novel title
Answer the following prompts in a Word document and upload (not copy/paste) your document to the turnin link.
1. Use a two-column chart to compare Devon in the winter to Devon in the summer.
2. Diagram the plot of the novel using the five plot structure terms.
3. By the end of the novel, what has Gene learned about the following?
1. Hatred
2. Jealousy
3. Friendship
4. War
the sources if you need it
Weekly Writing Assignment
Expectations and Grading Rubric
Expectations:
1. All responses should be typed in a Word document and uploaded through the assignment link in the week (NOT copy/pasted).
2. All prompts require a 6-8 sentence minimum response in paragraph form.
3. Provide evidence for all answers.
4. Use MLA parenthetical citations to document quotations or ideas from outside sources or the text. It should include the author’s last name and the page number, such as the example you see at the end of this sentence (Copper 1).
Grading Rubric:
Novice Competent Proficient Advanced
Criteria 0 to 4 points
The response is totally incorrect or irrelevant or contains insufficient information to demonstrate comprehension. 5 to 6 points
The response provides a minimal answer to the task. The response provides little or no information from the passage and may include inaccuracies. OR The response relates minimally to the task. 7 to 8 points
The response provides a partial answer to the task. The response provides limited information from the passage and may include inaccuracies. 9 to 10 points
The response provides a clear, complete, and accurate answer to the task. The response provides relevant, accurate, and specific information from the selection.
1
A Separate Peace
by John Kn
owles
Chapter 1
I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was
a student there fifteen years before. It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more
perpendicular and strait
–
laced, with narrower
windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat
of varnish had been put over everything for better preservation. But, of course, fifteen years
before there had been a war going on. Perhaps the school wasn’t as well kept up in those days;
perhaps varnish, al
ong with everything else, had gone to war.
I didn’t entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made the school look like a museum, and
that’s exactly what it was to me, and what I did not want it to be. In the deep, tacit way in which
feeling become
s stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into
existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out
like a candle the day I left.
Now here it was after all, preserved by some consi
derate hand with varnish and wax. Preserved
along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded
and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar
with the absence of
fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.
Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in,
which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking:
I must
have made my escape from it.
I felt fear’s echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its
accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like
Northern Lights across black sky.
There were a couple of places now which I wanted to see. Both were fearful sites, and that was
why I wanted to see them. So after lunch at the Devon Inn I walked back toward the school. It
was a raw, nondescript time of year, toward the end of November, th
e kind of wet, self
–
pitying
November day when every speck of dirt stands out clearly. Devon luckily had very little of such
weather
—
the icy clamp of winter, or the radiant New Hampshire summers, were more
characteristic of it
—
but this day it blew wet, mood
y gusts all around me.
I walked along Gilman Street, the best street in town. The houses were as handsome and as
unusual as I remembered. Clever modernizations of old Colonial manses, extensions in Victorian
wood, capacious Greek Revival temples lined the
street, as impressive and just as forbidding as
ever. I had rarely seen anyone go into one of them, or anyone playing on a lawn, or even an open
window. Today with their failing ivy and stripped, moaning trees the houses looked both more
elegant and more l
ifeless than ever.
2
Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind walls and gates but emerged
naturally from the town which had produced it. So there was no sudden moment of encounter as
I approached it; the houses along Gilman Street bega
n to look more defensive, which meant that
I was near the school, and then more exhausted, which meant that I was in it.
It was early afternoon and the grounds and buildings were deserted, since everyone was at sports.
There was nothing to distract me as I
made my way across a wide yard, called the Far Commons,
and up to a building as red brick and balanced as the other major buildings, but with a large
cupola and a bell and a clock and Latin over the doorway
—
the First Academy Building.
In through swinging
doors I reached a marble foyer, and stopped at the foot of a long white
marble flight of stairs. Although they were old stairs, the worn moons in the middle of each step
were not very deep. The marble must be unusually hard. That seemed very likely, only t
oo likely,
although with all my thought about these stairs this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me.
It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact.
There was nothing else to notice; they of course were the same stairs I had walked
up and down
at least once every day of my Devon life. They were the same as ever. And I? Well, I naturally
felt older
—
I began at that point the emotional examination to note how far my convalescence
had gone
—
I was taller, bigger generally in relation to t
hese stairs. I had more money and success
and “security” than in the days when specters seemed to go up and down them with me.
I turned away and went back outside. The Far Common was still empty, and I
walked alone
down the wide gravel paths among those most Republican, bankerish of trees, New England
elms, toward the far side of the school.
Devon is sometimes considered the most beautiful school in New England, and even on this
dismal afternoon its powe
r was asserted. It is the beauty of small areas of order
—
a large yard, a
group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses
—
living together in contentious
harmony. You felt that an argument might begin again any time; in fact it had: out of
the Dean’s
Residence, a pure and authentic Colonial house, there now sprouted an ell with a big bare picture
window. Some day the Dean would probably live entirely encased in a house of glass and be
happy as a sandpiper. Everything at Devon slowly changed
and slowly harmonized with what
had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the
curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this
growth and harmony myself.
I would know
more about that when I had seen the second place I had come to see. So I roamed
on past the balanced red brick dormitories with webs of leafless ivy clinging to them, through a
ramshackle salient of the town which invaded the school for a hundred yards, p
ast the solid
gymnasium, full of students at this hour but silent as a monument on the outside, past the Field
House, called The Cage
—
I remembered now what a mystery references to “The Cage” had been
during my first weeks at Devon, I had thought it must be
a place of severe punishment
—
and I
reached the huge open sweep of ground known as the Playing Fields.
