Pennsylvania System of School Assessment English Language Arts Grade 7

I came to the fence above Altoona's curve to count every car until the number proved the night was too long to stand in. Coal, then box, then a blank white tank, each one a tick I could hold in my mouth.

The rail hummed before the engine showed. My count broke when two cars wore the same rust and I could not say which tick was which. A worker on the far platform lifted a lantern and did not look up at the fence at all.

I stopped counting. The last wheel clicked past the joint and left a quiet that was not empty. It was the sound of the track remembering the weight, then agreeing to be only track.

What I carried home was not the total. It was the space after the lantern dipped, when the curve held nothing I had to number and the night was simply long enough.

To the Erie City Council: I am asking for a painted crosswalk and a stop sign where students from the middle school nearest the bayfront cross after band. I am not asking you to close the path to drivers or to move the school. On eight afternoons I stood at that gap and counted. Sixty-four students crossed. Nineteen of them waited while a car rolled through without slowing. I wrote nineteen while I was standing there.

A council member said a painted line will not stop a driver who already ignores the road. That is partly true. Paint is not a wall. I still want the line because the crossing is invisible now: gravel, then asphalt, then gravel, with no mark that says people belong in the middle. A sign gives a driver something to disobey on purpose. Today a driver can say there was nothing to see.

Please do not turn this into speed bumps on every bayfront block or a ban on evening deliveries. The warehouse gate one street north already has a guard and did not appear in my count. I want one crossing at one gap, painted before the November concerts, when band lets out after dark. A line is a small change. An unmarked gap is where those nineteen waits happened.

The neighborhood tour in Scranton met at the corner where the old breaker wall still shows black brick under peeling white. Jonah had brought a bucket of fresh paint and a roller. "Cover it," he told Ms. Pell, who led the walk. "If we want people to stay, the block should look finished." He pictured a smooth wall and a photo that could go on a poster without explaining soot.

Ms. Pell did not take the roller. She handed him a photocopy of a 1924 pay sheet a retired miner had lent the library. The names were pencil that had eaten into the paper. "Those men walked through the gate that stood where you want to paint," she said. "If the brick goes white, the gate goes with it. A guest can like a clean street and still not be lied to."

A boy on the tour asked why the wall looked dirty. Jonah started to say it was a problem the city had not fixed. He stopped. The dark was not a stain sitting on top of the brick. It was the brick, burned by years of coal dust at the loading doors. Paint would hide the dust. It would also hide the doors.

He left the bucket unopened. At the end of the block he asked whether a small plaque could name the gate and the pay sheet. The white he had wanted would have made a simpler picture. The picture he wanted now was the brick as it was, with a sentence beside it so a visitor would know what the dark meant.

The westbound has just been called for platform three at the Harrisburg Transportation Center. A clarinet case sits on the bench between two students from the same district. The next train after this one is forty minutes later.

NIA: It has been here since we sat down. If it were mine, I would want it at the lost-items window before the next train. OMAR: If we turn it in, we miss the westbound. Nobody is even looking for it. NIA: You do not know that. You know we have not seen them.

OMAR: It is latched. We are not opening it. A closed case on a bench is not an emergency. NIA: A closed case is how you lose a clarinet. The tag says H. Alvarez, and there is a school sticker from our district. That is a person, not a piece of furniture. OMAR: Then call the number on the tag. Do not make us walk back upstairs. NIA: The number is smudged. The window is not.

NIA: I am taking it up. You can catch this train. OMAR: Forty minutes is a long connector. It is shorter than explaining to Alvarez that we saw the sticker and left. I will come up with you. NIA: Bring the case. I will hold our tickets so we do not set them on the bench and start a second search.

The class sheet for French Creek said healthy water looks clear. Elena copied that line into her notebook before the van left Phoenixville. At the first riffle she could see pebbles, so she wrote healthy and capped her pen. Mr. Shah shook his head over a tray of kicked-up gravel. The tray held two mayfly nymphs and a stonefly. He pointed to a ditch one bend downstream, where the water was even clearer and the tray came up empty.

"Clear can mean nothing is in it," he said. "A lawn treatment washed through here last week. The insects that need this creek are gone, and the water looks like a picture of clean." Elena had wanted a simple test: if she could see the bottom, the creek was fine. The empty tray would not let that sentence stay simple.

She added a second line under healthy: clear, and also living. On the ride back she did not cross out the sheet's advice. She wrote beside it that clear water still has to be checked for what it can support. The pebbles at the first riffle had been good news only because the nymphs were there with them. Beauty in the water, she decided, was not evidence. It was an invitation to look again.

Our school paper asked whether Lancaster Central Market should drop the early Tuesday visit so vendors can sell from the opening bell. I am arguing to keep that one morning, from eight to nine, for a single class with a teacher. I am not arguing to reserve the whole day or to make vendors skip a Saturday.

Last month our class bought from eleven stands during that hour and from the same eleven a week later at noon. At noon we were in the way. Three vendors asked us to come back when we could decide faster. During the early hour those same vendors had time to explain how a head of cabbage was priced. People say a class spends less than a lunch crowd. Our receipts do not deny it. The early hour brought in less at the cheese stand. It brought explanations we cannot get when the line reaches the door.

Keep the limit tight. One weekday morning, one class at a time, and a teacher who has already listed the stands. If the market board wants more proof than our eleven, try the hour for six Tuesdays and post the sales beside the number of questions answered. A slower hour can still be a useful hour. Usefulness, in a market that also teaches, is not only the size of the receipt.

At the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Luis wanted the outdoor pump to bang. He told the guide, Ms. Rourke, that a quiet engine would put the visiting fifth grade to sleep. He had a recording on his phone of a modern drill, all clatter and alarms, and he asked to play it over the wooden derrick while the class walked up. "They need to feel how big oil is," he said.

Ms. Rourke set the phone face down on the rail. The reconstructed pump moved with a small, patient knock. She had him read the 1859 note on the placard: the well's first job was to bring up oil that seeped, not to roar. Neighbors had complained about noise from later fields. This machine mattered because it was early and awkward, a thing a person could watch piece by piece.

Luis watched one rod rise and drop. The knock was dull. It was also timed to the work. His recording would have covered that timing with a sound from a different century. The fifth graders were not asleep. Two of them were counting the rises out loud, the way he had refused to do.

He pocketed the phone. "Leave the recording off," he told Ms. Rourke. "If they can hear this knock, they can ask why it is so small." The size he had wanted was volume. The size he walked them toward was the distance between a first pump and the noise that came after it.

The school station in State College taped an interview with a flood-map librarian from Lock Haven. On the first edit, Hana deleted every silence longer than a breath. She told her producer, "Dead air is a mistake. If she needs time, I can cover it with music." The librarian had stopped for four seconds before saying where the 1972 water reached a particular porch. Hana marked those seconds in red.

Her producer, Mr. Ibarra, played the cut and then the raw tape. In the cut, the answer arrived polished: "Above the second step." In the raw tape, the librarian's pencil moved, and the four seconds held the sound of paper. "She is not lost," he said. "She is checking a memory against a map. If you fill that, you turn checking into certainty."

Hana listened again without her finger on the delete key. The music she had planned was a bright theme used for sports scores. Under that theme, the porch would sound like a result. She did not want a score. She wanted the moment a person refuses to guess.

In the version that aired, the four seconds stayed. Hana wrote a line for the host to read afterward: the pause is the librarian looking, not the station failing. Dead air, she had thought, meant nobody was working. On this tape, the quiet was the work.

A warm March in Adams County pushed peach buds ahead of the usual week. Neighbors told grower Celia Dunn to pick early in July before a storm could bruise the fruit. She did not. Her log from the year before showed that peaches picked at the first blush measured twelve pounds of sugar in a hundred pounds of fruit. Peaches left until the ground color turned from green to gold measured fourteen. Those extra two pounds were taste, not decoration.

The early fruit also stored worse. Of forty boxes rushed to a stand in Gettysburg, nine came back soft at the center. Of forty boxes picked after the gold showed, two came back. Celia taped both counts to the packing-shed door, where pickers could see them without a speech. She still watched the radar. Waiting was not the same as ignoring weather. If a hail warning covered the ridge, she would pick the rows most likely to be hit and leave the sheltered slope.

A buyer should not conclude that late always means better. A peach left past gold can go mealy. Celia's rule was a window, not a dare. She started the season wanting the earliest box on the stand, because early fruit sold as a prize. She ended it wanting the gold ground color, even if another grower's baskets arrived first. On the crate card she wrote that the prize is a peach that tastes like the number it earned.

I am here to ask the York council to repair the plank walk over Codorus Creek at the park, not to replace it with a road. Last spring I counted people using it on six Saturday mornings. Eighty-one crossings were on foot, with strollers or fishing poles. Four crossings were bicycles that were walked, not ridden. None were cars, because a car does not fit. A road would not serve the users I counted. It would replace them.

Some of you have said new asphalt would be easier to plow. I believe you. Boards splinter, and last February two planks cracked after an ice storm. That is a real maintenance cost. I am not asking you to pretend boards are magic. I am asking you to spend the repair on the walk people already use. A road wide enough for a truck would cut the playground off from the water and invite turns a child cannot predict.

Leave the request at repair: replace the cracked planks, add a second handrail, and post the weight a footbridge can hold. Do not read this as a demand for lights, a parking lot, or a boat ramp. If this year's budget covers only the cracked boards, do those and schedule the rail. A narrower fix is still a fix. The creek does not need a street. The people on those eighty-one crossings need the walk to stay a walk.

Priya's first draft for the Allentown school paper called the factory whistle a charm. She had grown up hearing it at three, when her aunt left the dye house, and she wanted a feature about memory: neighbors smiling, a paragraph of history, and no complaints. The city was considering silencing the whistle after new apartments opened across the street. Her draft treated that silence as an insult.

Then she interviewed Mr. Santos on the second floor of those apartments. He worked nights at the hospital and slept at three. "Charm is a word for people who are awake," he said. The whistle did not remind him of an aunt. It ended his sleep. Priya checked the city's notice. The proposal was not to erase the factory. It was to end one blast that carried into bedrooms.

She went back to the dye-house gate and stood with her aunt at the shift change. Her aunt still loved the sound. She called it a bell that meant the day had a border. Both sentences were true, and a feature that kept only the smile would be half an article. Priya deleted charm and wrote signal. A signal can be loved and still be too loud for the room it enters.

The piece she filed quoted the aunt and Mr. Santos in the same column. It did not tell the city how to vote. It told readers that a memory and a ruined sleep were happening at the same hour, and that choosing a word like charm too early had almost hidden one of them.

The pond behind the lodge at Tobyhanna wore a skin of ice that looked like bottle glass. Andre wanted to walk to the middle because that was where the light sat, and a photo from the edge would include the dock he was tired of seeing. His younger cousin, Bea, read the sign nailed to the rail. It required four inches or more before any step off the shoveled path, and today's measured thickness was three. "The sign is for tourists," Andre said. "We know this pond."

Bea did not argue about knowing. She asked where the three had been measured. The line under the number said the hole was punched at dawn by the lodge keeper, thirty steps from shore, and that the ice can thin where a spring feeds the far side. Andre's plan needed that far side. The sign had answered the plan before he finished describing it.

He put the camera back in his coat. The glass look was a surface, and a surface can lie about what is under it. They stayed on the shoveled path and photographed the light as it reached the near ice, dock and all. Andre told Bea the dock was ugly. Then he laughed once, because ugly and safe had arrived in the same frame. He did not need the middle. He needed a picture he could show their uncle without explaining a crack.

The flood museum in Johnstown asked student volunteers to finish a memory quilt. Lila arrived with a bolt of new blue cloth because blue would photograph cleanly for the spring poster. She told the curator, Mr. Ahmed, that donated scraps looked tired. "People will think we ran out of money," she said.

Mr. Ahmed unfolded a shirt square with a mended cuff. A card pinned to it named Ellen Ward, who had worn the shirt on a cleanup crew in 1977. "If you frame her name in store cloth only, the shirt becomes a costume," he said. "The mend is the part she gave us." Lila still wanted the poster to be readable from across the lobby. A cuff, she thought, would wrinkle and throw a shadow on the letters.

They tried a layout on the floor. New blue went into the title square, where the words Johnstown Remembers had to stay smooth and bright. The shirt scraps, including Ellen Ward's cuff, went into the border, one square for each donated name. From the doorway the title could be read. Up close the border showed seams, stains, and one careful mend.

Lila rolled the leftover bolt back into its paper. The poster would still have a clean line of text. The quilt's argument, she said, was in the border. The town did not remember with new cloth alone. It remembered with what people had already worn.

To the Presque Isle staff: I am asking for one hour after the astronomy club's May meeting, from nine to ten, when the path lights on the neck of the peninsula are dimmed. I am not asking for a blackout of the whole park or for boat lights on the bay to be banned. Our club is trying to see a meteor shower that the sky over Pittsburgh, where most of us live, washes out.

Last May we counted points of light through a simple tube. Under the path lamps we saw eleven stars in the tube. When a ranger let us stand for ten minutes with the nearest lamp shielded, we saw twenty-six. The extra stars were not a new sky. They were the same sky with one glare removed. A staff note said boat pilots need lights for safety, and I agree. This request does not touch the channel. It touches lamps aimed at a footpath for one scheduled hour.

Please publish the hour so runners are not surprised. If safety requires a lamp at the parking lot, leave that one on and dim the ones along the neck. A partial dark is still useful. We are not asking the peninsula to become a wilderness. We are asking it to turn down a glare we measured, long enough for a tube of sky to hold more than eleven points.

At Pine Grove Furnace, guides used to begin at the Appalachian Trail midpoint because families wanted the photo by the sign. Noor, a new guide, moved the start to the iron stack. Some visitors grumbled that the furnace was a pile of stones between them and the picture they had driven to take. Noor heard that grumble on a Saturday and almost gave the easy start back. The sign did not require her to explain charcoal.

She tried one tour the other way. She put her hand on the stack and asked the group what had to be missing for a stone tower to be cool. A child said fire. Noor nodded, then showed the arch where the heat had left. Only after that did she walk them to the trail sign. The photo still happened. It happened after the group could say what the place had burned.

In her notes she wrote that the sign marks a distance and the stack marks a job. Starting with distance had made the furnace a delay. Starting with the stack made the sign a reward for having looked. She did not cancel the photo. She refused to let it be the door they entered through. Visitors still left with the picture. They also left able to explain a cold arch, which no midpoint slogan could do for them.

The history fair at a Bethlehem middle school let students caption a photo of the old blast furnaces. Marco's first card said ruins. He liked the word because it sounded finished, and a finished story is easy to memorize. His partner, Sana, set a second photo beside his: the same stacks, with a lit arts venue at the base and a line of people at the door. "Ruins leave," she said. "These stayed and took another job."

Marco checked the packet from the local history center. The furnaces had stopped making iron. The site had not stopped gathering people. A caption that ended at the last pour would be true about metal and false about the ground. He tried abandoned, and Sana tapped the line of people. Abandoned did not fit a door with a line.

His revised card said the furnaces stopped their first work and kept their height for a new one. He kept one sentence on iron, because erasing the heat would turn the stacks into scenery. He added one sentence on the evening crowd. The fair judge asked which word had been hardest to give up. Marco said ruins. It was handsome. It was also a way to stop looking before the lights at the base came on.

The garden club at a West Philadelphia school had one raised bed and two plans. Jordan wanted tomatoes, peppers, and a sign that said the bed fed the cooking class. Mx. Ellis, the advisor, wanted native bee balm and milkweed along the back edge, even if those plants would never land in a salad. Jordan called that a waste of the only bed. "We can buy flowers," Jordan said. "We cannot buy a lesson that starts in dirt we touched."

Mx. Ellis did not cancel the tomatoes. The bed measured eight feet. She marked six feet for food and two for the natives. "The cooking class needs a harvest," she said. "The block also needs plants that feed insects the tomatoes alone will not feed. If we fill every inch with crops, we teach that a garden is only a grocery."

Jordan kept the six feet. At first the bee balm still looked like a luxury. In September the cooking class made salsa, and the milkweed held a striped caterpillar that brought the science class outside. Jordan's revised sign said food on the long side and habitat on the short side. The sentence under it admitted the change: a bed can feed people and still leave a strip that is not for them.