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aCTIVITy 4.5
Finding Truth in Comedy
learNING sTraTeGIes:
Think-Pair-Share, Marking
the Text, Metacognitive Markers, Questioning the Text, Rereading, Close Reading, Discussion Groups, Socratic Seminar, Drafting
About the Author
Dave Barry (b. 1947) was a humor columnist for the Miami Herald until 2005. His work there won him the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1988. He has also written novels and children’s books and continues to write articles for a variety of magazines. Much of Barry’s work provides humorous commentary on current social issues.
essay
my Notes
Learning Targets
• Collaborate to analyze a humorous essay in a Socratic Seminar.
• Write to explain how an author conveys universal truths through humor.
Preview
In this activity, you will read a humorous essay and think about how people use comedy to discuss serious or important topics.
Setting a Purpose for Reading
• As you read the essay, underline words and phrases that are intended to be humorous.
• Circle unknown words and phrases. Try to determine the meaning of the words by using context clues, word parts, or a dictionary.
• Place an exclamation point by text that deals with a universal truth.
I’ve got a few pet peeves about sea creatures
by Dave Barry
Chunk 1
1 Pets are good, because they teach children important lessons about life, the main
one being that, sooner or later, life kicks the bucket.
2 With me, it was sooner. When I was a boy, my dad, who worked in New York City, would periodically bring home a turtle in a little plastic tank that had a little plastic island with a little plastic palm tree, as is so often found in natural turtle habitats. I was excited about having a pet, and I’d give the turtle a fun pet name like Scooter. But my excitement was not shared by Scooter, who, despite residing in a tropical paradise, never did anything except mope around.
3 Actually, he didn’t even mope “around”: He moped in one place without moving, or even blinking, for days on end, displaying basically the same vital signs as an ashtray. Eventually I would realize—it wasn’t easy to tell—that Scooter had passed on to that
272 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 8
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