New Jersey Student Learning Assessments English Language Arts Grade 9

1 The piling wears a white band / 2 where last March stood. / 3 I call the band a warning.

4 My brother taps the wood / 5 and says the band is a score / 6 we have not beaten yet.

7 He climbs until his shoe / 8 covers the paint, then laughs / 9 as if the bay had lost.

10 I pull him down and watch / 11 the band come clear again. / 12 I call it the water's leaving.

A practice room at Halden Annex. ADA, first-chair trumpet, has her case open on the bench. BENNO holds his horn. On the music stand sits a silver mouthpiece with a hairline crack across the rim. A second mouthpiece, smooth and unmarked, lies in the case.

ADA: Take the pickup at measure 40. Your ear finds the pitch faster than mine.

BENNO: You have played that entrance all season. Ms. Orth already penciled your name.

ADA: I have played it safe. You will play it awake. Use this one. It feels like mine. (She nods at the cracked mouthpiece and does not mention the crack.)

BENNO plays three notes. The third note splits. He lowers the horn.

ADA: That's the horn, not you. Horns get tired in this room.

BENNO: There is a line on the rim. Let me try the mouthpiece still in your case.

ADA: That line is polish. It plays the same. Trust the sound you have. (She latches the case. The unmarked mouthpiece stays inside.)

BENNO: If the entrance splits in the gym, my name is the one Ms. Orth will hear.

ADA: If you nail it, the section looks generous. I can live with either story. We will tell Ms. Orth the entrance is yours.

She sets the cap for the cracked mouthpiece in her pocket and leaves the cracked piece on his stand. The smooth mouthpiece is still latched in the case. BENNO does not pick up the cracked piece. The hall light clicks off.

Nico ran the side spotlight for the winter dance concert at Marlin Dock High. The cue sheet said the amber special should find Amira at center on count four of her entrance. Amira entered four counts late. Nico left the special dark.

He had pulled the amber gel out of the frame and into his hoodie pocket so the miss would not be lit. After the number, Amira came to the booth and asked why the light never found her. Nico said the gel burned.

In the booth the gel was still in his pocket. It was intact. No edge was scorched. Burned was a story about equipment. The pocket was a story about a choice.

At notes, the director said Amira's absence read as a cut, not a mistake, and praised the clean look. Clean, in that praise, meant the audience saw no error. Amira smiled in a way that did not reach her eyes and said she was glad the error stayed invisible.

Nico put the gel back in the frame. He told the stage manager, loud enough for Amira to hear, that he had pulled the special on purpose. The miss became a miss again, which is what the cue sheet had been waiting to show.

A dark special had protected Amira from being seen and had also taken away the chance to be corrected in the light. Putting the gel back did not undo the concert. It undid the lie that the darkness had been a burn. The cue sheet could be true again the next time she entered.

This brief reports a nest count at the Silt Creek rookery behind Marlin Dock High. In this brief, a rookery means a group of nests in the trees, not a single heron and not the creek itself. Counts were made from the same blind on three April mornings, from 6:40 to 7:10.

Two observers agreed on 14 occupied nests the first morning and 14 the second. On the third morning they agreed on 15. The extra nest was a new stick platform in the dead oak at the east edge, seen by both observers before either one wrote the number.

A town flyer says the rookery has doubled since last year. This brief contains no count from last year. A doubling cannot be checked against a number the pages do not have.

The careful claim is narrower. Across three mornings the occupied count stayed at 14 and then 15, and the fifteenth nest was a new platform both observers saw. The brief does not say why a heron built it, and it does not say the colony will keep growing.

Occupied here means an adult was on the nest or a chick was visible during the half hour. Empty stick piles were not added. The 14 and the 15 are occupied nests, not every pile of sticks in the trees.

The flyer uses doubled as if the growth were already measured. The blind measured three mornings. A reader who stops where the observers stopped can say the count held and one platform was new. A reader who needs last year will not find it in this brief.

The rooftop horn at North Silt High should be silent during the last period, and dismissal for students still inside should be a light in the main lobby. The horn was mounted on the roof to reach the athletic fields. The fields now have their own courtyard speaker.

The clinic log for May lists 22 afternoons when a therapist noted the horn during a session, and 3 afternoons when the note says the session paused. Those are counts of notes, not a guess about feelings.

A patient told the front desk she lost the sentence she had been trying to say the moment the horn went off. I am not asking anyone to invent her words. I am asking the school to hear what a blast does to a sentence already in someone's mouth.

I volunteer at that desk on Tuesdays, and I wrote those pauses into the afternoon sheet myself. The 3 is not a number I found in a speech. It is a number I entered while the sessions were still on the schedule.

Coaches say students on the field need a sound. They do. The courtyard speaker can chirp once at a lower volume for the field. The rooftop horn is louder than that job requires, and it is the horn the clinic log names. Replacing every sound is not the request. Replacing the rooftop blast during last period is.

Silence the rooftop horn during last period, and let the lobby light dismiss the students indoors. The horn was mounted to reach the fields. The fields have a speaker now. What the roof still reaches, according to the May log, is the clinic across Oak Street.

The wardrobe note said the gray apron had to be ready before places. Lila found a three-inch tear at the hem and knew the nail by the prop trunk had caught it when she carried the apron past. She threaded a needle with matching gray and began a stitch so small the tear would look like a seam.

She planned to call the tear wear if anyone asked. Wear was easier than the nail. It suggested ordinary use, not a hand catching thread on metal. The stitch went in even and tight. From a seat in row F, the hem would look never torn.

Ms. Quill, who runs wardrobe, passed with a clipboard and said the hem looked mended already. Lila heard the praise and felt it land on the lie she had not spoken yet. A neat stitch can be true about thread and false about cause.

She unpicked the row. The tear opened again, obvious on the table. She set the apron beside the trunk and put her finger on the nail head. She told Ms. Quill she had caught it there. The mend, she said, could wait until the nail had been seen.

Ms. Quill nodded, marked the trunk for tape, and handed the needle back. Lila stitched the hem a second time. The second stitch was no prettier than the first. The difference was that the cause was already on the clipboard.

Before places, the apron hung where the note had said it should. The hem held. Lila did not use the sentence about wear. The tear had been hers, the nail was taped, and the stitch that remained was the one made after the truth, not the one made to hide it.

Reed Wharf Biology keeps 40 oyster cages under the school dock. Each week for 16 weeks the crew measured shell height on the same 40 cages. The mean height moved from 18 millimeters in week 1 to 31 millimeters in week 16. The sheet records growth in those cages.

A blog post said the cages cleaned the whole river. The lab sheet never uses the word cleaned, and it never measures the whole river. It measures shell height in 40 cages.

Here, the printed claim treats the rise as growth in the measured cages. It does not mean the water met a swimming standard, and it does not mean every oyster in the bay grew. The 31 is a mean for these cages, not a promise about unmarked beds.

One cage, number 12, lost its lid in week 9 and was dropped from the mean after that week. The note says the 31 excludes cage 12. A reader who adds cage 12 back in is using a cage the crew stopped measuring.

The crew's claim, printed under the table, is this: mean shell height in the measured cages rose from 18 to 31 millimeters over 16 weeks. That sentence stays inside the table.

The blog's word cleaned suggests a finished purification of a whole river. The table supports a smaller sentence about shells in the measured cages, with cage 12 left out after week 9. A bigger verb does not enlarge the measurement.

The comment box outside the main office should stay, and the school should publish a monthly tally of topics without names. The box was screwed to the wall so a student who will not speak at the microphone still has a slot.

I empty the box each Friday as an office aide. In September I logged 40 slips. Eighteen were about the lunch line, 9 about the late bus, 7 about club funding, and 6 about other matters. The tally is a count I made from the paper in the box, not a survey I invented.

One slip, unsigned, said only that the writer eats in the stairwell and nothing else. I filed it with the lunch-line slips because it was about eating at school. A tally can hold that topic. A name on that slip would point to a person the box was built to protect.

Some staff want the slips read aloud at the microphone with names attached, so complaints are owned. That kind of ownership would expose students who used the box because they will not speak into a mic. The box cannot serve the quiet student and the microphone at the same time.

A posted tally of topics lets the lunch line, the late bus, and club funding show their weight: 18, 9, and 7. The 6 stay grouped as other. No handwriting goes on the bulletin board.

Keep the slot, and publish the monthly topics without names. The box was screwed to the wall so a student who will not take the microphone still has a way in. A tally keeps that way in. Reading names aloud would make the slot a microphone after all.

In the boat-shop elective, the keel drawing showed a wrong offset of 14 centimeters. The shop plan called for 11. Imani Ruiz erased the 14 and wrote 11. The correction was in her pencil. Cole had been standing at the same table, and the college counselor was writing Cole's recommendation that week.

When Mr. Dane asked who fixed the offset, Cole started to answer. Imani spoke first and said they had both looked. It was not quite a lie and not quite the pencil. They had both looked was a sentence that shared a credit her eraser had done alone.

She told herself the share was temporary. A recommendation needed a clean story, and in her mind a clean story was one with no public mistake in it. The drawing did not look spared. It looked accurate, which is a different kindness from a kindness that hides the hand.

On Friday Mr. Dane set the drawing on the bench and asked for initials beside the correction before it went to the shop folder. Cole's hand hovered. Imani put her initials, I.R., next to the 11. Then she said, so Cole could hear it before Mr. Dane wrote anything more, that the eraser was hers.

Cole nodded. He did not argue for the shared sentence. Mr. Dane wrote Imani's initials on the folder tab and still listed Cole's sanding on the week's log. The log did not give Imani the sanding, and it did not give Cole the eraser.

Imani looked at the ghost of the 14 under the 11. The ghost was the error. The initials were the repair. Sharing the look had been a gift she could not leave on a page that asked for a name. The page got the name that matched the eraser.

The studio annealer cools glass so a finished piece does not crack from its own heat. The log records the start temperature and the temperature each hour until the piece is below 200 degrees. A schedule posted on the kiln says a bowl this size needs four hours to make that drop.

On March 3 the log shows a bowl pulled at hour 2, still at 410 degrees. The note for March 4 says that bowl cracked on the shelf. On March 18 another piece was pulled at hour 2, and the next line says it cracked as well. Two early pulls, two cracks.

A poster by the door says the oven forgives a rushed piece. Forgives suggests a mercy that cancels the mistake. The log does not show mercy. It shows two cracks after two early pulls.

The claim the log can support is limited. For these two recorded rushes, the pieces cracked. The log does not say every rushed piece in the world will crack, and it does not say a piece that stays the full four hours cannot fail for a different reason. It says what these lines say.

Students sometimes treat the annealer as a warmer. The schedule treats it as a controlled drop. A warmer would be a place you leave early because the work feels done. The schedule says the work of cooling is the hours still on the page.

Read the poster beside the log, not instead of it. Forgives is a comforting word. The March lines are a record. A record of two cracks is the evidence. The comforting word is not.

The wetland plot beside the east gym should stay fenced from December through March. The fence is a pause, not a refusal of winter. Snow can still fall on the hill next to the plot. Feet should not cross the stems we are counting.

I am on the plot crew. With a partner I counted stems inside the fence: 126 in November and 119 in March. The unfenced demonstration strip beside the tape went from 40 stems in November to 11 in March, after one snow day when students walked it. The two counts were made with the same method. The fenced plot's change, from 126 to 119, is smaller.

I watched a freshman step off the tape because the hill looked unused, and he froze when he saw the broken stems stuck to his boot. The hill looked empty. The blue thread on those stems said it was not.

Some students say a fence through winter wastes a good sledding slope. The slope they want is the open hill on the gym side of the tape, which is not inside the plot. The fence does not close that hill. It closes the rectangle where the stems are flagged.

Blue thread marks a stem the crew is still counting. A stem that is stepped on can disappear from the March number. The drop from 40 to 11 on the walked strip is the evidence that feet change the count.

Leave the fence up from December through March. Winter is not cancelled. The fence is a pause, not a refusal of winter, and the hill beside the tape can take the sleds. The rectangle inside the tape should still be a count in March, not a path.

The old swing bridge at Bram's Landing ends in open air. The middle span was removed, and the gear that used to turn the bridge is locked with a county bar. Jules wanted to film himself at the gap for an application portfolio. He said a still picture of a railing would not show nerve.

I said the gap was a place the county had already decided we should not cross. Nerve, in his sentence, meant a body out where the span used to be. I would not film that. We argued until the word portfolio came out of him, smaller than the dare had been.

He was not only chasing a thrill. The portfolio needed a clip that looked bold, and the locked bridge was the boldest object on our walk. When he heard himself say portfolio, he stopped smiling. The motive was real, and it embarrassed him more than the refusal did.

He pointed at the locked gear and said we could film the bar, the teeth, and the sign that reads span removed. That shot would show a machine that used to work and a decision to stop it. It would not show a person pretending the decision was still open.

We filmed the gear. Jules narrated one sentence: the bridge does not turn. He did not step past the bar. In the portfolio the clip is eighteen seconds, and the gap appears only as empty air beyond a lock.

On the walk back he said the first idea would have made the county's limit look like a dare he had won. The clip we kept makes the limit visible. A closed bridge can be the subject without being reopened for a camera.

In March 1911 the town clock at Bram's Landing went silent. This brief asks what a reader can claim about that silence. Two sources sit on the table. They do not say the same kind of thing.

The Landing Beacon of March 8 wrote that the clock stopped in grief the week of the harbor storm. Grief, in that sentence, suggests a feeling, as if the clock shared the town's sorrow. A clock does not feel. The word makes a mechanical gap sound mournful.

The maintenance ledger for the courthouse clock lists a snapped cable on March 6 and a replaced cable on March 12. The clock is marked running again on March 15. The ledger gives a part, two dates, and a return to running. It does not give an emotion.

A modern plaque under the clock says the silence was a vigil. Vigil, like grief, frames the gap as a ceremony. The plaque cites no ledger line. It cites the mood of the story the paper told.

The paper's phrase, the week of the storm, is less precise than the ledger's dates. A reader can prefer the dates without calling the paper useless. The paper records what the town was willing to say. The ledger records a part.

What the cable shows is a snap and a replacement. Grief and vigil remain words about feeling and ceremony. They can be quoted as the town's language. They cannot be promoted into the cause of a snapped cable. The silence has a part in the ledger. The sorrow is a story beside it.

The activity bus should add a stop at Hale and 5th, in front of the clinic. The route was drawn to meet students where the day actually ends. For eleven riders, the day ends at a shift, not at the corner four blocks north.

The roster lists 11 students whose clinic shifts end at 4:10. The current stop is Hale and 9th. Those students walk the cut-through between the blocks, and the cut-through has no streetlight. I have ridden this bus since freshman year, and I have counted those walkers on the afternoons I am aboard.

Last Thursday June stood under the clinic awning with her scrubs still on, watching the bus skip the awning and head for the stop four blocks north. She was not late to the stop we have. She was at the stop we refuse to make.

The elementary schools on this run open their doors at 4:40. A driver trial in September added the clinic stop and recorded 90 extra seconds. Even with that stop, the sheet shows arrival at the elementary door at 4:28. The trial did not make the children wait past the opening.

Parents have said an extra stop will unravel the route. The trial is the evidence about time, and the trial's extra time is 90 seconds, not a missed pickup. Unravel suggests a whole route coming apart. The sheet shows a route that still arrived.

Add the stop at Hale and 5th. The route was drawn to meet students where the day actually ends. Eleven clinic shifts end on that awning. A map that skips the awning is a drawing of a corner, not of the day those riders had.

After rehearsal, section leader Renata told Calvin, in front of the violas, that his shift into measure 12 was sloppy. Sloppy suggested carelessness rather than a place to put his hand. Calvin's bow stopped. He said he would fix it, and the word sounded like a door closing.

In his case that night he found a sticky note in Renata's handwriting: he was fine, he should not worry, and the shift was basically there. Fine, after sloppy, did not name a repair. It patted the same spot the public word had struck. Basically there suggested the note was almost a correction and had decided not to be one.

Calvin played the shift the same way on Thursday. Renata heard it from the front stand and did not speak during the run. Afterward she asked him to stay. She said one sentence: his first finger was late to the upper string, and the bow was already moving. That was a fix. It could be practiced. Fine could not.

Calvin tried the measure twice with the finger early and the bow waiting. The second time the shift landed. He did not thank her for the sticky note. He thanked her for the sentence he could use.

Renata tore the note in half and dropped it in the bin by the door. She said the public word had been too wide and the private word had been too soft, and neither had given him a place to put his hand. The third conversation was the one that respected him.

Measure 12 at the next rehearsal was not perfect. It was on time. Sloppy had named a flaw without a handle. Fine had tried to erase the flaw. The sentence about the late finger gave the flaw a shape he could change, and the change was the respect.

The environmental science class sampled a drainage swale on campus after a January melt. This brief reports conductivity, a measure of how well the water carries an electrical charge, often raised by dissolved salt. It does not report a poison, a fish count, or a legal violation.

Three sites were sampled once each on the same afternoon. Site A, the parking-lot drain, measured 1,840 microsiemens per centimeter. Site B, midway in the swale, measured 1,210. Site C, at the marsh edge, measured 490. A lab tap used as a comparison measured 140.

The pattern in this set is a drop from the lot drain to the marsh edge. The highest reading is Site A. The lowest field reading is Site C. The tap is lower still, and it is not part of the swale. The tap shows the meter can read water that has not run off the lot.

A poster in the hallway said the parking lot is poisoning the marsh. Poisoning suggests an intended lethal harm. The meter did not identify a substance by name, did not count dead animals, and did not state an intent. The brief's word for the lot-drain reading is elevated, set against the tap.

Elevated here means higher conductivity than the comparison tap and higher than the downstream sites in this sample. It does not mean the marsh is dead. Site C is still above the tap, at 490 against 140, so the brief also does not say the edge matches tap water.

The claim that fits the afternoon is this: in these four readings, conductivity was strongest at the lot drain and weaker toward the marsh edge, and all three field sites read higher than the tap. A poster that says poisoning claims a harm and a motive this meter did not measure.

Mrs. Adeyemi's note said to leave the camera under the bench if she was not home. I set it there and almost left. A pale scratch crossed the lens ring. I had done it that morning on a zipper, and the scratch had not been in the checkout photo from Monday.

On the walk over I practiced a sentence: the scratch was already there. Already there would make the scratch older than my hands. The sentence was ready, which is not the same as being true. True would cost the clean return I wanted.

I stood at the bench with the sentence in my mouth and the camera in the shadow. A scratch in shadow can look like a reflection. I did not want a reflection to do the work of a fact. I carried the camera back to the sidewalk, where the light was plain, and photographed the ring.

The photo showed the scratch as a bright arc, not as a trick of the porch. I printed it in the library, wrote my name and Monday's checkout date on the back, and rubber-banded the print to the strap. The band was tight enough that the photo would not blow into the yard and become nobody's.

I set the camera under the bench again. The note's instruction was finally followed, and the scratch came with it. The sentence about the scratch already being there stayed unsaid. What I left instead was a picture I could be asked about.

A clean return would have matched the hiding sentence and hidden the zipper. The return I made matched the note and the morning. Under the bench, the camera was where she had asked, and the arc on the strap was mine.