73 pages • 2 hours read
Gordon KormanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
When Capricorn begins attending the public school, he encounters a world that operates by different rules, and the school faces a compassionate and peaceful “threat” to the status quo. Who experiences more change—the school community when Capricorn’s influence inspires them, or Capricorn under the influence of the school? Explain your rationale with examples and refer to text details in your answer. These questions may serve as useful points in formulating a response.
Teaching Suggestion: To begin, students might work with a partner or small group to define change and list ways people and schools can shift. They can look for scenes that reveal change and identify specific quotations that illustrate their ideas. One way to approach this topic could be to assign weights to how much both sides changed the other (Capricorn and the school), with the weights adding up to 100%. This could lead to more complex critical thinking, where students include qualifiers like mostly, somewhat, and slightly.
By Gordon Korman