Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt

Author:Cynthia Voigt [Voigt, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Ages 12 & Up
ISBN: 9780689847981
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2001-12-07T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

DICEY LOOKED out the window and made her legs stay still. Outside, wind blew the branches of the two big oaks, ripping off the last of the brown leaves and carrying them away. The sky was a bright blue, and the sun shone with a diamond hardness. The brightness of the sun and the coldness of the wind combined to mark out sharply the edges of her view. She could see each individual brick on the old building, as if the cold made each brick contract into itself. The angles of the main entranceway, the clear edge of the cement sidewalk, the flat lawn, bare and brown now, all looked as if they would be cold to touch.

Dicey crossed her ankles again, containing her impatience. She was wearing jeans and one of the rough old boys’ sweaters, a bright red one that hung loose about her torso. She had chosen it because it seemed like the kind of color her Momma’s brother Bullet would have liked, if she was right about the kind of person he had been.

Mr. Chappelle was putting off returning their papers until he had told them about the mistakes most of them had made. They were supposed to be writing these things down, the list of misspelled words, the grammar errors, the kind of topic sentence every paragraph was supposed to have. He was explaining and explaining. Everybody was quiet, just waiting for him to get finished. The thing that got Dicey was that he pretended he was doing this stuff first because it was more important than the grades. That was what he said, that the papers were a learning situation, and the grades didn’t matter.

But Dicey suspected that he was doing this dull stuff first because he knew that once he handed the papers back nobody would pay any attention to him. It wasn’t his fault, it was just the way classes went. You worked hard (or not so hard) for something, and when you got the results that job was over. The teacher might not think it was over, but the students sure did. The grade told you how well you had done (or what you got away with). The grade was what you looked for — not the red circles around mistakes. Sometimes, a teacher wrote a comment, good work (or bad work), and you looked at that, too. But mostly, everything they had to say they said in the grade. If there was something more important than the grade, Dicey wanted to know why didn’t teachers ever say anything about that, like write you a note about it on your paper. If it wasn’t worth his time to write down, how could he say it was worth hers?

She sat forward and sat back and sat forward. She looked at the clock — only fifteen minutes left; he’d have to hand the papers back soon.

“Now,” Mr. Chappelle said, “you may be interested in seeing your essays.” He smiled at his own joke, so a few kids made little fake laughing noises.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.