The Speaker in “The Stray”
Mr. Alvarez’s fifth-grade class has 24 students, and 15 minutes remain in the period. Projected on the board is an eight-line poem called “The Stray.” The first stanza reads: “I curl in the porch’s warm square. / You set the bowl down and go. / My tail makes a question mark.” The final two lines repeat, “I wait.” During turn-and-talk, Dion says, “The poem is about a lonely person who feeds a cat but never stays.” Three classmates nod. The lesson objective is “Explain how a speaker’s point of view shapes a poem,” and later the class will compare this poem with a short story narrated by a human. Mr. Alvarez has one whiteboard, a stack of exit tickets, and no time to reread the whole poem aloud. He knows Dion is a fluent decoder who often loses track of who is speaking in dialogue-heavy texts. He wants a five-minute check that produces exit tickets he can sort tonight.
1. What is the likely source of Dion’s confusion, and which words should Mr. Alvarez point to first? Explain why those words, rather than others, settle the question.
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Diagnosis. Dion has collapsed the speaker with the subject. He reads the “I” as a person describing a cat, when the “I” is the cat describing a person.
Where to point first. Start with self-description, not pronouns: “My tail makes a question mark” can only be said by a creature that has a tail, and “I curl” is an action the speaker performs, not something observed. Then establish the addressee: in “You set the bowl down and go,” the “you” is the human.
Why not just pronouns. “I” and “you” alone prove nothing - a person could also say both. The decisive evidence is the body part plus the physical action.
Why the order matters. If Mr. Alvarez simply announces “the speaker is a cat,” Dion gets a fact instead of a strategy. Naming the evidence type - first-person self-description - gives him a move he can reuse on the later short story, where the narrator is human and the confusion will run the other direction.
2. Design a five-minute check that reveals whether students can identify the speaker and support it with evidence, rather than repeat the teacher’s explanation. What would a proficient response contain?
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Check design. Give every student the stanza and two directions: (1) “Rewrite lines 1–3 so the human is speaking. Keep the same events.” (2) “Underline one word in the original that told you who was speaking.”
Proficient response. Something like: “I stand on the porch while the cat curls in the warm square. I set the bowl down and leave. Its tail makes a question mark.” The underline falls on “My tail” or “I curl.”
Why it works. Rewriting forces a decision about agency - who curls, who leaves - instead of a label to guess. The underline is the evidence, so the tickets sort into three piles: identifies the speaker and cites body or action evidence; identifies the speaker but cites only “I”; still assigns human actions to the cat. The third pile is tomorrow’s reteach group.
What to avoid. “Is the speaker a cat?” puts the answer inside the question and yields a guess, not a demonstration.
3. The class will next read a short story with a human narrator who describes a neighbor. How should Mr. Alvarez use the poem to prepare students for that text without repeating the same lesson?
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Bridge the concept, change the surface. The poem taught students to ask, “Who is speaking, and what can this speaker actually know?” The story raises a different question: the narrator is human, but is he reliable and limited?
Concrete move. Before reading, post two questions on the board: “Who is telling this?” and “What could this teller not know?” Students answer the first in one sentence at the start and revisit it at the end.
Contrast during reading. Ask students to mark one place where the neighbor’s actions are reported from outside - the narrator cannot know the neighbor’s reasons. That is the same move as “My tail makes a question mark,” but inverted: in the poem, the speaker’s inside knowledge is the clue; in the story, the narrator’s outside position is the clue.
Assessment. A short written response: “How does the narrator’s position shape what the reader learns?” This transfers the reasoning, not the answer.