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Overview
From the Newbery Medal–winning author of Dead End in Norvelt, eight more hysterical semi-autobiographical Jack Henry stories about a sixth grader's trials and tribulations
Jack's life is a crazy roller-coaster ride. At his fifth school in six years, he has a crackpot teacher who won't give him a break about his lousy handwriting and a secret crush who wants to be a policewoman. At home, he has a pesky little brother with a knack for getting hurt whenever Jack's supposed to be looking after him, a terror for an older sister, all sorts of weird neighbors, and, last but not least, ferocious alligators in the canal behind his house.
Writing in his diary about his good days and bad days is one way Jack survives his up-and-down year. But he's also a kid who knows that life can go any which way at any given moment.
He might as well flip a coin: heads he wins, tails he loses. What will turn up next?
A Common Core title.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429979115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/01/1994 |
| Series: | Jack Henry Series , #3 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Lexile: | 750L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 13 Years |
About the Author
Jack Gantos has written books for people of all ages, from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults. His works include Hole in My Life, a memoir that won the Michael L. Printz and Robert F. Sibert Honors, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, a National Book Award Finalist, and Joey Pigza Loses Control, a Newbery Honor book. Jack was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and when he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing, and teachers made learning a lot of fun. When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Jack retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. The seeds for Jack’s writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister’s diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers’ lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories. While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections, they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success and the beginning of Jack’s career as a professional writer. Jack continued to write children’s books and began to teach courses in children’s book writing and children’s literature. He developed the master’s degree program in children’s book writing at Emerson College and the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children’s book writers. He now devotes his time to writing books and educational speaking. He lives with his family in Boston, Massachusetts.
Read an Excerpt
Heads or Tails
Stories from the Sixth Grade
By Jack Gantos
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1994 Jack GantosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7911-5
CHAPTER 1
I crept up on my diary. Carefully, I undid the lock with the small key I kept on a string around my neck, then slowly opened it.
"Ughhhh," I moaned. The pages were filled with squished spiders. I slammed it shut like a tiny coffin.
It wasn't the spiders that scared me. I had pressed them into the book. It was all those blank pages. For three years I had been trying to fill them, but I could never think of anything interesting to write. It was as though my brain stopped working if I even thought of my diary.
This didn't make sense. Usually, I was pretty good at imagining things. When I looked at the picture of the sailboat on my wall, in my mind I could see Dad racing the Flying Dutchman yacht of his dreams. When I read a good book, like The Feathered Serpent, the words filled my brain with people, smells, and sounds. But when I opened my diary, my mind went as blank as the paper. I felt like a moron.
It started the afternoon Mom came home from work and gave my older sister, Betsy, a diary. The year was stamped in gold on the flowery front cover. The hundreds of pages were made of thick, glossy paper. But what amazed me most was the lock. A strap from the back cover fit into a lock sewn onto the front cover, and there was a tiny key that only Betsy would be able to use.
"You can write anything that comes to your mind in this book," Mom told her. "A diary is for keeping all your secrets, and nobody is allowed to read it but you."
I looked up at my mother. "Where's mine?" I asked.
"I'll get you one when you're old enough to have secrets," she said.
"I do have secrets," I shot back.
"Not grownup secrets," she replied.
"I want a diary," I shouted and stomped my foot as hard as I could.
Mom didn't budge so I had to go all the way. I threw myself down on the floor and cried and bucked up and down. "I want a diary! I want a diary!"
"Don't be such an immature little brat," Betsy said and walked off to her bedroom, probably to start filling her diary with secrets. I howled even louder and kicked the floor with my heels.
"Okay, cut the theatrics," Mom said. "I'll get you a diary, but you must promise to write in it every day."
I promised. But I did not keep my promise.
At first, I just wrote down what day it was and the weather. Then I started listing everything I ate. But when it came to writing about what I was doing or what I was thinking and feeling, I couldn't seem to get it down. I could lie in bed and remember everything I had seen and said during the day, but when I opened the diary my thoughts vanished.
Still, I fought back and began to fill my diary with stuff. Each day, I searched for interesting things. I captured all kinds of bugs and squished them between the pages. I stapled in my baseball cards. I kept my stamp collection neatly arranged in rows. I used the diary as a photo album and mounted all my pictures inside. When I taped in my fortune-cookie fortunes, they looked like tiny telegrams from a foreign land. One of them read, "You Are Brave And Have Many Friends." I didn't believe it. I was covering over the empty white space of the pages in the same way I covered my eyes with my hands when I watched a monster movie.
It was no good. Even though the diary was filled with stuff, it was stuff someone else had thought up, someone else's stuff.
This evening was no different. Without writing much of anything, I locked the diary, grabbed a deck of cards and fled my bedroom. Betsy was sitting at the dining-room table playing a hand of solitaire. I sat down across from her and began to lay out my cards.
"Stop that," she said sharply.
"What?" I said.
"Stop copying me," she said. "Mom, tell him to stop copying me. He's driving me crazy."
"Leave your sister alone," Mom said, "and come help me work on this jigsaw puzzle. I'm having trouble."
Betsy slapped her cards down on the table. "Don't let him help you, Mom," she said. "Make him think of something to do on his own. Everything I do, he wants to do. Everything you do, he wants to do. He doesn't have a brain in his head. He's like some kind of dumb animal. Monkey see, monkey do."
"That's enough," Mom said. But we knew Betsy was right. I couldn't come up with any great ideas of my own. Nothing seemed interesting until I saw another person do it first. When Betsy started a shell collection, I started a shell collection. When she put PEACE posters on her bedroom wall, so did I. I wanted to be friends with all her friends. It seemed as if I could only do what she did first. I'll never be the President, I thought, just the Vice President. I won't be a gangster kingpin, just his stooge. I won't be the sole survivor in any humongous disaster, just another victim along with all the other losers. Believe it or not, I hate feeling sorry for myself. It makes me feel like an idiot, which makes me feel even sorrier for myself.
"Why don't you go fishing with your father," Mom suggested.
Dad was in the back yard, fishing in the canal for mullet and reading his favorite magazine, Popular Mechanics. But a few days before, I had seen our left-side next-door neighbor, Mr. Velucci, feeding spoiled pork chops to the alligators in the canal and I didn't want to go near that brown water. And I didn't want to get into a dumb discussion with Dad on how to transform his truck into a cabin cruiser or the washing machine into a helicopter. Popular Mechanics gave him the strangest ideas.
"Dad and I have nothing in common," I said, repeating a line I had heard Betsy say the previous week.
"Don't you have any homework to do?" Mom asked.
I did. I was avoiding my math homework because I wasn't sure of the assignment. My teacher terrorized me and I was afraid to ask her after school for an explanation. I didn't know the other kids that well and I was afraid to ask them. They might call me stupid. And once you get that name you're stuck with it for the rest of the year.
My teacher's name was Mrs. Marshall and I thought she was more dense than I was. She certainly didn't have an original thought in her head. Each day, after she took roll, she turned to us and announced, "All students take out your copybooks." We reached under the seats of our desks for our black-and-white composition books. But we didn't dare open them until she said so. She had threatened to mash our fingers between the pages if we disobeyed.
From a desk drawer she removed a pair of white cotton gloves and put them on. Next she got a fresh box of white chalk from her supply closet and loaded five new sticks into her wire chalk holder which drew five lines at a time. She pressed it against the chalkboard in front of the class and scratched a stack of lines from left to right. The screeching was so loud I thought my head would explode. Then she scratched more lines across the blackboards that ran along the entire right side of the room and across the back. Along the left side of the class, we had windows. But Mrs. Marshall wheeled two portable blackboards in front of the windows and our room became gloomy. She covered them with lines, too. I was surrounded by walls of blackboards, and from where I sat the gray lines of chalk looked like miles of barbed wire.
She removed a textbook from her desk and opened it to the page where we had left off the day before. She held the book in her left hand and raised a piece of chalk with her right. "Students, prepare to copy," she ordered. We opened our copybooks and twenty-five ballpoint pens clicked into position. "Go," she shouted and began to write. She copied onto the board exactly what was written in the book. If I only had known what the title of the book was, or who wrote it, I would have bought it so I could copy it at home. But she kept the book wrapped in a brown-paper cover.
"Egyptian history begins with the reign of King Menes," I scribbled.
She wrote like a sewing machine. Her handwriting looked even better than my mother's. All the letters were perfectly formed and they all slanted to the right at exactly the same angle. My handwriting was a mess. I wrote mostly straight up and down. My letters were always squashed together or too large and loopy. But, worst of all, I was slow. Every day I tried to keep up with Mrs. Marshall, but when she finished filling up the front blackboard I was only halfway down. She made us keep our desks clustered together in the center of the room so she had space to use the boards. When she finished the front, she hollered, "Shift!" and we scooted our desks a quarter turn to the right and faced the long side blackboard. Because I hadn't finished the front, I left a section of my copybook blank and began with the new board. I figured that maybe I could get caught up later. "Shift!" she hollered when she finished the side board and moved to the back, and again we scooted our desks to the right. When I looked around, it seemed that all the other kids were keeping up with her. Then she began on the portable blackboards.
"Shift!" she commanded. We did, and once again I left extra space in my copybook as I leaped ahead of myself, trying to keep up. But I was still scribbling away when she finished the portable blackboards. She put down her book and chalk and quickly began to erase her writing as I desperately scrambled to fill the blank spots in my book. When all the boards were erased, she said, "Everyone put down your pens and stretch out your fingers and hands." As the class stretched, a team of honor students jumped into action. They wet sponges in the back sink, then madly washed the chalkboards. The room was so hot the water evaporated in a flash, and once again we were ready to go.
"Okay," she announced after drawing fresh lines. "Everyone pick up your pens and let's begin." She changed books and we began to copy a chapter on earth science.
All day long we copied chapters from her books, but I never remembered a thing I wrote. I was too frazzled with trying to keep up. At the end of the day she had overlapped me a dozen times. I felt even more tortured each Friday, when we turned in our copybooks. She passed them out to us on Monday and each time I read the same comments: "Write more neatly and quickly. Don't daydream. Keep your mind on your work." What mind, I asked myself. I didn't have a thought of my own.
Betsy scooped up her playing cards. "You can play cards," she said. "I'll do some homework." She got up and went to her bedroom.
I picked my cards up, too, and ran to my bedroom. I grabbed my book bag and dashed back to the dining-room table before Betsy had returned. I took out a clean sheet of paper and a book.
When Betsy returned she slapped her books down on the table. "Copycat," she sneered. She spread her homework out while I copied a page from my history book. After a while I peeked up at her to see what she was doing. She was writing a letter to a friend. It occurred to me that I should be writing a letter to a friend. Then I noticed that she was writing differently than usual. Her handwriting slanted to the left instead of to the right. I thought it was a neat idea and so I started to do it, too. I was peeking up at her again to see if I was missing out on some new trick when she saw me.
"You're copying my new handwriting," she said. "I caught you."
"I am not," I cried. She snapped up my paper before I could grab her hand. "Give it back," I hollered. "I'll call Mom."
"Call her," Betsy said calmly, "so I can show her what a moron you are. Not only are you copying my handwriting but you are copying your homework word for word out of the book. A trained monkey could do what you do."
"Leave me alone," I said.
"Gladly." She sighed and gathered up her books. "If you try to follow me into my room, I'll knock you cold and sell you to a zoo."
I didn't care what she said. I was excited with the new handwriting style. It seemed to work really well for me. My letters were clear and I thought I was writing faster. I couldn't wait to try it out in class.
The next morning I got up early and started to get dressed. Everyone at school was wearing blue jeans and T-shirts. But Mom had other ideas. At the beginning of the school year she took me to Sears and bought five new pairs of slacks, five matching shirts, five pairs of matching socks, and a pair of brown lace-up shoes. Then she organized my closet so that on Monday I wore the green slacks and green-and-yellow plaid shirt with green socks. On Tuesday, I wore the brown slacks with the brown-and-white stripes and brown socks. This was Friday, so I put on my blue slacks and the blue-and-white checkered shirt with dark blue socks. Getting dressed was like being on an assembly line. I couldn't wait until I was old enough to pick out my own clothes. Mom said it had nothing to do with being old enough. "When you can pay for them," she said, "you can wear whatever you want. You can go to class dressed in a clown suit."
Today I'm going to have an idea of my own, I promised myself as I rode my bike to school. I'm not going to copy Betsy. I'm going to do exactly what I want to do, no matter what anyone thinks of me. I can either be a copycat for the rest of my life or I can be a one-of-a-kind.
I passed the drive-in theater at the end of our street. They showed only old movies and The Sound of Music was still playing. It was playing when we moved into the neighborhood, and that was four months ago. On some nights when the wind was blowing just right, I could hear the music through my bedroom window. Because of that movie, I caught myself singing, " ... The hills are alive ..." about a million times a day. I heard it in my brain when I was sitting in class. I heard it when I was playing kickball. I heard it when I was eating breakfast. I hated that movie. Maybe that's why I don't have an original thought in my head, I guessed. I'm being brainwashed by that movie all night long.
I got to school early. The place looked as strange as ever. It was made out of eight separate rectangular wooden trailers. There was one trailer for each grade, first through sixth. One trailer was for the office and one trailer was split in half for the girls' and boys' bathrooms. All the trailers were fitted with wheels and the entire school could be pulled away in the middle of the night. I could imagine all of us arriving one morning to find nothing but the asphalt paths left behind in the sandy field which was hot and large as a desert.
When Mrs. Marshall gave us the order to "start copying," I was ready for her. My new slant-to-the-left handwriting was faster. As she circled the room I was almost right behind her. And because I wasn't so afraid of being overlapped by her all the time, I could think about what I was writing. The Egyptians were great. Maybe I'll be an archaeologist when I grow up and study ancient Egypt, I thought. That was an original idea for me.
I went home for lunch and unlocked my diary with the key I kept around my neck. Yesterday I had scrawled above a line of flattened ants that I was "the stupidest kid on the planet." Today I wrote: "There is hope for me after all." The discovery of my new slant-left writing would change my life, like the discovery of electricity had changed the world, I decided. I closed the diary and heard the delicious crunching of a juicy palmetto bug that hadn't yet dried out.
At the end of the week, Mrs. Marshall collected our copybooks. I was excited because I had almost kept up with her the last two days, now that I was using my new handwriting. I expected praise for doing better. Maybe she'd even make me an honor student.
On Monday morning Mrs. Marshall handed out the copybooks. I flipped through the pages, and when I reached my new writing, I saw a big red X across every page, "DO YOUR OWN WORK," she had written, "SEE ME AFTER GLASS." My heart was pounding. I tried not to cry, but I could feel the tears filling my eyes. I put my head down on my desk as Mrs. Marshall began to draw lines around the room.
At lunchtime I waited until everyone left the classroom before I went up to her desk.
"I don't respect cheaters," she said to me.
"But I did write this," I protested. "I changed my writing."
"Don't argue with me," she replied, "I've already made up my mind. I don't know who copied this into your book, but you can't fool me."
I didn't know what else to say. I was being cheated by my teacher and there was nothing I could do about it. I turned and walked to my desk.
"I expect from now on you'll do your own work," she scolded. "Let this be a lesson to you."
The rest of the afternoon I copied her as best I could in my old handwriting. She overlapped me five times. I imagined myself failing sixth grade because I was unable to write fast enough. Betsy was right. A trained monkey could do what I do, only better.
When I returned home I went straight to Betsy's bedroom. "You've got to help me," I blurted out. "Look at this." I opened the notebook and showed her Mrs. Marshall's comments.
"Well, that's what you get for being a copycat," she said.
"But I did do the work," I Cried.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
"Write her a note and tell her I copied you," I begged. "She'll believe you."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heads or Tails by Jack Gantos. Copyright © 1994 Jack Gantos. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
COPYCAT,MY BROTHER'S FINGER,
CANDY ITANI,
RABIES,
DONNA LOWRY,
DEATH AND TAXES,
MY BROTHER'S ARM,
COCOA BEACH,
Reading Group Guide
Discussing and Responding
Jack's mother tells Betsy, "A diary is for keeping all your secrets, and nobody is allowed to read it but you." Why is it important to record your secrets in a diary or journal? A secret is no longer a secret once it is shared. What type of secrets should be shared? How do you know when a secret should be shared? Discuss incidents in the novel where Jack should have shared his secrets. Mrs. Henry tells Jack that she will get him a diary when he is old enough to have secrets. How old must a person be to have secrets? How might Mrs. Henry define
"grown-up secrets"?
In the story "Candy Itani," Jack goes to the
Baptist Mission with Johnny Ross. At the end of the story, Jack says that he will never go to the church again. What turns him against the church? What does Jack's decision reveal about him? Jack is sure to encounter Johnny
Ross at school. What do you think he will say to Johnny?
Jack is fascinated with the idea of UFO's in the story "Death and Taxes." He says that
UFO's can take him "away from all this confusion and set me down in a place without fear." Discuss the confusion and fear in Jack's life. Find incidents in the book when Jack uses humor to deal with his fear.
When the Henry family moves to Fort
Lauderdale, Jack writes in his diary, "Was this going to be a fresh start? Or was this only another beginning without an end, like all the others?" Why does Jack need a "fresh start"? What type of ending does he want?
How does Jack use humor to deal with his
"new beginning"? What could Mr. and Mrs.
Henry do to make their frequent moves easier for the children?
Reaching across the
Curriculum
Language Arts
Jack Henry likes to read detective novels.
Ask students to make a summer reading list that includes at least ten novels that they would recommend to Jack.
Jack puts fortune-cookie messages in his diary. Ask students to write a fortune-cookie message for Jack. Tell them that the message should offer him encouragement and make him feel better about himself.
Social Studies
In the story "Death and Taxes," the Henry family drives from Miami to Mount Pleasant,
Pennsylvania, to attend a family funeral. Ask students to use maps or atlases to determine the shortest route for the Henry family to take. Then, have them plan a scenic route for their return trip.
Fort Lauderdale is known as the "Venice of
Florida." Ask students to plan a day tour of
Fort Lauderdale and the surrounding areas.
Instruct them to give brief information about each site.
Science
In the story "Rabies," Jack is bitten by a dog and worries that he has been infected with rabies. Ask students to go to the library and obtain information about rabies. Have them make a pamphlet that informs other people about this deadly infection. The pamphlet should include a brief discussion about the causes, symptoms, and treatment of the infection. The students may also want to include a brief history about the discovery of the treatment of rabies.
The Henry family is preparing for a hurricane in the story "Rabies." Ask students to research the weather conditions that produce hurricanes. What is the difference between a Hurricane Warning and a
Hurricane Watch? How does the National
Hurricane Center in Florida collect and use data?
Mathematics
Ask students to use the most recent World
Almanac or the Internet to locate figures regarding the death toll and property damage from hurricanes in the United States since
1950. Have them construct graphs that compare the data. Which hurricane is considered the most devastating?