New Jersey Student Learning Assessments English Language Arts Grade 7

The slip wears wool this morning, gray wool pulled over the pilings. I cannot see the far tower, only a softer gray where the tower should stand.

A horn speaks from inside the wool. It does not arrive. It promises. Each note is a door that stays shut one more minute.

My ticket is a small stiff card. It knows a time. The river does not. I turn the card as if a corner could call the boat.

Then I put the card in my pocket and take the upland stair. The wool can keep the horn. My feet want pavement I can name, block by block, back toward Grove Street.

Jonah Reece arrived at the Asbury Park boardwalk with a narrow goal. He wanted three photographs of the carousel for art class and a train back to Belmar before noon. Ms. Adeyemi had signed the class up for the Saturday bucket line, but Jonah had decided the camera was the work that counted.

Tessa, a fourth grader with a green shard, asked if the piece belonged in the glass bucket or the trash bag. Jonah said he did not have time to sort other people's leftovers. He framed the carousel so the buckets stayed outside the picture.

A wave slid over the cleared sand and left the same bottle neck at Tessa's feet. She picked it up again. Jonah's second photograph caught the bucket in the corner. The carousel was sharp. The neck of the bottle shone in the bucket like a small green moon. He did not delete the frame.

He lowered the camera. The clean rail in his first plan would last only until the next push of water. He told Tessa he would stay until the glass bag was tied. The train could wait. A picture that hid the returning shard would show a beach the tide had already argued with.

Amira Solano's letter to the Kearny town council is about Lot C, the unpaved rectangle beside Frank's Creek. The creek's reeds drain toward the Hackensack. A proposal would pave Lot C for forty new parking spaces. Amira asks for a walking path instead.

She does not rest the request on a feeling about birds alone. On four school mornings she counted twenty-two great egrets feeding where the reeds meet the mud. She writes the dates in the margin so the number can be checked.

Her second piece of evidence is rain. After one storm, water stood on Lot C and sank by the next afternoon. On the paved street beside the lot, the same storm ran off in a sheet and went straight into the creek. She uses sheet for that runoff: a flat rush, not a slow drink.

Mr. Pell, who owns the hardware shop, told the council the forty spaces would bring Saturday customers. Amira answers him directly. The path would not erase the street spaces already painted in front of his store. Her claim is about water and the reeds. She does not claim the path will increase his sales, and she does not ask the council to pretend the shop has no needs.

The letter ends by separating the two ideas. A parking lot answers the question of where a car sits. The reeds answer the question of where the rain goes. Paving Lot C solves the first by giving up the second.

At the harbor museum in Highlands, Caleb Nguyen met the brass lamp his aunt Ruth kept in a room that smelled like salt and polish. He called it a cold relic. In his mind a relic was an object finished with its work, safe only if it stayed dark and locked.

Aunt Ruth turned the wick up on Friday afternoons. The lamp was not the great twin towers on the hill. It was a teaching lamp, lit on a schedule for the harbor class. Students stood at the window and watched the beam pick out a line of buoys in the channel. Ruth said the lamp kept that line. She did not mean it stored the line in a drawer. She meant it tended the line, again and again, so a boat could tell channel from shoal.

Caleb had wanted a caption that said the lamp was retired. The word retired would have pleased the part of him that liked dust and quiet. Ruth set the schedule card beside his notebook. The card listed Fridays. A retired tool does not have Fridays.

He rewrote the caption. The lamp was a working mark, small beside the towers, but still assigned to the water. Cold had been his word for unused. The brass was cold only before her hand warmed it. After that it was a signal with a job.

On Wes Okonkwo's first Saturday at a diner on Route 22 in Union, he trusted the window tickets. A ticket was a short sentence in grease pencil. Shout it, plate it, send it. He believed the fastest server was the one who never looked up.

Mrs. Gupta stopped a plate of steak and eggs at the counter. Mr. Alvarez had been coming on Saturdays for years. His usual was on no ticket until somebody remembered: no onions. The pencil had taken down what he said in a hurry that morning, which was only the usual. Wes had cooked the plate the board described. The board did not know last October.

Mrs. Gupta set two rules side by side. The ticket records what was spoken at the window today. Memory records what was meant across many Saturdays. Speed uses the first. A regular's breakfast uses both. A plate that comes back is not only a slow server's failure. It can be a fast server's missing fact.

Wes wrote no onions on the ticket himself and called the order again. He did not throw out the tickets. He stopped treating them as the whole of the customer. The window was still for speed. The counter was for the sentence the pencil had been too new to hold.

On a blueberry farm in Hammonton, Sofia Marin wanted every row in her crate count. Her uncle had promised a bonus if the crew finished the north field before the heat. Sofia's goal was a full crate from every bush, including the row marked with yellow tape.

Uncle Mateo stopped her hand at that tape. The marked row was for the birds and for the canes. If every berry left the bush, the birds that ate the insects would have nothing, and the canes cut too hard would give a thin August next year. He was not saving the row because he disliked full crates. He was saving a year.

Sofia argued that a berry left was a berry wasted. Mateo asked her to count what wasted left out. A berry in a bird's mouth was not in a crate, and it was not gone from the work of the field. A cane with some fruit still on it was a plan, not a loss.

She looked down the row. The yellow tape was a sentence she had tried to skip. Her goal changed. She would fill crates from the open rows and leave the marked row standing. The bonus could come from fruit that had been offered to the crew. It would not come from the row that had been offered to next August.

On the Delaware and Raritan Canal towpath near Griggstown, the first mile felt like a drag to Luis Ortega. Drag, in his mouth, meant a useless slowing. He had biked there to beat his cousin's time. The canal was flat, and flat should have been fast. His tires still seemed to stick.

A marker by the lock told a plain story. Mules had walked that path to pull boats. They were not there to set a record. The path was a work surface beside the water, narrow so a towline could run clear. Speed was not the job the dirt had been built for.

Luis read the marker twice because the first reading had bounced off his goal. He walked the second mile instead of riding it. Walking was not a punishment. It was a way to feel the path as a towline would have felt it, one steady pull, not a blur.

By the lock, drag had a second meaning. It was the pull the mules gave the boat. His tires had been honest. The path was asking for a pace older than a Saturday race.

At a branch library in Trenton, two shelves held stories from the city. One shelf faced the front window. The other faced a cinder-block wall. Imani Brooks, a student volunteer, noticed that the window shelf emptied by Thursday. The wall shelf kept the same spines for a month. The books were not worse. They were turned away.

Ms. Drummond, the librarian, had shelved the wall books by the year they were printed, oldest toward the dark. She said order was a kind of care. Imani said order that hid a title was a kind of silence. She did not ask to throw out the year labels. She asked to turn the local shelf toward the window, where the bus stop sent readers in with a few minutes to look.

They tried it for two weeks. A book of neighborhood sketches, Buttonwood Stairs, by a writer who lived three blocks away, went out four times. It had gone out once in the whole previous year, when a teacher had known to walk around the endcap.

Imani compared two ideas of care. Ms. Drummond's care kept a sequence. Imani's care kept a meeting between a person and a cover. The library needed the sequence so books could be found again. It also needed the meeting, or the sequence was a neat row of unread names. A story could be good and still be absent if the room never offered it to a face.

During a nor'easter at Dunecrest, a barrier town on the Jersey Shore, Captain Rios told the volunteers to hold the porch of the community center. Eli Santos heard hold and froze with a coil of rope in his hands. In his house, hold meant stop moving and wait for an adult to finish the hard part.

Rios pointed at the shutters banging on the ocean side. Hold, in her order, meant stay with the building and fasten what the wind was taking. It did not mean hide in the kitchen. It did not mean clutch the rope and watch. One hold was absence. The other was a grip.

Eli got the west shutter pinned on the third try. Spray salted his lips. A neighbor, Ms. Patel, could not reach her own latch, and Rios sent Eli across the dune walk with a spare pin. He had thought the order ended at his feet. It traveled.

When the gusts dropped, Rios checked the pins with her flashlight. Eli understood the hour differently. Holding was not a statue's stillness. It was the decision to remain useful while the wind argued. His first meaning would have left the shutter flying. His second meaning kept the porch attached to its task.

Dana Okeke wrote a column for her Newark school paper about two lunch plans. Plan A was a bulk tray of the same rice and beans, delivered by one truck, at a low price per tray. Plan B was a rotating pot from cooks on Ferry Street in the Ironbound, with a spice list posted by the line, at a higher price per day.

The principal, Mr. Lang, said the budget could love only Plan A. Dana did not answer him with a speech about taste. She brought a week of leftover counts. Under Plan A, students returned 46 trays untouched. Under a trial of Plan B, they returned 19. The dumped food had a cost the low tray price did not show.

She compared two measures on purpose. Price per tray asked what the school paid at the dock. Leftover trays asked what students would actually eat. A plan could win the first measure and lose the second. Mr. Lang's number was real. It was not the only real number.

Dana's column did not claim Plan B was cheap. It claimed a higher daily price could still waste less. She asked the board to read both columns of her table before calling the truck the careful choice. Care, in her last sentence, meant food that was eaten, not only food that was inexpensive to deliver.

In a letter to the Kettle Hook bridge committee, seventh grader Nora Blake writes about the drawbridge over a bend of the Hackensack. When the bridge lifts for a barge, a guard chains the pedestrian walk for a full hour. Nora counted twelve lifts. The bridge was up for about eight minutes each time. The chain stayed on for sixty.

The guard, Mr. Soto, told the committee a chain is simpler. One lock, one hour, no one on the walk while the span moves. Nora grants that a moving span is dangerous. She does not ask for people on the leaves while they rise. She asks for a side ramp that stays open, so a walker can cross the creek on the fixed walk beside the moving part.

Her evidence is the gap between the two times. Eight minutes is the hazard. Sixty minutes is the habit around the hazard. Patients walking to the clinic on the far bank lose the longer number, not only the shorter one. A simpler lock for the guard is a longer errand for them.

Nora's claim stays narrow. Keep the walk open by using the ramp during lifts. Do not stop the barges. Do not pretend a chain has the same cost for every person who meets it. The letter compares a guard's ease with a walker's hour and refuses to call them the same thing.

Omar Haddad stood at the overlook above the Great Falls in Paterson with his report cards in three rubber bands. The first stack was what he saw: white water, a stone wall, a crow, spray on his sleeve. The second stack was what the sign said: the falls had turned wheels for mills. The sign did not name the mill in his imagination, and it did not say a wooden wheel still turned under the walkway. The third stack was what he did not know: who worked the mill he cared about, and whether any wheel remained.

His first draft mixed the stacks. It said a wheel still turned under the walkway because he could hear water. Hearing water was a fact from the first stack. A hidden wheel was a wish. The sentence sounded certain, and the certainty was borrowed from the wrong stack.

His teacher, Ms. Rivera, asked him to keep the colors of the cards. What he saw stayed blue. What the sign said stayed green. What he did not know stayed blank. When he rewrote, the report said he saw spray and a wall. It said the sign linked the falls to mills. It said he did not know if a wheel remained.

Omar compared two ways a report can sound sure. One way earns the sure sentence with a matching note. The other way lets a roar under a walkway finish a story the notes never started. He kept the blank cards in the folder. They were part of the research because they marked the edge of it.

In the Pine Barrens, the wide sand road looked like the right way to Ruthie Cole. It was pale, open, and aimed at the fire tower she could already see. Her goal was to reach the rented cabin before the map got confusing, and the wide road seemed to promise that.

Mr. Hale, the cabin owner, shook his head. The wide road ran toward the tower and then to a paved lot used by day hikers. The cabin sat on a narrow track that followed tea-colored water. Cedar water in that part of the Barrens was dark because of the plants in it, not because it was dirty. He called the color a slow sign. A slow sign asks to be read. A wide road asks to be trusted for its width.

Ruthie wanted speed. Width felt like speed. At the first fork she still leaned toward the sand. Then she saw the water under the cedar roots, brown as tea, moving the way Hale had described. The tower was a landmark for a different errand.

Her goal changed. She wanted the dark water, because the dark water was the path to the cabin, and the pale road was a path to a lot. They walked the narrow track. The clearest-looking way can still be clear about the wrong destination. A sign does not have to be bright to tell the truth.

At Liberty State Park, Ranger Ibarra gave the class two paper maps of the same ground. The terminal map showed the old rail sheds where trains had released crowds toward the harbor. The lawn map showed picnic circles, a fountain path, and the open grass families used on warm days. Neither map was a correction of the other.

Ben Cho called the terminal useless because no train sat there now. He was reading with the lawn idea only. If a place is not a picnic, his test said it had failed. A classmate, Lila, said the lawn should be closed so the memory of the trains would stay serious. She was reading with the terminal idea only.

Ibarra asked them to hold both papers. The empty tracks explain an arrival that already happened. The lawn explains an afternoon that is happening. A visitor who wants the park to be only a museum will miss people on the grass. A visitor who wants it to be only a picnic will miss why the sheds stand where they stand.

The ranger's point is that canceling one map makes the park smaller than it is. Ben folded his word useless into a question instead. He asked what the sheds had released, and he still planned to eat lunch on the grass.

In a community garden in Camden, Andre Ellis had one goal for the block party. He wanted the last tomato row in the salsa bowl, every red fruit, so the bowl would look full in the photographs. Mrs. Chen had tied blue string around that row. The string meant seed save. Those tomatoes were to be kept, scooped, and dried so the garden would have the same variety next August.

Andre said a party is now and a seed is a guess. Mrs. Chen handed him a jar from last year's save. The plants he had been picking all summer had come from a jar like it. A full bowl that spent the seed row would be a picture of a garden borrowing against itself.

He walked the unmarked rows. They held enough tomatoes for a smaller salsa, chunky and honest, if he stopped needing the photograph to be a mountain. His goal changed. He wanted the blue-string fruit left for seed, and he wanted the salsa made from the rows that had been marked for eating.

Next August was no longer a guess sitting in the way of the party. It was the reason this August had a party at all.

Camille Ortiz spoke at Pierpoint Middle School in Hoboken about the first bell. The old bell was 7:40. For one trial week the bell was 8:10. She asked the school to keep the later time.

Her evidence was a tally of late arrivals. In the two weeks before the trial, 31 students were late. During the trial week, 12 were late. She brought the clipboard. She did not bring grades. A counselor had hoped the later bell would raise quiz scores. Camille said the tally could not carry that hope. It counted bodies through the door. It did not count points on a page.

A coach objected that a later start meant less time for morning clubs. Camille answered with the schedule she was actually proposing. The clubs would move to the afternoon for the same number of minutes. The morning slot would shrink. The club slot would not. She was not claiming every student would join. She was claiming the objection described a loss she was not asking for.

Her claim was about lateness. Beside it she kept a limit: the clipboard did not prove anything about grades. Comparing those two ideas was the point of her last minute at the microphone.

The road pull-off at High Point felt like the top to Nadia Rahman. Cars nosed the railing. The view ran across ridges toward New York and Pennsylvania, wide enough that her little brother called it the whole map. Nadia took the wide view as proof they had finished the climb. A ledge, in that moment, meant a summit. The word felt complete.

The marker was still above them. A stone stair left the pull-off and turned into trees. Her father said the obelisk, not the railing, was the high point. The road had been cut where the view was easy to park beside. Easy is not the same as highest. The ledge was a stopping place that borrowed the feeling of an ending.

They took the stair. The view from the marker was not a different landscape. It was the same ridges, plus the pull-off itself, small, with the cars looking like they had paused on a step. Nadia felt her word change. A ledge was a shelf. A shelf can hold a person and still sit under something higher.

A wide view can be honest about distance and still be short of the highest point. Nadia could see that only after the stair put the railing below her.