Virginia Standards of Learning English Language Arts Grade 7

The kitchen in Cape Charles faces the Bay. Salt dries in a white crescent on the sill where last night's storm pushed its breath under the sash and then withdrew.

My mother calls the crescent weather, not damage. She wipes a clean path for the latch and leaves the rest, a thin map of how far the water wanted to come in.

I set a finger on the dry edge and taste it. It is not the Bay in my mouth. It is the part of the Bay that agreed to stay behind on painted wood.

By supper the wiped path is bare wood again. The crescent still shines where her cloth refused. I had called the mark a mess at noon. I do not call it that after the latch turns.

A prop room at a middle school in Staunton, ten minutes before a one-act. A cardboard river, painted in three blues, leans on a piano. It is too wide to pass through the doorway lying flat. NIA, the stage manager, holds a roll of cloth tape. CAL plays the mayor and wears a paper sash lettered MAYOR. One piano key is chipped.

NIA: The script says the water arrives whole. If we cut the river, scene two starts with a town that is already cut, before the flood has done anything. CAL: Cut it. Nobody bought a ticket for cardboard. They came for the speech.

Stage direction: Cal pulls the sash tight, then lets it twist. He looks at the doorway, not at Nia. His thumb finds the chipped key and taps it, one soft click for each word he has already finished saying.

NIA: We do not cut it. We stand the river on a corner and walk it through. Your speech keeps its minute. The river keeps its width. Stage direction: Cal takes the lower corner. The tapping stops. The sash stays crooked, and he does not fix it. Together they angle the cardboard through the door.

The seventh-grade shellfish club at a school in Virginia Beach tends four oyster cages in Brown Cove, a sheltered finger of the Lynnhaven River. In March the cages rest on the bottom. In June the club winches them up and sorts the catch into live adult oysters, empty shells, and spat, the young oysters no bigger than a fingernail clinging to old shell.

On cage 2 the March sheet lists 80 live adults. The June sheet lists 64 live adults and 22 spat. Priya, a new member, says the cage failed because 64 is less than 80. The club note, written by the adviser Ms. Daley, splits that judgment. The fall from 80 to 64 is a loss of older oysters. The 22 spat are a new set, young oysters that were not on the March sheet. A cage can lose adults and still be recruiting.

The sheet does not add spat into the adult column. Spat are not ready to be called this year's adults, and they are not a harvest. Folding them into the adult number would hide the loss of older oysters and pretend the gain was the same kind of fact.

A line at the bottom limits the claim. Brown Cove is calm. A cage on the windward side of the Lynnhaven can fill with mud and lose both adults and spat. The club says only this: on these four cages, in this cove, June showed a loss and a new set. It does not say every oyster bar in the city improved.

Jonah Hale, a seventh grader, writes to the Roanoke parks desk about the Mill Path, the greenway between the library steps and the pedestrian bridge. He asks for low lamps, shielded so the light points down, from dusk until nine on school nights. He does not ask for the path to blaze until morning.

For ten school nights in October, Jonah and his aunt walked the path at 6:40. On seven nights they met no other walker between the steps and the bridge. On three nights they turned back at the bend where a root shelf jutted into the dark. Jonah calls the seven nights a record of emptiness at that hour. He does not call them proof that the city dislikes the path. People may be choosing streets that are already lit.

A neighbor says lamps will ruin the owls. Jonah writes that the worry is a real cost, not a punch line. He asks for shields and for a dark hour after nine. He does not claim the owls do not matter. He claims a limited light can serve walkers without pouring glare on the trees all night.

The last paragraph keeps the request small. Ten nights are not a year, and the root shelf is one bend. He wants a November trial and a fresh count of walkers. If the path stays empty under the new lamps, he writes, take them down.

Lena Cho wanted the rock before the ranger began at noon, and the switchback on the Hawksbill trail in Shenandoah looked like wasted minutes. A faint boot path cut the corner. She called it the honest line, the track walkers make when a park draws the long way around. Her cousin Omar tapped a white blaze on a pine at the elbow of the marked trail. Lena said paint was only paint.

They took three steps onto the cutoff. The boot path dropped into a gully where last week's rain had peeled the leaves off the soil. Omar's heel slid. He caught a root and stopped with both hands muddy. Below them the gully was a chute of loose rock, not a shortcut a class should invent before lunch.

They climbed back to the blaze. The marked walk was longer, and noon sat closer than Lena had budgeted. She still reached the rock with the group, breathing hard and on time by a minute. On the way down she told Omar she had treated the blaze as decoration. It was a line somebody had already walked and marked.

The cutoff had looked brave because it was shorter on the map in her head. That map had no gully on it. The peel of leaves and the loose rock had been waiting whether she drew them or not.

A picking note from a family orchard outside Crozet compares two rows sold at the same stand. Row Gold carries large yellow apples. The crew picked 140 pounds, and many of those apples bruised in the basket. Row Red carries smaller fruit. The crew picked 180 pounds, and fewer of them bruised. Both rows are priced at two dollars a pound.

A visitor says Gold has won because those apples match the yellow fruit painted on the orchard's banner. The note answers that the stand sells by the pound and keeps fruit that is still sound on Friday. On pounds picked, and on fruit still sound at the end of the week, Red is ahead. On looking like the banner, Gold is ahead. The note will not fold those results into a single winner.

Both rows lost blossoms in an April frost. The frost is a cause the rows share. It does not explain why Gold bruised more once the apples were in the basket. The crew writes that Gold has thinner skin and Red has thicker skin, a difference they felt when they packed. Blaming the frost for the bruises grabs the cause that covers both rows and misses the cause that separates them.

Sasha Quinn writes in the Winchester school paper that this year's activities gift should repair the hearing loop in the auditorium before the school commissions a lobby mural. At the fall concert, fourteen families who use the loop reported static. Six of those families left at intermission. The art teacher hopes to paint an apple harvest on the lobby wall. Sasha agrees the lobby is plain. A plain wall is not the same trouble as a concert people cannot hear.

A donor writes that beauty brings people through the door. Sasha answers that people had already come through the door. They left when the sound failed. A picture of an apple harvest does not repair a wire under the seats.

She does not write that art never matters. The gift is enough for one project. She wants the loop this year. The mural, she says, can be next year's ask, paid by a separate drive. Drop the sentence about that later drive, and her timing starts to look like an attack on painting. She did not write that attack.

Bess Waller wanted the broadside from the Cedar Press, a small shop on Cooper Lane in Williamsburg, to look important. She set the headline in the largest type the shop owned: FLOUR ON FRIDAY. The letters were so tall that the date and the price, four pence a pound, slid off the bottom of the proof.

Mr. Adey, the printer, did not praise the height. He laid the proof on the counter when Mrs. Penn, the baker, came for the week's notice. Mrs. Penn asked the price first. Her finger searched the sheet and found only the headline. She said a notice she cannot price is a notice she cannot use before the dough is mixed.

Bess unlocked the form and dropped the headline one size. The date and the four pence fit on the page with a margin a thumb could hold. Mrs. Penn read the price without turning the sheet over. Bess had thought importance was how tall the letters stood. On Cooper Lane that morning, importance was the line a buyer could find before she left the counter.

At Holt Lock, a watered chamber in a Richmond park along the old canal, a placard walks visitors through one rise of a boat. The boat enters from the lower pool. The lower gates close behind it. Valves then let water in from the upper pool, and the boat rises inside the chamber. When the water matches the upper level, the upper gates open and the boat leaves. The placard calls the lock a staircase of water.

A student named Harris tells the guide that a lock is simply a dam, because both are walls set in a river. The guide points to the next sentence. A dam holds a pool in place. A lock passes a boat from one pool to another by changing the water in a chamber. If the gates stayed shut forever, the chamber would behave like a dam. They are built to open in turn.

The placard also warns against memorizing one direction. Some hours the exhibit boat is walked upstream, a rise. Some hours the valves run the other way and the boat is lowered. The staircase sentence still holds. Only the direction of the step changes. Calling every locking a rise keeps the picture of one afternoon and drops the valves that can work in reverse.

On a field morning near Wachapreague, an Eastern Shore science class lays meter squares in the salt marsh. The squares are wood frames, tossed so they land where they land, including on bare mud. Inside each frame the students count Spartina stems, the cordgrass of the marsh, and they note wrack, the tangled dead grass the tide has dropped in a brown rope.

Cam wants to move every frame to the green edge, where the stems look thick enough for the class photo. Dr. Ellis says the edge is real and the bare patch is real. A method that keeps only the pretty edge will describe a marsh the class wished for. The tossed frame is a sample. It is not a portrait of the whole shore.

The sheet asks for the color of the ground before the stems are counted. Dark peat, soil made of plants that never fully rotted, holds water. Pale sand on a nearby ridge does not, and Spartina thins there. Calling every soft patch peat would treat the ridge as if it stored the marsh. The color gives the number a place.

Back at school Cam still likes the green photo. The data table does not use it. Ten squares went into the average, and three of them were mostly mud. The average is not a promise that every step in the marsh feels like the picture.

Nico wanted the cider beans done before the Harrisonburg youth game. The pot on his grandmother Ruth's stove was only shivering, small bubbles that died against the rim. Ruth said a roll, a hard boil, would split the skins and turn the broth cloudy. The whistle at the field, she said, did not rewrite the pot.

When Ruth stepped onto the porch to pay the egg man, Nico turned the burner up. The pot rolled. Skins split. The broth went the color of dishwater. Ruth came back, looked once, and set a second pot on the rear burner at the same shiver. They would miss the first half. Beans already ruined could not be hurried back into being whole.

Nico sat with the spoon and did not touch the new dial. He had thought slow meant late. The fast boil had spent both the pot and the half they were trying to save. When the second pot finally shivered clear, he told Ruth he would rather miss a tip-off than split another skin. She salted the broth. The game would still have a second half. The beans would not get a third pot.

A volunteer crew checks twenty bluebird boxes along a two-mile stretch of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah. The June sheet sorts them into three labels. Twelve boxes hold bluebird nests of fine grass, with eggs or chicks. Five boxes are empty. Three hold mouse nests, known by fur and shredded bark rather than grass.

Helen, a new volunteer, wants to count the mouse boxes as successes because something lived there. The crew chief, Mr. Pinto, says the promise to the park is bluebird fledglings, young birds that leave the nest. A mouse is an occupant. It is not the occupant the boxes were put up to raise. Counting mice as bluebirds would let the sheet congratulate itself for a different animal.

Empty is its own label. Four of the five empty boxes were nailed up in April. Mr. Pinto will not call a new box a failure in its first June. On this sheet, failure means a box that has stood more than a year and still shows no bluebird use. None of this year's twenty meet that test. The five empties stay empties. They do not become a story about defeat.

The total line adds only chicks likely to leave the twelve grass nests. It leaves the mice off. It does not drag the birds backward by stuffing empty boxes in as zeroes. The kinds stay apart so a mouse, a bare box, and a chick cannot be added into one cheer.

Amira Solt speaks to the student council at her school in Newport News. She asks for one added stop on the Thursday activity bus, at the apartments on 35th Street, on evenings when band practice runs past six. A petition in her folder carries forty-six names of riders who say they would board there. She does not ask for that stop on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

A council member says students can walk. Amira answers that the walk from school to those apartments is unlit after six and crosses two busy roads. The ride she wants is about one extra mile. She does not pretend the driver's time is free. A cost with a name, she says, is easier to judge than a request that hides the mile.

She offers a trial of four Thursdays. A parent will stand at the door and count who actually boards at 35th Street. If fewer than eight students board across those nights, the stop should be dropped. Forty-six signatures are a promise people made in daylight. The count on the steps, in the dark, is the test. A signature and a boarding are not the same fact.

A placard at a maritime museum in Newport News stands beside a ringed glass lens taken from a retired light on the Bay. The rings bend the lamp's glow into a narrow beam. The tower, the placard says, is not a pedestal someone added for looks. It is the height that lets the beam clear the dunes and meet a ship still beyond the curve of the near water.

Wes, on a school visit, tells his teacher that a brighter bulb would do the same job in a short shed. The placard answers a claim like his. A brighter lamp in a low house still sits behind sand and behind the curve of the earth. Height is what gives the beam its reach. Brightness without height lights the grass.

A side note describes one cracked ring. The lamp behind it was strong. The crack scattered part of the beam into a smear beside the true path of light. Sailors saw glow in the wrong place and a weaker beam on the heading that mattered. The museum retired that lens. Wes copies the last line of the placard: aimed and bright are not the same virtue.

At a reunion in Farmville, a dealer offers Della Whitt forty dollars for one square cut from a family quilt. The square shows a small boat stitched in brown thread across a band of blue. Della wants a bicycle, and forty dollars is most of a used one at the shop on Third Street. She tells her aunt Mae that a photo on her phone already holds the memory, so the cloth is spare.

Mae sets her hand on the blue band. The square was sewn the winter after the family crossed the Appomattox in a borrowed skiff, when the river stood over the lower field. The blue thread is the water line they agreed to remember. A phone photo, Mae says, lives in a device Della replaced last spring. The cloth has stayed in the same cedar chest.

Della does not take the dealer's card. She still wants the bicycle, and she says so out loud, because pretending otherwise would be a different kind of sale. She slides the square back into the chest. The sentence she gives up is the one she arrived with: that the square was spare cloth because a picture existed. The picture can show a boat. It was not in the room the winter the thread went in.

On a school trip to the Great Dismal Swamp, the class stops at a shed beside the ditch that leads toward Lake Drummond. The water is the color of strong tea. A brochure in a wire rack, printed by a soap company, says the brown comes from a factory that dirtied the ditch. The same page shows a bottle whose slogan is the color of the lake, and under the bottle a price.

Ranger Ibarra hands out a one-page sheet instead. The tea color, it says, comes from tannins, acids that leach out of peat and fallen leaves. Peat is the dark soil of plants that did not fully rot in the wet. A water test from the ditch is printed in two lines: organic color is high, and the metals a factory would raise are low. The brochure has no test. It has an adjective and something to sell.

Ibarra does not tell the class the swamp was never harmed. A later paragraph on the sheet describes ditches dug long ago to drain timber land. That history is real, and it is not the soap page's story. The brochure ties today's color to a factory and then offers the color in a bottle. Sharing a shed does not make an advertisement and a measurement the same kind of source.

A review in an Alexandria school paper covers Bankfull, a one-act about a family deciding whether to raise their house after a river flood. The reviewer, Chris Adey, says the play is strongest when the argument stays in the room and weakest when a character lectures the seats.

In the first act a neighbor turns toward the audience and reads rainfall totals for three Julys. The totals may be accurate. Chris writes that accurate numbers, spoken at the seats, do not yet make a scene. Nobody on the stage has to answer them. While the list continues, the family does not choose anything.

In the second act the same neighbor and the homeowner argue over a contractor's bid. They stack books on a kitchen table to show how high the next floor would sit. The homeowner wants to remain at ground level because the stairs would trouble a grandparent. The neighbor wants the higher floor because the last flood reached the wall sockets. Chris calls this the scene the first act only described. The bid, the books, and the grandparent are inside the argument. The audience watches people choose.

Chris recommends the play for that second-act argument. The recommendation does not erase the first act. It ranks the act below the quarrel. Useful information, the review says at the end, is still not the same achievement as a conflict a viewer can see.