HELP, pick one and do a quick write of what you think Quickwrite 1: Some people assert that just one or two generations ago men and women seemed to have more rigid codes for how to behave: for example, men could be loud and assertive while women were expected to dress modestly and use a “feminine” voice. Do you think these codes or “rules” for male and female behavior still hold true today? What codes or “rules” apply to those who do not identify with one gender or the other? What experiences and observations can you point to as support for your position?
Quickwrite 2: Women and men now work in a greater variety of jobs than ever before: women take combat roles in the military and serve as police officers and firefighters. Men work as nurses and participate in cheerleading. More individuals are refusing the male/female binary, identifying themselves as gender-fluid or non-binary. Do you think there are still jobs or activities (for instance, sports) that are better suited to men or women? If so, what are they and why? If not, why not?

Read the excerpt from "mother tongue." those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “even though tom was mary thought he was ” and the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “even though tom was foolish, mary thought he was ridiculous.” well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what tom could have been and what mary might have thought of him. so i never did well on tests like that. how does tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? tan discusses the types of questions on achievement tests to support the idea that the tests limit students’ ability to write well. tan explains a question on a language achievement test to support the idea that the tests should include more interesting content. tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability. tan considers how her mother might answer a question on a test to support the idea that nonstandard english limits a person’s ability to communicate.