Telephone Man

Goodmorning!
The first story I have for you comes from Chris Crutcher's 1991 collection entitled Athletic Shorts. It includes 6 short pieces, each ranging from 14-20 pages long.  The piece that I have for you is entitled Telephone Man. Crutcher does use dramatic imagery, as noted by some phrases in my summary, and his topics are hot topics.  Racism and bullying are the two major ideas presented in this text. All in all I would recommend this text for high school level students. It offers great classroom discussion and has a great lesson. After evaluating this text and taking into consideration the five major characteristics for proper evaluation of Young Adult novels- I gave it a 46 out of 50. I will attach my complete evalution if you want to know more. With that said "Pull up a chair, Grab a cup of Jo and Enjoy!"

 The Telephone Man is a story about a boy who struggles with the concept of ethnicity.  He has had to change school a couple of times, and in the end is forced to attend an all-black school- or he will end up in jail.  The protagonist struggles a lot, and has unfortunate accidents –one involving Bisquick mix and berry flavored soap. As you can predict those two do not mix well, and in the end create “a cannon” from his butt, and he ends up “spray-painting the bathroom” with his butt with the help of strawberry shampoo and Bisquick. This already sounds humiliating for the main character, but it does get worse. As he is encouraged to go home and change, he gets jumped outside the school property. The Chinese clique demand payment for crossing “their territory.” The only thing that he has on him is his telephone equipment, well the only thing he lets on. Now the telephone equipment is what makes him unique. He does get jumped, but saved by an unexpected person. He then in turn comes to the conclusion that maybe blacks aren’t as bad as his dad makes them out to be, and maybe the other ethnicities aren’t as bad either.  “If my dad made a mistake about them (blacks), I wonder if he could make a mistake about the other colors, too” (128).