Standardized Testing and Reporting - STAR

Literary Response and Analysis (Performance Level: Advanced) – Question 01

excerpt from “Breaking the Barrier”
by Caroline Patterson

1        We were sitting on the front porch one August morning, bored and penniless, trying to
think of ways to make money. I polished shoes and my brother mowed the lawn but shoes
dirtied and grass grew only so fast. That’s when we hit on the idea of the fair. Cash prizes, no
limit on entries: we entered everything we possibly could, and added up what we’d make for
first in every category, the dazzling twenty-four dollars already weighting our pockets.

2        Fair week, our house was a whirlwind of activity, my mother’s VW bus pulling in and out
of the driveway for more tape or matting board, my brother and I snarling insults back
and forth. “I’ll leave you in the dust,” my brother would say, taping string on the back of a
photograph. “You’re dead meat,” I’d yell back over the hum of the mixer.

3        I was particularly proud of two of my entries: a colored pencil sketch and a dress I’d
sewn. The sketch was the silhouette of a woman’s head I’d copied from a booklet called
“Drawing the Human Head,” and I thought I’d done an especially good job on the ear, which the booklet said
was the hardest part to draw. “Nice ear!” I could imagine the judges whispering among themselves, “See how
she managed the shine on canals!”

4        The dress, however, was my pièce de résistance. Its Empire-waist bodice (featuring my first darts) and
long puffy sleeves had taken me most of August to sew. During the long, hot afternoons while my friends
went swimming, I was at the sewing machine, ripping out mangled seams, crying, raging, then sewing them
again.

5        Opening day, I went first to my silhouette. I looked at the entry tag. Nothing. Next to it, an elk sketch—a
big, dumb elk that had been entered every year since the fair began—mocked me with its shiny blue ribbon.
What was wrong with those judges, I steamed. Didn’t they see my ear?

6        I still had my dress.

7        In Home Arts, ribboned entries jammed the walls: a grinning Raggedy Ann and Andy, a beaded chiffon
mini, a pillow embroidered with a large McCarthy flower. The lowly, prizeless entries were jammed onto
racks and shelves.

8        I found my dress on a rack. The tag was bare, except for a comment from the judge, written in a measured,
schoolteacher’s hand: “Rickrack is such a decorative touch!”

9        My brother cleaned up. He got a first on chocolate chips he’d never made before the morning our entries
were due, prizes on his photographs, a car model I didn’t even know he’d entered . . . It went on and on.

10      My brother made twenty-one dollars. I got two.

11      But it wasn’t the fact I didn’t make money, or that life was unfair, that bothered me most. It was the
comment of that judge, probably some poor Home Ec teacher who’d seen a thousand dresses as badly sewn
as mine that day. It was her tone of polite dismissal, her cheery insincerity, which I still associate with the
voices of women in my past—the Home Ec teachers and den mothers and club presidents I still try to escape
from.

“Breaking the Barrier” by Caroline Patterson originally appeared in Vol. 77, No. 2 & 3 of the Southwest Review. Reprinted by permission of Southwest Review, Southern Methodist University, and Caroline Patterson.

CSR0P065

Which phrase from the story helps to create a
mood of anticipation?

A   a whirlwind of activity

B   long, hot afternoons

C   snarling insults back and forth

D   jammed onto racks and shelves

Results

1. 48% of students gave this response. (Correct Response)
2. 21% of students gave this response.
3. 24% of students gave this response.
4. 7% of students gave this response.

Note: Percentages may not total 100 due to rounding.