave me another book to read in class and, because it was the weekend, allowed me to take it home to read. From that day on I liked
Mrs. Conway.
22 I still didn’t get to read aloud in class, but when we had a class assignment to write a poem, she would read mine. At the end of the year I got my best report card ever, including a glorious Needs Improvement in conduct.
23 It was also the golden anniversary of the school, and the school magazine used one of my poems. It was on the first page of the Jubilee Issue, and it was called “My Mother.” When I saw it, I ran all the way home to show Mama.
22 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 7
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