Whether the planks hide the beating of a hideous heart or they break away to the madness beneath, their presence makes itself known in the final instructional activity of a literary analysis unit. Having gathered textual evidence from "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe and "I Feel A Funeral, in my Brain" by Emily Dickinson, ninth graders craft an essay with an original statement about the shared central idea of madness in a unit assessment.