Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Department of Education
REGION VII – CENTRAL VISAYAS
Division of Cebu Province
A.Readings/Discussions:
Directions: Write the similarities and differences of the Illustrated novel, Manga
and Chick Literature using the Compare and Contrast Graphic Organizer.
1. CREATIVE NON-FICTION
The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s account of the year following the death of her
husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and her attempts to make sense of her grief while
tending to the severe illness of her adopted daughter, Quintana.
On December 30, 2003, John and Didion go to the hospital to visit their daughter,
who is in a coma in the intensive care unit. Later that evening, John has a massive heart
attack while sitting down to dinner in their New York apartment. He is pronounced dead
shortly after arriving at the hospital, but Didion finds herself unable to accept this fact even
as she arranges for an autopsy and plans for his funeral.
As she tries to make sense of John’s death and her own changed identity, Didion
discovers that grief is not what she expected it to be. Consumed by memories of the years
they lived in Los Angeles, shortly after they married and adopted Quintana, Didion feels that
she has entered a state of temporary insanity. Though cool and collected on the surface, she
begins to believe that her wishes might have the power to bring John back. To this end, she
refuses to give away his clothes and shoes, believing that her husband will need them when
he returns to her. She calls this childlike belief that her thoughts and wishes can alter reality
“magical thinking.” She finds numerous examples of this behavior in the literature she studies
on grief and mourning, which ranges from poems, novels, psychological texts, and even
etiquette books.
Page 2 of 12
As Didion tries to figure out a way to fix the situation and bring John back, she
becomes fixated on her memories of the months leading up to his death. Also in December
of that year, Quintana had developed a severe case of flu that worsened in the days leading
up to Christmas, though doctors reassured her that she was on the road to recovery. On
Christmas morning, Quintana checked into the hospital, where she went into septic shock as
a result of the pneumonia that had overtaken her lungs. Though John’s spirits had been
buoyed by both a new pacemaker as well as Quintana’s wedding earlier that year, the news
of his daughter’s condition devastated him, prompting him to begin assessing his own life.
Several days before his death, John had told his wife that he felt he was a failure. Quintana
doesn’t wake from her coma until January 2004, though soon after being discharged she
must return briefly, because of blood clotting in her legs. After her second release, the family
decides to hold the funeral for John, after which Quintana will travel to Malibu, California, with
her husband to recuperate. Didion realizes that she will have to get back to her life as well.
Shortly after arriving in the Los Angeles airport, however, Quintana experiences a
massive brain hemorrhage that requires emergency neurosurgery at UCLA. Doctors fear she
will not survive, and if she does, that she may have suffered brain damage. Didion
immediately flies to Los Angeles to be with Quintana, reassuring her that she will get better
even though she knows that she is powerless to protect her daughter. Didion spends every
day at the hospital and begins to experience what she calls “the vortex effect,” a reaction in
which environmental triggers unexpectedly set off emotionally crippling flashbacks of her life
with John and Quintana. Though she tries to avoid landmarks that remind her of in the happy
years the family spent in Los Angeles in the 1970s, the vortex effect occurs at the most
unexpected times. After several months, Quintana moves to a stepdown observational unit,
with plans made to transfer her to the Rusk Institute in New York. After the transfer, Quintana
again begins the slow process of recuperation and Didion again tries to resume her life.
Didion begins to examine her memories for omens and symbols that might have
warned her of John’s impending death. She looks to literature, to events from their shared
life , and to clues that John seemed to leave in his own novels. She becomes consumed with
the idea of self-pity, its relationship to grief and mourning, and how these feelings are
perceived by society. Realizing that she had almost never been separated from her husband
during their forty years of marriage, she finds herself turning inward in her solitude, consumed
by her own thoughts. In an effort to get back to her normal life, she makes plans to cover the
Democratic and Republican conventions for the New York Review of Books. Though the
conventions seem to pose little risk of setting off the vortex effect, she finds herself paralyzed
by memories no matter where she goes or what she does.
Didion begins to feel that she has gone insane as she experiences both magical
thinking and the vortex effect. To regain her grip on reality, Didion looks back to her past and
tries to remember what the world used to mean to her. As a child, she remembers, she fixated
on meaninglessness, believing that the massive geological changes that occur slowly over
time indicated the smallness and brevity of human experience. As an adult, she had once
found meaning in the routines of her life and in her role as a wife and mother, but she now
realizes that, following John’s death, she has lost the sense of self those roles once afforded
her. Though she understands that John is dead, Didion cannot understand how or why. Her
thinking only begins to clarify once she receives the emergency room and autopsy reports,
nearly a year after John’s death. The reports confirm that John was dead from the moment
he sat down to dinner. Didion could have tried to fix the situation, but it would have been
futile; there was nothing she could have done about it then, and nothing she can do about it
now. Didion’s vivid memories of the months before John’s death begin to fade, but though
her heated mental state subsides, no clarity or sense of purpose replaces it. Didion begins
to focus again on the routines of daily life, accepting the inevitability of change, which forces
us to adapt and, eventually, to move on.
2. SCIENCE FICTION
Mockingjay
Suzanne Collins
Book Summary
The novel opens with Katniss wandering through the ashes of her decimated district,
District 12. It’s been a month since Katniss was rescued from the Quarter Quell arena
after shooting an arrow at the force field, the same time her district was bombed by the
Capitol. During that month, Katniss lived safely underground in the highly regimented
District 13, where the heart of the revolution resides, powered by President Coin, whom
Katniss doesn’t completely trust. Katniss is trying to make sense of this new world amidst
a rebellion and is still quite unstable as she recovers from the physical and emotional
trauma she underwent in the arena.
Page 4 of 12
Katniss’ coming to District 12 was her own idea. She wanted to see her home and mourn
for those who were killed. She feels great guilt for everyone who died. Gale heroically led as
many people as he could, including Katniss’ mother and sister, Prim, to the Meadow and
into safety. Now, the District 12 refugees have been welcomed into District 13, whose
population is waning because of a pox epidemic that killed many of the district’s citizens and
left a great number of them infertile. Gale waits for Katniss overhead in a hoverplane. Katniss
is still trying to make sense of her feelings for Gale, and it is especially hard now as she
worries constantly about Peeta, who was captured by the Capitol, wondering if he is alive or
dead.
Along with Katniss, the others rescued from the Quarter Quell arena were Finnick Odair and
Beetee, who had been part of the rebel plan organized by Head Gamemaker Plutarch
Heavensbee. Now, Katniss is experiencing great pressure from District 13’s leaders to be
the Mockingjay, the figurehead for the revolution that her defiance of the Capitol has helped
inspire. It’s a role that Katniss isn’t sure she can fill. She wonders if she would do more
damage than good.
Eventually, Katniss does agree to be the Mockingjay, but it’s only after she sees Peeta on a
televised interview calling for a cease-fire, which makes him a traitor even though Katniss is
sure Snow made him say it. Katniss creates a list of demands, all of which she requires in
order to be the Mockingjay. On that list is Peeta’s immunity. Katniss learns that clothing
designer Cinna, before he was killed, had already designed and created all of her
Mockingjay uniforms. Katniss discovers her prep team imprisoned in District 13’s cells deep
underground; they’ve been horribly abused and mistreated. She saves them and grows
increasingly wary of Coin and the way she runs District 13. Katniss continues to see major
parallels between District 13 and the Capitol.
Coin calls an assembly per Katniss’ request, not only to announce Katniss’ acceptance of
her Mockingjay role, but also the immunity of Peeta and the other captured tributes should
the rebels win. Coin adds, however, that should Katniss deviate from her Mockingjay role,
immunity will be revoked and all tributes, including Katniss, will be subject to the laws of
District 13.
Katniss’ first propo, short for propaganda spot, is an utter failure. It’s staged and stilted, and
Katniss doesn’t even recognize herself. Haymitch, now sober since District 13 doesn’t allow
alcohol, laughs at the propo and points out that Katniss is most powerful and moving during
genuine scenarios. Coin says to send Katniss, a bodyguard team, and a camera crew to
District 8 that day to get some more realistic propos.
Katniss and Haymitch are still angry at each other. They both think the other failed to protect
Peeta in the Quarter Quell arena. Upon talking, however, they realize neither one of them
could have made any other choice. Now, they will work together to win this war and rescue
Peeta.
On her way to District 8, Katniss learns that the rebels have control of every district except
for District 2, which has always been favored by the Capitol. The rebel plan was to take over
each district, ending with 2, cutting off supplies to the Capitol. If the rebels win, the new
government will be a republic.
In District 8, Katniss meets Commander Paylor and visits the wounded in a makeshift
hospital. The patients call out to her by name, invigorated by the mere sight of her. They
want to touch her and talk to her, and suddenly Katniss realizes that she hasn’t been fighting
against the Capitol alone. She also recognizes that she does possess power, the kind of
power that Snow is afraid of because it inspires unity and hope. Just as Katniss and her
team are leaving District 8, another airstrike arrives, targeting the hospital. Katniss and Gale
disobey orders and climb to the rooftop on a nearby building to shoot down the bombers.
Once the attack is over, Katniss surveys the destroyed hospital. There are no survivors. She
is enraged at this disregard for human life and an attack on the defenseless and weak. She
delivers a fiery message to Snow, all of it captured by her fearless camera crew.
Page 5 of 12
Back in 13, Katniss and Finnick watch another interview with Peeta, but this time she can
see that he has been tortured and is hurt. Katniss and Finnick pretend they didn’t see the
interview, and nobody tells Katniss about Peeta, not even Gale. Katniss eventually gets
Gale to confess, but she feels betrayed. Gale and Katniss, growing farther and farther
apart, return to District 12 to film more propos. Katniss remembers how she used to be
happy there and wonders what her life might have been like had she run away with Gale.
During another live Capitol programming, in which Snow and a very battered and fragile-
looking Peeta appear together, Beetee is able to break through the Capitol feed to
broadcast clips of the rebel propos. While Command rejoices, Katniss knows that their
success means more pain and suffering for Peeta. At the broadcast’s end, Peeta warns
Katniss and District 13, saying they’ll be dead by morning. The feed cuts out just as Peeta
is hit to the floor, his blood splattering the tile.
B. Exercises.
Exercise I. Directions: Observe how the two stories are written, focus on the
theme and structure of each story. Then answer the questions that follow.
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven
o 'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on,
repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!
In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces
of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two
cool glasses of milk.
"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale,
California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday.
Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light
bills."
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors
slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on
the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; umbrellas, raincoats for today. .." And the rain
tapped on the empty house, echoing.
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door
swung down again.
At eight-thirty the eggs were shrivelled and the toast was like stone. An aluminium wedge scraped
them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed
them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged
twinkling dry.
Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were a crawl with the small cleaning
animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their moustached runners,
kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped
into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.
Page 6 of 12
Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and
ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which
could be seen for miles.
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings
of brightness. The water pelted window panes, running down the charred west side where the house
had been burned, evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for
five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman
bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy,
hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to
catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint - the man, the woman, the children, the ball - remained. The rest was a thin
charcoaled layer.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there?
What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its
windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a
mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The
bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
Twelve noon.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to
bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry
mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap
rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced
back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent
of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only
silence was here.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which
filled the house with a rich baked odour and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles,
biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in
an electrical wind.
Two-fifteen.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.
Two thirty-five.
Page 7 of 12
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis
manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.
At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls .
Four-thirty.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal
substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films clocked
through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp,
cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of
delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a
great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there
was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the
summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched grass, mile on mile, and
warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes. It was the children's
hour.
Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In
the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an
inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.
Nine o'clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.
Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling: "Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this
evening?" The house was silent.
The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music
rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favourite...
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone."
Questions:
1. What 21st century genre is reflected in the story?
2. What distinct feature of this genre is very evident in the story? Cite lines to
support your answer.
3. What is the theme of the story?
Page 8 of 12
Scars
A life in injuries.
By David Owen
March 12, 2012
On a hill in the neighborhood where I grew up, in Kansas City, was a suburban ruin that my friends
and I called the Burned-Down House. There was a crumbling tennis court, which was enclosed
by an overgrown chain-link fence, and there was a concrete slab with a dirt-floored crawl space
underneath it, and there were two limestone chimneys. During the summer of 1972, when I was
in high school, my friend Duncan and I sat on top of one of the chimneys lighting firecrackers with
our cigarettes and throwing them at two other friends, who were sitting on a limestone retaining
wall and throwing firecrackers at us. Between explosions, we tried to think of something less
boring to do. Most of our firecrackers were Black Cats, but we had some cherry bombs, too, and
one of those blew up a few inches above my left foot. When I could hear again, and when Duncan
and I had stopped laughing, I noticed a nickel-size piece of cherry-bomb shrapnel embedded in
the rubber toe cap of my sneaker. When I pulled on it, it came out of my foot like a cork, and blood
spread up through the canvas and into the laces. Duncan drove me to the office of my doctor, a
pediatrician. The waiting room was full of mothers and weepy three-year-olds, and I took off my
shoe and handed it to the receptionist, to show her what the problem was.
I can still make out the line of the wound. Over the years, your body becomes a kind of historical
document, in which certain dramatic moments are memorialized in scar tissue. There’s a blemish
on my left arm that was caused by a dollop of molten G.I. Joe—the artifact of experiments that
my friends and I conducted, in grade school, on the melting points of our possessions. On my
right arm, I have two similar marks, made by metal pins that a surgeon inserted on either side of
a broken wrist, when I was in college. (After the pins were out and the cast was off, I showed the
surgeon that I couldn’t bend my right wrist as much as my left. He tapped the right wrist and said,
“This is normal. The other one bends too much.”)
When I smile, I have a dimple in my right cheek. Age and extra pounds have made it less
prominent, but it’s still visible, and I can feel the other side of it with my tongue. I got it when I was
three, by falling from the seat of my tricycle, on which I’d been standing. My main memento of that
accident, other than the dimple, is a photograph from the next day’s Kansas City Star of a forlorn-
looking little girl, who’s wearing a party dress and pressing one ear of a stuffed lamb to her cheek.
The photograph was part of an Easter feature, and I was supposed to have been in it, too. (The
writer was a friend of our mothers’.) The caption says the girl is “lonesome for a special playmate,”
who hurt himself that morning, and for several years that page in my scrapbook was my favorite.
The picture spoke of my ability to influence the emotions of others, as well as suggesting a kind
of celebrity. The girl and I didn’t get married—an early assumption of mine, partly clipping-based—
although I did take her as my date to my first school dance, in seventh grade. I was ashamed of
how skinny I was in those days, and I wore two pairs of pants, one over the other, in the hope of
making my legs appear less avian. The last song was the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” which I later
described to another friend’s mother as “a seven-minute slow dance,” hoping to shock her. Many
years later, my date’s daughter and my own daughter were college classmates, sorority sisters,
and friends. Now they’re both married.
Page 9 of 12
Complete the table below based on your observations of the two selections.
Theme:
Structure/format:
Exercise II. Directios: Compare and contrast these modern literary genres
using the Venn Diagram.
Directions: Look at the image below, what does it tell about the current
situation of the world today?
Write a 2-paragraph essay on your thoughts and views of the picture.
Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/B2fPAGk1vyw9o97b8
Page 10 of 12
D. Suggested Enrichment/Reinforcement Activity/ies
Directions: Below is a lyrics of the song “Time Machine” by Six Part Invention,
read the lyrics (you may opt to view it on youtube) and determine the meaning
behind the song.
If you are given a Time Machine, would you travel back in time to change
something in the past? Or would you use the Time Machine to travel to the distant
future?
"Time Machine"
I need you like the air I breathe (you make me feel alive)
You're the best part of my everyday (my every night)
If only I could travel back in time
I'd take it all back and I'll turn it all around
Edited by:
Reviewed by:
GUIDE
Take time to learn the concepts. Seek help from teacher, if needed.
Kindly monitor that learner answers the during study period. Please seek contact
subject teacher for assistance, if needed.
Page 12 of 12