Discussion Director

Effect/Cause

1.                  Effect: Mr. Maxwell thinks that Mark is a slacker.  What caused Mr. Maxwell to believe this?  Do you think it was right for Mr. Maxwell to assume this?

Mr. Maxwell thinks Mark is a slacker because of the way he acts in the classroom.  Mark sits in the back of the room, he doesn’t pay attention in class, and he had a bad attitude.  I don’t think Mr. Maxwell should automatically assume that Mark is a slacker; he should try to talk to Mark and see why he seems so un-interested during class.

Setting

2.                  Where does this story take place?

This story takes place in New Hampshire.  Most of this section takes place in Mr. Maxwell’s fifth-grade science class at Hardy Elementary School.

On Your On

3.                  If you went to a new school in the middle of the year, how would you feel?

I would feel lonely and left out, just like Mark feels.  I would especially feel this way if like Mark, I had already learned the stuff that the teachers at my new school were teaching.

4.                  How would you feel if you were Mr. Maxwell and had a student like Mark in your classroom?

I would probably feel the same way that Mr. Maxwell feels.  Mark doesn’t seem to care about anything that Mr. Maxwell does in class, even though he tries to make class fun.  I would get frustrated if a student in my class didn’t seem to care about what I was teaching.

Italics

“He glanced at the fraction problems on the chalkboard, and fought back a yawn.  He thought, I learned all that stuff ages ago.” – p. 27, par. 1

5.                  Why was this sentence italicized?

This sentence was italicized to show that Mark was bored with the things he was learning in class.  The italicized part is him thinking about how he learned the fractions they were discussing in class a long time ago.  He is bored because he already knows what the teacher is going over, so he has nothing to do or pay attention to.