Secondary English Language Arts: Revised ed:TPA Lesson Plan Template

Name: Jason Hameister

Lesson Title: Toms River Week 5 During Reading Grade Level: 11th
Lesson Goals
Central Focus: Describe the central focus (of the unit) and explain how this lesson reflects the central focus.
The central focus of this unit is for students to explore the theme of environmental pollution and its effects on communities by way of
engagement with complex informational texts. This lesson addresses the central focus in that students are asked to forge the
connections that enable environmental pollution to occur at such profound levels, as well as to engage with a supplemental complex
text that focuses on the ways in which the population Toms River has responded to the pollution-fueled disaster that impacted their
community.
List the title, author, and write a short description of the text(s) used in this lesson.
Title: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
Author: Dan Fagin
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin, tells the story of the Ciba company, named Toms River Chemical
Corporation when it made its move to Toms River, and its method of hazardous waste material disposal. Within the text, he describes
the history of the Ciba company; a company, first called Mller-Pack, that produced dyes, paints etc. during its time. It began in
Switzerland after an accident in a lab showed scientists how to produce a new type of dye. They decided to rid the waste from the
production process into lagoons and holes around the factory, after law enforcement wanted to stop them from polluting water in
Switzerland they began dumping the waste in the Rhine river, effectively taking the waste into Germany. However, the company was
forced to move around several times during this time period because there were cases in the communities surrounding the company,
wherever it moved, of illness that was continuously found to be because of pollution in the water. So, the company would move before
full cases could be made against them. The company decided then to move to Cincinnati, Ohio where in time similar cases popped up
forcing them to move again, to Toms River, New Jersey, this time. Throughout the book Fagin also includes a history of Toms River, a
somewhat secluded little town in a bay that allowed for pirates, access to trade by the sea, and porous soil that the Toms River
Chemical Company could dump waste into. Eventually the company built a pipeline to bring the waste into the ocean, this was after
some cases of illness cropped up and then it was found that the pipeline was leaking waste. The book explains the chemistry of
making the vat dyes that were originally made in Toms River and also explains the waste removal processes that the company
conducted. However, the book also explains the cases of childhood cancer that were also found in astonishing rates in Toms River.
Most prominent was the story of Michael Gillick and his mom, Linda Gillick; Michael has cancer and although he was told he wouldnt
survive through childhood he was 21 when Fagin wrote the book, but his quality of life was severely lessened because of the

medication for and the course of the cancer. Linda Gillick is a very prominent figure in leading the charge against the hazardous waste
dumping of the company and has fought to tell her sons story and put a stop to this pollution. The book ends with the company
moving yet again.
Title: A Town Plagued by Water
Author: Alexander Nazaryan
This article from the New Yorker re-capitulates some of the information from the book, with a specific focus on community effects and
the ways in which the Toms River community has tried to leave its history of pollution and disease in the past. Specifically, Nazaryan
mentions that there has been some aversion to Fagins book within the community, as some have subscribed to the notion that
forgetting has a curative property and the publishing of the book has made the situation all the more difficult to forget. Nazarayan,
on the other hand, praises Fagins work as necessary. Further, this article brings to light another environmental concern in putting
forth the possibility that manmade environmental pollution and global warming contributed to the formation of Hurricane Sandy, which
struck the Toms River community in 2012, and represented the second water-related catastrophe in the communitys history. All in all,
this supplementary article connects well to the primary reading and invites readers to forge connections between the issue of pollution
and the health, wellbeing, and reputation of communities, as well as to consider the value of memory in the face of terrible
circumstances.

Conceptual/Theoretical Framework (draw from research and readings in CI and English coursework):
This during-reading lesson makes extensive use of collaborative learning techniques, the effectiveness of which are corroborated by a
study conducted by Judith Langer, which reads that it became evident that the students were more actively engaged in their school
work more of the time when English and literacy were treated as social activity. In light of this, weve opted to construct our lesson in
such a way that promotes peer-to-peer socialization not simply as a response to reading, but during the reading process, such that
students are work toward building understanding cooperatively.
Jim Burke specifically endorses the semantic mapping activity that we employ in this during-reading lesson, saying that semantic
maps help students see and build connections between words and ideas and as such can play an important role in effective reading
instruction. Because this unit is principally based around the formation and investigation of connections between environmental
factors and surrounding communities, this activity is ideally suited to help students work toward the learning goals.
Overall, in this introductory lesson, students will get the support they need to understand the text as they read, as well as take part in
expert-endorsed practices that will help them to garner the most out of the reading process.

Standard(s) Addressed (use examples from both the Common Core State Standards and the Illinois Professional Teaching
Standards):
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.9
Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.3
Analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over
the course of the text.
2K) engages students in the processes of critical thinking and inquiry and addresses standards of evidence of the disciplines
2N) facilitates learning experiences that make connections to other content areas and to life experiences
3D) understands when and how to adjust plans based on outcome data, as well as student needs, goals, and responses
Recall your central focus and explain how the standards (above) and learning objectives (below), that you have identified, support
students learning:
In order for students to be able to demonstrate the ability to track various themes throughout an entire novel, they must first be able to
comprehend the literature, and that process can be scaffolded by incorporating prior knowledge early in a unit. These standards and
goals are designed to aid student learning by doing just that helping students to comprehend the literature and incorporating prior
knowledge into the unit. This particular lesson is designed in response to the cooperating teachers early evaluations that students
were struggling to grasp the text without these additional supports. By gathering outcome data, we were able to adjust instruction to
incorporate more scaffolds into the reading process, and in this particular lesson, we gather additional student data such that we can
again reassess how students are handling the material and decide how to proceed in the way that allows students the most
meaningful learning experience, relative to what they need. In this way, we can ensure that students are receiving the appropriate
amount of support throughout the unit.

Materials/ Instructional Resources:

Class set of Toms River

Class set of The New Yorker article (attached)
Chalkboard / Chalk
Paper / Writing utensils
Chromebooks

*Learning Objectives (Add additional objective boxes as

needed):

*Assessment (both formal and informal)- Evidence of Student

Understanding:

Objective 1: Students will forge connections between the

organizations and ideas that drive forward the narrative and the
themes of the book, such that they will better understand the
sociopolitical context that allows the events of the upcoming
chapters to take place.

Related Assessment: In small groups, students will be asked to

create semantic maps that demonstrate the connections between
some of the texts prominent subjects and ideas (such as
government, EPA, pollution, oversight, disease, industry, capitalism,
and greed). Each group will also be asked to add three terms to the
semantic map that are not listed.

Explain the Assessments Alignment with the Objective:

Semantic maps enable students to develop and show the
connections between entities and ideas in a relatively free-form and
personalized manner that also demonstrates that students are
thinking about the inter-related nature of important aspects of the
text.

Describe the form of Student feedback that accompanies

the assessment:
The student feedback that accompanies this assessment is a
diagram with lines connecting important terms to indicate their

relationships to one another.

Objective 2: Students will collaboratively read and respond to

an informational text (an article from The New Yorker) related to
the effects of water quality on the Toms River community.

Related Assessment:
As students read the attached article entitled A Town Plagued by
Water, they will pause every three to four paragraphs and respond
to what theyve read by identifying what they found to be the key
points of the article and including a personal response. At the end
of each of these responses, they will pose a question. The students
will then exchange papers and respond to one another before
moving on to the next section.

Explain the Assessments Alignment with the Objective:

This assessment gives students a structured way to approach a
discussion of a non-fiction text and allows students to build a
shared understanding of the text and think about ideas that may
have not occurred to them individually. It also builds shared
accountability for clarity and quality of response.

Describe the form of Student feedback that accompanies

the assessment:
The student feedback that we will receive for this assessment will be
in the form of written notes.

Lesson Considerations

Pre-Assessment:
The semantic map activity allows students to demonstrate understanding of what theyve learned thus far throughout their reading,
while also laying the groundwork for their understanding of the upcoming reading. As students complete the activity, we will be
circulate the room and monitor student progress and they attempt to forge these connections. The completion of this activity, as well
as the classroom discussion surrounding it will ensure both that the student have understood what they have read thus far, and that
they have the requisite knowledge necessary to follow the upcoming reading and class material.
Prior Academic Learning and Prerequisite Skills: (Cite evidence that describes what students know, what they can

do, and what they are still learning to do.)

From students engagement with previous readings, we learned that students can read for comprehension and make connections to
particular themes when prompted to do so. They are largely well-versed in the traditional academic essay. However, many students
have shown difficulty relating texts to real-world events in their essays, and would prefer to stay within the text while writing. Many
students also require additional in-class supports to effectively independently read grade-level materials.

Personal, cultural, and community assets related to the central focusExplain what you know about your students
everyday experiences, cultural and language backgrounds and practices, and interests.
There are 2,383 students currently enrolled in school and 593 of those students are currently in eleventh grade. 1,073 students are
female and 1,310 are male. Seventy-five percent of students are White, five percent are Black, fifteen percent are Hispanic, three
percent are Asian, and two percent are two or more races. Sixty-five percent of students identify with Christianity, twenty percent
identify with Judaism, and fifteen percent identify with Islam. Thirty-eight percent of students are from low income. Six percent of
students are learning English as a second language. Fourteen percent of students have Special Needs. In our eleventh grade
classroom, there are twenty students. Of these twenty students, nine are White, three are Black, five are Hispanic, and three are
Asian. English and Spanish are spoken in the classroom. One student in the class has a mild visual impairment that requires the
student to be placed towards the front of the classroom as well as receive materials with enlarged print.
Misconceptions:
Some potential misconceptions about my students may be that:
Students who speak primarily Spanish cannot meaningfully contribute to a mainstream-level English Class
Students of this age dont care about or cannot grapple with real issues.
This text is beyond their academic capacity.

While language, motivation, and readiness are absolutely vital to take into account with regard to the delivery of this lesson and this
unit, there are accommodations that can be made and structural aspects to this particular lesson that can enable students to be
successful in this classroom during this learning segment and beyond. By adding in supports for comprehension and structuring the
unit in such a way that necessitates connection with the outside world, the hope is that the texts difficulty and student motivation to
learn will not be major obstacles.

Language Objectives and Demands

Identify a Language Function:

Language Function. Using information about your students language assets and needs, identify one language function essential
for students within your central focus. Listed below are some sample language functions. You may choose one of these or another
more appropriate language function for this lesson.
Analyze

Argue

Describe

Evaluate

Explain

Interpret

Justify

Synthesize

In this pre-reading lesson, students are being asked primarily to analyze what theyve read thus far in anticipation of the reading to
come, which will build upon this knowledge base and the connections that students are able to forge. Before students can begin to
address the essential questions posed by the text of who or what is ultimately to blame for the pollution and its destruction of
communities, they must first begin developing their understandings of the ways in which these ideas and entities intertwine. This
baseline understanding will be vital as students move forward into more analytical engagements with the text. The activities that
students will complete throughout this learning segment afford them the opportunity to build this understanding that will help them
build toward more meaningful interpretations of the text and its thematic content remainder of the unit.
Vocabulary:
Semantic map
Conversational notes

Learning and Linguistic Accommodations: Describe the instructional accommodations that you must make, as the classroom
teacher, in order to address the learning needs of students with special needs and students who are not English proficient or
students who use varieties of English.
Accommodations for students with Special Needs:
We will allow for our student with a visual disability (and his partner) to read and respond to the article on Chromebooks such that the
student can adjust text size and brightness and participate in the activity. This student will also be seated at the front of the room and
we will write largely and neatly on the chalkboard and explain what were writing as we write it.
Accommodations for students who are not proficient users of Standard English:
Again, much of the information will be presented in various forms, such that students have a variety of ways of engaging with the
material. Further, the semantic map is in itself an accommodation for English learners, as it enables them to forge the necessary
literary and thematic connections in a way that is graphic and visual rather than in a way that requires precise verbalization.
Responses to this and to the conversational notes activity will not be graded for grammar usage or spelling.
Explain your instructional decision-making and the way you plan to support student learning when using whole class, small groups,
and individualized assignments. In addition, explain accommodations for students who have special needs and students
who are not proficient users of Standard English as part of whole class and small group arrangements
In addition to the learning accommodations detailed above, by allowing students to discuss their responses to the Semantic Mapping
assignment in small groups and as a class, students with learning and language needs will have something of a built-in support as
their answers can reflect their interpretations of the classroom discussion rather than only the information that they are able to draw
directly from the text.
Another important aspect of the group discussion format with regard to students with learning and language needs is the inclusion of
their perspectives in the discussion. In order for this to happen, those students must feel as though their perspectives are valued in
the classroom and feel comfortable sharing. We will also take care to avoid placing pressure on these students to respond, such that
they can participate at a level with which they are comfortable. The primary response type throughout this lesson will be written, so
students who dont feel comfortable speaking up will still have the opportunity to demonstrate their learning and engagement.

Time

*Lesson Plan Details

5 min.

Lesson Introduction
We will begin the class by introducing the concept of the Semantic Map, by first writing the word Industry on the board and
then asking students to name another concept or idea from Toms River and showing how the two can be connected, then
modeling that connection on the board.

40 min.

Learning Activities After modelling the process of semantic mapping for the students, we will pair them up and enable them to begin working
on their own semantic maps. As the groups finish up, we will re-convene as a class to talk through the connections that
students made and fill out the semantic map that we started together as a class. Students will be encouraged to add to
their groups original document during this time.
Following the semantic mapping activity, the class will begin reading an article from the New Yorker entitled A Town
Plagued by Water. This article ties in well with the book (in fact, it references the book several times) and corroborates
the information contained therein. This is the ideal time to incorporate this text as students continue to shift their focus
outward toward the real world. Students will read the article silently in pairs, grouped roughly by reading speed, and will
respond to the article and pose a question before trading papers and responding to one another.
Describe how your planned formal and informal assessments, including a written product, will provide direct evidence of
students abilities to construct meaning from, interpret, OR respond to a complex text throughout the learning segment.
Students will demonstrate that they are constructing meaning from Toms River by way of the semantic mapping activity
and the associated discussion. This unit focuses largely on the connections between individuals, the communities in which
they live, and the outside forces that affect these communities. They will show that they are constructing meaning from the
article from The New Yorker by way of their written conversational notes, which will enable us to see where there may be
gaps in engagement and/or understanding.
Closure
We will conclude the class by briefly discussing the article as class, asking students to connect the article to the book and
leaving them to ruminate on the question of memory and whether forgetting that the cancer outbreak ever happened might

actually be the best way to move forward, which we will address in more detail in tomorrows lesson. The students written
conversational notes will serve as the Exit Ticket for the day, and the students will turn these in as they leave the
classroom.
Extension
If time allows, we can have students discuss some of the most fruitful aspects of their written note conversations, or to
pose some of the questions they wrote to the class and allow for further discussion. Alternatively, we can allow the
students to get a head start on their reading for tomorrows class.

Resources and References (use APA or MLA listing the information from the conceptual framework
above as well as from any other categories where cited a source):
Burke, Jim. The English Teachers Companion: A complete Guide to Classroom, Curriculum, and the
Profession. 4th ed., Heinemann, 2012
Langer, Judith A. Beating the Odds: Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well.
American Educational Research Journal, vol. 38, no. 4, Jan. 2001, pp. 837880.
Nazaryan, Alexander. A Town Plagued by Water. The New Yorker, 16 July 2014, www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/atown-plagued-by-water.

10

A TOWN PLAGUED BY
WATER
By Alexander Nazaryan May 24,
2013

Water has not been kind to Toms River. When I drove through the coastal New Jersey
town, in early May, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy was still visible along the strip that sits on a
barrier peninsula facing the ocean: houses had been tossed into the sand like toys; buildings had walls
sheared away; and a field of debris looked like a graveyard.
Most of Toms River sits on the mainland, but its main attraction is Ortley Beach, on the peninsula.
To the south is Seaside Heights, made famous by the sybaritic exploits of MTV s Jersey Shore. In
the other direction are Lavallette and Mantoloking, with their saltbox cottages evoking the serenity of
Cape Cod on a good day.
It was not a good day when I visited. It should have been a bright spring afternoon; instead a cold rain
fell from a pavement-colored sky. It had been more than six months since Sandy, yet construction
crews looked to be in the earlier stages of recovery. Among the most memorable images of the storm is
that of Casino Pier looking like it had been snapped apart by a child, its roller coaster washed out into
the ocean. Demolition of that ride began last week. The new coaster will be called the Super Storm.
Waterborne destruction has visited Toms River before, albeit via less conspicuous channels, which
Dan Fagin traces with marvelous precision in his new book, Toms River: A Story of Science and
Salvation. For more than forty years, its residents

ingested trichloroethylene, styrene-acrylonitrile () trimer, epichlorohydrin,

benzidine, and naphthalene. These are poisons known or suspected to cause cancer. Some are the
by-products of dye-making; trichloroethylene is an industrial solvent; trimer forms during
the production of plastics. Regardless of these chemicals origins, their presence in the air and the
aquifer used by the Toms River Water Company led to Toms River being designated a
residential cancer cluster. Specifically, far too many children there became sick from acute
lymphocytic leukemia.
Cancer is prevalent and prolific: there are more than a hundred and fifty types of the disease. The
complexity makes causation dicult to prove within a community where every genetic and
lifestyle factor cannot possibly be taken into account.
Accordingly, the very few confirmed cases of residential cancer clusters have achieved macabre
fame. One is in Woburn, Massachusetts, which also had trichloroethylene in its drinking-water
wells. In 1996, Jonathan Harr published A Civil Action, about Jan Schlichtmann, a
crusading lawyer who fought on behalf of the families of children stricken, as in Toms River,
with acute lymphocytic leukemia. (One of the companies
settled the suit for eight million dollars; Schlichtmann bypassed the chance to settle for far more.)
Toms River is not famous. Fagins book is necessary, but that doesnt mean it is welcomed,
especially by those who find in forgetting a curative property. When I talked to the mayor,
Thomas F. Kelaher, he was far more concerned about Sandy cleanup than childhood cancer.
The latter was history, he said, displeased that I had brought up the topic. Nobody talks about
that anymore.
The town is pleasantly unexceptional. Along Cardinal Drive, midcentury split-levels show
signs of upkeep and suburban prosperity. Only by driving slowly could you have seen a chain-link
fence behind the houses. That fence circumscribes fourteen hundred acres of land, where the
Swiss company Ciba once ran a dye-manufacturing plant, the Toms River Chemical
Corporation, which opened in 1952.
The reactions needed to make dyes require or produce volatile, toxic compounds;
secretaries who ventured into production buildings complained of melted stockings.
After the necessary reactions ran their course, the waste simply flowed into Toms River.
Fagin describes how George Woolley, later a worker at the chemical plant, came home from
college, in 1962, and took dip in a swimming hole, only to discover a purplish foam clinging to
his body. In 1966, Ciba built a pipeline to the ocean, where, for the next three decades, it
continued to dump waste just three thousand feet from Ortley Beach. When the underground
pipeline burst, in 1984, and sludge spilled out at an intersection in town, an ocial for Ciba2

Geigy (the name of the company after a 1970 merger) said the waste was ninety-nine percent
water and a little salt.
No pipeline could dispose of all the by-products generated by the plant: a single pound of nished
anthraquinone vat dye left behind a thousand gallons of wastewater. Much of the plants chemical
refuse was put into fifty-five-gallon drums, which, Fagin writes, proliferated like a pox.
There would eventually be forty-seven thousand such drums on the Ciba-Geigy site, buried in
pits and trenches or just dumped in unmarked clearings within the dense forest. Often, the waste
would not be contained at all. It
was poured into holes with names like the Acid Pits. The towns Republican leadership took
corporate mandarins at their word: that this pure euent was harmless to fish life.
Three miles from the town center is Toms Rivers other Superfund siteone of nine in Ocean
Countymore, Fagin notes, than in thirty-six states. Here stood the egg farm of Samuel and
Bertha Reich, Holocaust survivors who bought this land in 1952. Egg farming did not prove
propitious; the advent of long-haul refrigerated trucking, in the nineteen-sixties, put the Reichs
out of business. Their supposed savior turned out to be the towns doom: Nick Fernicola, a
garbage hauler who had run out of places to stash waste produced by Union Carbide. For a
promised forty dollars a month (never paid), the Reichs allowed Fernicola to store his barrels on
the farm in the fall of 1971.
Fagin describes Fernicolas trucks turning Reich Farm into a toxic dump where thousands of
gallons of toxic chemicals splashed directly onto the farms sandy soil, with no barrier to prevent
them from seeping down through the sand and into the groundwater that owed beneath.
Fernicolawho has since diedonly abused the Reichs land for four months. But that was
long enough. Among the more Solomonic questions in Toms River is whether the Reichs
bear responsibility for abetting Fernicola, who got o with a hundred-dollar fine. They plead
innocence, or at least ignorance: when I talked to Bertha over the phone recently, she told me in
a despairing voice, He knew. We didnt. I pressed for more, but she grew wary and mentioned
needing to consult her lawyer. The Reichs still own the farm. They tried to sell it, but no one
wanted the poisoned land.
Caught between the pincers of Ciba-Geigy and Reich Farm, residents of Toms River continued
to drink water full of mutagenic chemicals, which can damage DNA and potentially lead to
cancer. The tainted water (and air) was especially dangerous to pregnant women, since fetuses,
with their rapidly dividing cells, are highly susceptible to cancer-causing invaders.
Indeed, what makes Fagins book so terrifying is that most of its victims are children: Gabrielle
Pascarella died at all of fourteen months from a rare melanoma that invaded her central nervous
system; Randy Lynnworth grew up in the shadow of the chemical plant on Cardinal Drive, and
3

succumbed to a brain tumor at eighteen. Even those who survived, like Michael Anderson, who
contracted leukemia at age ten, were robbed of their childhoods by a disease that is not supposed to
strike, on average, until the age of sixty-seven.
We sometimes think of cancer as a sin tax, the product of too much smoking, not enough kale.
As Siddhartha Mukherjee notes in The Emperor of All Maladies, cancer is the pathology of
excess. And though our consumption continues apace, the processes that fuel it have conveniently
disappeared from view. If Toms River is no longer plagued by dye manufacturing, that is
because so much clothing is now made in China. Fagin arrives, at the end of his book, at the
Chongqing Childrens Hospital, where a woman watches her nine-year-old son suer from
leukemia, which knows no distinction between Guangdong and New Jersey.

The hero of Toms River is surely Linda Gillick, whose son, Michael, was born in1979
with neuroblastoma, but defied odds that had him dead within months. He still lives, though his
growth is stunted and cancer continues to hound him. Gillick marshalled the families of Toms
River to demand the state and federal governments to study their water supply. The more
attention the suspected cancer cluster got, the larger the stain on Toms Rivers reputation grew.
The water is fine, one anonymous note
chided her. Cancer cluster is probably a freak. Meantime, Ocean County will suer this
summer because you have scared away tourists, homebuyers and others. When I spoke to
Gillick, she said, Companies slip; government slips. But slip is a generous way to describe
the wrongs committed against Toms River.
Ciba-Geigy, the Dow Chemical Company (which had acquired Union Carbide), and United
Water Toms River (previously Toms River Water Company) were not going to budge a legal
inch unless there was proof that their activities had caused cancer. That task fell, in good part, to
Jerald Fagliano, an epidemiologist at the New Jersey health department, who conducted casecontrol studies scrutinizing residents habits everything from tap-water drinking to hot-dog
consumptionwhile also analyzing historical water distribution patterns. In 2001, Fagliano
issued a narrow but confident ruling regarding the sixty-nine families whose children had fallen
ill with cancer: consumption of town tap water was responsible for an increased incidence of
leukemia in girls under ve. This did not satisfy many families, but it was enough for the
companies in question to settle for a sum that Fagin estimates to have been as high as forty
million dollars, with some families receiving as much as around half a million dollars.
The lawyer who helped broker the settlement was the same Jan Schlichtmann from Woburn.
When I asked Schlichtmann whether justice was served in Toms River, he said,
Absolutelyeven though none of the companies admitted liability. At least, Fagin writes,
4

Toms River can claim that its water has been tested more thoroughly than anywhere in New
Jerseymaybe anywhere in the world. As for Ciba-Geigy, its pharmaceutical arm morphed
into Novartis, which makes drugs to cure some of the cancers its predecessor may have once
caused.
Its somewhat odd that Fagins book has come out now, a reminder of one misfortune
as Toms River is dealing with another. The cancer was caused by human activity; as for the
hurricane, Bloomberg Businessweek put it best with its post-Sandy cover, whose headline
announced, Its Global Warming, Stupid.
The beach season opens this weekend, but many of the beaches along the Jersey Shore
have not recovered from the hurricane. It will take time, but the sunbathers will return; teen-agers
will eat clam strips on the boardwalk; children will coax parents to ride the roller coaster. And
eventually people will forget Sandy, as some in Toms River have already forgotten cancer.
Alexander Nazaryan is a writer living in Brooklyn.
Photograph by Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/Redux.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misspelled Jerald Faglianos name