A Place For Us By Nicholas Gage Summary

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Informational Text Elements - The Teacher Who Changed My Life
Informational Text Elements - The Teacher Who Changed My Life
Assigned by: Marilu BelmanDue: Nov 8, 2017 11:59 PM
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1Identification and Application:
Look for facts and key details in the text that describe or explain important ideas, events, or individuals.
Identify transition words and phrases, such as because, as a consequence, or as a result, that signal interactions among individuals, ideas, or events.
Determine how an event or a sequence of events influences an individual, a subsequent event, or an idea.
Determine how an individual or individuals …show more content…

In this personal narrative, Gage recounts how Marjorie Hurd, one of his teachers and mentors in junior high school, influenced his life by pushing him toward a career in journalism. Gage makes this idea clear in the first sentence of his essay:

3The person who set the course of my life in the new land entered as a young war refugee --who, in fact, nearly dragged me on to the path that would bring all the blessings I’ve received in America--was a salty-tongued, no-nonsense schoolteacher named Marjorie Hurd.

4As happens with a flood of memories, Gage packs facts and key details into the long first sentence of his personal essay. He establishes that he came to the United States “as a young war refugee” and that one individual--a “no-nonsense schoolteacher named Marjorie Hurd--served as his compass by setting “the course of ...[his] life ...on to the path” of journalism, a path “that would bring all the blessings” he has “received in America.”

5In the second paragraph, Gage provides more details about the reason he came to the United States and the role that his mother played in shaping his …show more content…

8Readers get the first glimpse of Hurd’s enormous impact on the events in Gage’s life in a remembrance placed in paragraph 8:

9One day, after discussing how writers should write about what they know, she assigned us to compose an essay from our own experience. Fixing me with a stern look, she added, “Nick, I want you to write about what happened to your family in Greece.” I had been trying to put those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment.

10Although he had been trying to forget his mother’s death and other painful memories, he now had to confront it for his essay assignment. In paragraph 11, Gage provides concrete evidence of the profound emotional impact that Miss Hurd’s assignment had on him:

11I handed in the essay, hoping never to see it again, but Miss Hurd had it published in the school paper. This mortified me at first, until I saw that my classmates reacted with sympathy and tact to my family’s story. Without telling me, Miss Hurd also submitted the essay to a contest sponsored by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, Pa., and it won a

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