Schooled

By **Gordon Korman

Booktalk 1**

Capricorn Anderson has: 1. Never watched T.V. 2. Never eaten a pizza. 3. Never ever interacted with kids that are his age. Since he was little his only life experience has been living on a farm commune and being home schooled by his “hippie” grandmother named Rain. But life has a way of changing very quickly. Rain falls out of a tree and breaks her hip. Now Capricorn has to go to the big city, live with a school guidance counselor and her daughter, and worst of all he has to go to a normal school. Capricorn has to walk into a grade 8 classroom with absolutely zero experience with school or 14 year old kids. Right from the beginning Capricorn’s extreme weirdness makes him a target at Claverage Middle School. He has long unkept hair, wears hemp clothes, wears corn stalk sandals and practices Tai Chi on the front yard. He was the perfect target for the school bully. Zach the bully can hardly wait to introduce Capricorn to a very strange tradition started by the kids at the school. The tradition is to nominate the biggest nerd in the school for class president. Everyone makes sure this unlucky person wins, and then they spend the whole year making the winner’s life miserable. Read page 41 – Zach had Cap’s combination--- dead bird. That’s just the beginning of what the bullies have in store for Capricorn. Things get more and more out of hand because Cap is absolutely clueless about how things work. Zach and his buddies dream up the worst things imaginable. Then the principal of the school makes the biggest blunder of all. He hands Cap a chequebook. A chequebook to a kid who has no idea what money is. He is now in charge of spending money from the school’s Activity fund. You won’t believe what he buys. And the bully’s are still at it. They set up a prank where there is a huge crash that sends an ambulance to the school. The rumor is Cap is dead. What was the prank? What happens to Capricorn the kid who knew nothing about life? The ending of this book will surprise you and you will be very sad that there are not more kids in our world just like Capricorn Anderson.


 * Booktalk** **2**

When Capricorn Anderson arrives at Claverage Middle School, Hugh Winkelman can hardly believe his luck. He has suddenly been replaced as the eighth grade target for every bully in the school. Cap, with hair down to the middle of his back, his tie-dyed clothes and homemade sandals, has never been to a public school before. He has no idea what a cell phone or an iPod is and never watched TV. He has grown up at Garland Farm, a commune that his grandmother, Rain, founded in the 1960's. At one time, it was a thriving hippie community but over the years people left to make new lives in the real world, all except for Rain. When Cap's parents die in the Peace Corps, she became his sole guardian, friend and teacher. That all changes suddenly when Rain falls out of a plum tree on the farm and breaks her hip. Her hospital stay and recovery are going to take a long time and Cap is placed in foster care and registered in public school for the first time. Cap's naïve, simple view of the world sets him apart from everyone. He becomes the perfect target for spit balls that stick in the tangle of his hair, gross objects stuffed in his locker and love letters from the non-existent Lorelei Lumley. When he is manipulated into becoming the eighth grade class president, he thinks that the students have elected him because they believe in him. He doesn't know that it has been a tradition at the school to terrorize the class president until the individual has a nervous breakdown. Little does anyone realize that Cap may very well be the greatest class president in the history of the school.


 * Teaching to Write With a Voice From Different Perspectives**

Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different character in the novel and would be helpful to illustrate how a story is shaped by the voice of the character telling the story.