1. Read the prompt on the back of your packet from yesterday.

2. Read the response in front of you.

The Windbreaker (396 words)

I bought a windbreaker for a hundred dollars the other day. The windbreaker was made for mountain climbers. Rich mountain climbers. I’m not a mountain climber. Nor can I legitimately defend spending $100 on a jacket that costs just under the bluebook value of my car. This windbreaker reflects Margaret Drabble’s cynical—but truthful—claim that “our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.”
That windbreaker has earned me some compliments, its “North Face” label exposing me as the yuppie poser I swore I’d never be. But conforming is so—safe. “Objectivity” says that $100 should go toward a debt, groceries, a down payment on a better car. But conformity trumps objective fact in a world where we are more affected by the people around us than the voice inside of us.
Thoreau probably didn’t wear a windbreaker. He built a house, in the woods, far from the conformist city-dwellers—the “sheep” as Twain called them. Thoreau prided himself in his individuality, his ability to escape the claustrophobic nature of everyday village life that reeked of conformity.
But lo, Thoreau was but a few miles from town, only lived at Walden Pond for two years, and who is anyone to say that his goal was not to sell a ton of books to a “conformist” audience? I taught Thoreau to my AP class this year; indeed I forced them to conform to his nonconformist values. The irony is too much to bear.
We conform because it’s easier, albeit often more expensive, financially or otherwise. The teenager has another beer before getting behind the wheel because he saw how easy it was for his friend to do it; the DINC couple buys a new Audi instead of an old Chevy because it’s easier to explain to their status-seeking neighbors. The 4-year old girl chooses the pink dress because she doesn’t yet know what objectivity is. Maybe therein lies the answer: We conform because it’s what we were taught from birth, before we knew how to think for ourselves.
Though it pains me to admit it, Drabble’s words ring doubly true for me: That same windbreaker was purchased by my best friend the day before, right in front of me. Luckily he lives in New York so I won’t look like the pathetic conformist that I am. For now, I’ll take the compliments.


3. List what the writer DOES WELL.

4. Identify and name rhetorical devices.

5. Explain tone and style.

6. Discuss 4 and 5

7. Score it.

8. Your turn - 25 min (or until the bell)