Twelve-year-old Jamal of Scorpions and sixteen-year-old Steve of Monster both face difficult choices in difficult environments. As African American boys growing up in Harlem, Jamal and Steve must negotiate their ways among the conflicting, swirling influences of school, family, and street life. How they respond to these challenges and the life-and-death consequences of their decisions form the backbone of these two gripping novels from award-winning author Walter Dean Myers.

Reading Skills and Strategies
Compare and Contrast | Evaluate Fact and Nonfact | Identify Problems and Solutions

Monster
About the Book | Analyze Point of View | Questions for Group Discussion

Scorpions
About the Book | Analyze Point of View | Questions for Group Discussion

Other Books About Celebrating Differences and Meeting Challenges

Feel free to print this teacher's guide for use in the classroom.

Reading Skills and Strategies

Challenging Issues

Both books deal with issues related to guns, violence, and drugs. The author deromanticizes these issues by showing their real consequences, as well as the desperation and fear of people drawn to them. Have students supplement their reading and discussion of these issues with newspaper articles and stories of real teenagers in situations similar to those in the books. How are their perceptions of these true stories altered by having read Myers’s books? Why might it be helpful for teenagers to read Monster and Scorpions?

Monster

About the Book
“The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.” With this dramatic sentence Steve begins the story of his jail experience and his trial for felony murder. The charge has resulted from his alleged involvement with a grocery store holdup in which the owner was shot and killed. Because Steve increasingly feels like an outside observer of his own life, and because he studies film at a prestigious New York City high school, he writes most of his story in the form of a screenplay. In his mind he calls the movie Monster, after what the prosecutor has called him. The word torments him—along with fears about what will happen to him, concerns about how his family is responding to his arrest and trial, and questions about the nature of truth.

Reading Strategies
Since most of the book is in screenplay format, before reading you may wish to assign roles and have the class read Monster aloud together. Students can pick roles out of a hat so that no one feels he or she is being stereotyped.

Analyze Point of View
We hear Steve’s story through his own point of view. How does this affect the way the story is told? As students read, ask them to think about when Steve’s point of view might be different from an “objective” one.

Evaluate Fact and Nonfact
Point out to students that the job of a reader is in one respect similar to that of a juror: both must sift through stories and determine what they do and do not believe. As students read, ask them to record examples of statements they think, within the context of the novel, are Fact and Nonfact. Afterward present students with these questions: Are fact and nonfact the same as truth and nontruth? How might characters in Monster answer this question?

Questions for Group Discussion

• Is justice served in Steve’s case? Do you think Steve served as lookout man for the robbery? If he did, do you think he should have been charged with, or convicted of, felony murder? Ask students to role-play lawyers in the case and present arguments for both sides. Follow up by asking how they would vote if they were on the jury.
• Steve imagines the defense attorney is looking at him wondering “who the real Steve Harmon was” (p. 92). How would you answer this question? Steve himself says he films his life to try to “look for one true image” (p. 281). Why do you think the question of who he is remains so important to Steve?
• Reread the prisoners’ debate about truth (p. 220). Who is right? What happens to truth in the legal system? Are the lawyers seeking the truth? Which witnesses in the trial do you think were telling the truth and which were not? Look back at the testimony and try to determine what led you to form your opinions.
• What do you think of the screenplay format as a way to tell this story? When is the form most effective? When is it least effective? The advice Mr. Sawicki gives about film is to let the audience “predict without predicting” and to “keep it simple” (pp. 19 and 214). Do you think Steve achieves this with his movie? Use examples from the text to support your answers.

• “This is not a movie about bars and locked doors. It is about being alone when you are not really alone and about being scared all the time” (pp. 3–4).
• “Most people in our communities are decent, hardworking citizens who pursue their own interests legally and
• without infringing on the rights of others. But there are also monsters in our communities—people who are willing to steal and to kill, people who disregard the rights of others” (Petrocelli, p. 21).
• “It’s funny, but when I’m sitting in the courtroom, I don’t feel like I'm involved in the case. It’s like the lawyers and the judge and everybody are doing a job that involves me, but I don't have a role. It’s only when I go back to the cells that I know I’m involved” (p. 59).
• “Half of those jurors, no matter what they said when we questioned them when we picked the jury, believed you were guilty the moment they laid eyes on you. You're young, you’re Black, and you're on trial. What else do they need to know?” (O’Brien, pp. 78–79).
• “ ‘All they can do is put me in jail,’ he said. ‘They can’t touch my soul’ ” (Acie, p. 89).
• “I think about myself so much, about what’s going to happen to me and all, that I don’t think about my folks that much. I know [Mama] loves me, but I wonder what she’s thinking” (p. 91).
• “Seeing my dad cry like that was just so terrible. What was going on between us, me being his son and him being my dad, is pushed down and something else is moving up in its place. It’s like a man looking down to see his son and seeing a monster instead” (pp. 115–116).
• “What did I do? I walked into a drugstore to look for some mints, and then I walked out. What was wrong with that? I didn’t kill Mr. Nesbitt… Sunset said he committed the crime. Isn’t that what being guilty is all about? You actually do something?” (p. 140).
• “His film footage shows me what he’s seeing and, to a large extent, what he’s thinking. And what he sees, the humanity of it, speaks of a very deep character....
• It is my belief that to make an honest film, one has to be an honest person” (Sawicki, p. 237).
• “They are all equally guilty. The one who grabbed the cigarettes, the one who wrestled for the gun, the one who checked the place to see if the coast was clear” (Petrocelli, p. 261).

Scorpions

About the Book
Jamal, at age twelve, feels pressure to “act like a man.” His brother is in jail for murder. His father puts in only occasional household appearances, and his mother works long hours to support Jamal and his younger sister. Jamal wants to help his mother raise money to appeal his brother’s murder conviction, but so many factors seem stacked against him. At school the principal has targeted him as a troublemaker, while an older boy taunts him continually. Jamal struggles to be strong, but inside he often feels small and weak. When his brother sends word that Jamal is to take over as leader of his gang, the Scorpions, Jamal suddenly finds himself with something new to address these challenges: a gun. The stakes rise for Jamal and his best friend, Tito, and despite their good intentions the two boys are drawn into trouble that leaves a young man dead and their own lives drastically altered.

Reading Strategies
Before reading, display a map of New York City and have students locate Harlem, where most of the action takes place. As students read they can look up the streets and places mentioned and mark these on the map.

Identify Problems and Solutions
As students read, have them keep a four-column chart identifying problems Jamal faces, possible solutions he might pursue, the solution Jamal chooses, and the one they would recommend under the circumstances.

Make Predictions
Have students pause between chapters to discuss in small groups what they think will happen next. A volunteer in each group can record the predictions. Then at the end of each chapter have them look back to see which events confirmed their predictions and which ones surprised them.

Explore Character and Motivation
Write the following names on the board: Jamal, Tito, Sassy, Mama, Mack, Abuela, Mr. Davidson, Dwayne. Ask the class to brainstorm a list of adjectives that describe each character. Afterward have students suppose they are in charge of casting a movie version of Scorpions. They must come up with a one-paragraph description of each character as part of the “casting call.” If students have ideas of specific actors who might play the roles, have them explain why these people would be appropriate. You might divide the class into small groups to work on assigned characters, then together as a class discuss the final paragraphs. For each of the above characters have students create questions in the form of “Why does X do Y?” (e.g., Why does Mama tell Jamal about Mack? Why does the Principal behave so rudely to Jamal? Why does Sassy keep quiet about the gun?) Explain that the best questions are usually the ones that are hardest to answer, rather than those with clear right and wrong answers. Have students take turns posing questions that the whole class can then consider and discuss.

Discuss Quotations
Present the following (or other) quotations from Scorpions to the class. Ask students to explain what the words mean in context and discuss how they feel about the ideas expressed.

• “He was tired of school anyway. The only thing he did was to sit in the classrooms and listen to the teachers tell him what he couldn’t do. He didn’t even have to show up for school to know what they were going to say” (p. 17).
• “The only way to deal with somebody stupid like Dwayne, Jamal thought, was to punch him out” (p. 60).
• “Jamal felt the same about his father as he did about Randy. They were both gone, and each of them had taken a little piece of Mama with them that they couldn’t bring back” (p. 88).
• “It was like [Mama] knew that the police were coming to get Randy. It was part of living on the block, part of walking past Mr. Evans’s raggedy store, part of what their lives were about. If you were a part of the life they were living, Jamal thought, then after a while you did something and the police came and got you” (p. 117).
• “ ‘It’s a hard life sometimes, Sister Hicks,’ Reverend Biggs said. ‘And the biggest temptation is to let how hard it is be an excuse to weaken’ ” (p. 156).
• “It was Indian who was in jail and Angel who had been killed, but Jamal knew that Tito was messed up, too. It was as if he had been wounded in a place that Jamal couldn’t see, though he knew the wound was there” (p. 209).
• “Every thought he had about the gun was bad. It had made so much trouble, had hurt them so much. But there was something else, too. Something deep in him that he thought Tito knew about, had maybe known about even before he did. That was the part of him, a part that was small and afraid, that still wanted the gun” (pp. 213–14).

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Thematic Connections

African American Experience
What roles do you think race and racism play in the experiences of these characters?

Courage and Survival
The main character of each novel feels a need to act tough to survive. Discuss the role that fear plays in their lives. What is courage under these circumstances? What do you think they do and do not have to do to survive?

Family Relationships
What do you think family means to Jamal and Steve? Describe their relationships with their different family members.

Making Decisions
“What decisions did I make? What decisions didn’t I make?” Steve wonders (Monster, p. 270). Why do you suppose this is a hard question for him to answer? How would you answer it for Steve, or for Jamal? What decisions do Steve and Jamal make? What are the results of their decisions?

Similarities and Differences
Describe the similarities and differences between the two books. Consider: titles, writing style and genre; the main characters’ backgrounds, circumstances, and schools; the roles of gangs, guns, and violence; the crimes that propel both plots; the sense both characters have of watching life as though it were a movie; and the books’ endings. Which of the two main characters, Jamal or Steve, do you think will have a better chance of “making it,” and why?

Turning Points
Steve subtitles his movie “The incredible story of how one guy’s life was turned around by a few events....” The same subtitle might work for Jamal’s story. What do you think are the turning points in the boys’ stories? Are these the same as or different from the turning points in the structure of each novel?

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Activities Across the Curriculum

Language Arts
Steve tells his story in the form of a screenplay. Note the formatting conventions he observes, including using a “slug line” before each scene: listing INTERIOR or EXTERIOR and a brief PLACE description; listing CUTS and some camera directions (CLOSE UP, MEDIUM SHOT, LONG SHOT) in moving from one scene or image to the next; and centering dialogue on the page under the name of the character. Write a scene from your own life in the form of a screenplay.

Math
Jamal learns “minus numbers” and decimals in math class, but does not particularly relate to them. Yet, he is very aware of some real applications of math in his life, such as how long it would take him to earn money for his brother’s appeal. He thinks he can earn “maybe five or seven dollars a day” carrying packages for the supermarket (p. 46). Come up with a plan you think is realistic for Jamal to earn the $500 or $1,000 necessary to start his brother’s appeal. Consider that he may want to spend some of the money he earns on food or other things.

Social Studies
How does the education system serve or fail Jamal and Steve? What do you think the teachers in Jamal’s school could have done differently to help him? Jamal goes to a local public school, Steve to a special school for gifted students in a different neighborhood. How do these differences affect the boys’ experiences? After discussing these questions, have students work together to create “Guidelines for Schools for Helping Students in Trouble.”

Discuss questions about the criminal justice system raised by these books. Then ask groups of students to come up with questions about the criminal justice system in their own community and do research to find the answers. They might keep a scorecard listing what they think the system does well and poorly, both in these fictional representations and in real life.

What should be done about the prevalence of gangs and guns in many communities? Have the class research the impact of gangs and guns in their own community, and create a chart proposing solutions for dealing with them.

Art
Jamal and Steve both enjoy expressing themselves through visual mediums. Jamal draws many things that he sees, including the view from his window and a portrait of Tito, while Steve films his neighborhood for a class at school. What do you think artistic expression gives these characters? Find out by trying it yourself. Draw a portrait of a person you admire or a landscape of a place you see frequently. Or create part of a storyboard for a film about your neighborhood, drawing sketches of the different shots you would like to show.

In Steve’s movie he includes a cartoon reinterpretation of the phrase “The people rest” in which everything screeches to a halt and everybody sleeps (“The people are resting” Monster, p. 199). The book introduces other words and phrases from two specialized languages: the legal system (felony murder, objection sustained) and the street (did a calendar, dropped a dime). Choose one such expression and illustrate it in a cartoon.

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Meet the Author

An Interview with Walter Dean Myers

Q. You’ve written for many different age groups. What are the special challenges of writing for young adults? What do you like about it? A. Being a young adult is always a traumatic age for kids. You go through the shock of being a child, directly to the responsibility of being an adult and the problems that an adult faces. You’re facing the world for the first time as an individual. It’s a difficult period in everybody’s life. It was for me, but I keep referring back to it because it was such an exciting and trying time in my life. When you’re young, you make mistakes. The big thing that’s different now is that when I was a kid, you could survive your mistakes. Then, if you got into a gang fight, you hit someone with a stick or you threw a bottle… today kids have access to guns. The same kids that would have been in trouble and gotten a stern talking-to are now going to jail for fifteen or twenty years. Instead of having a bloody nose, you’re dead. Then you could get away with your mistakes. It’s much harder living today. The values are basically the same, but it’s easier to mess up.

Q. A theme that runs through the books is the ever-present fear of violence. How do you hope your books will influence kids?
A. I am not interested in giving kids something that will all of a sudden change their lives. Just having kids think about it is important. I feel that kids don’t think about things until after they happen. I remember one time I hitched a ride on the bumper of a cab, and I wound up being dragged a block. I was all bruised up, and afterwards I thought I probably shouldn’t have done that. That’s typical of kids…you do things first, then you think about it. By the time you think about it you’re in big trouble. Facing someone with a gun is less personal and takes less nerve than being in a fistfight—it doesn’t require as much physical courage. Someone like Jamal, when faced with idea of confronting a bully, doesn’t have to draw up that physical courage, and that’s really bad news.

Q. In Scorpions, the older brother is in jail. Was the starting point of Monster the desire to flip the perspective and tell the story from the perspective of a jailed person?
A. I did a lot of interviews with kids in jail for Monster. One of the things that really shook me was that the young men did not understand how they got from the point of innocence to the ability to commit a crime. What got them there, of course, were the small moral decisions they made for which they were not punished. Many of these people in jails think of themselves as basically innocent kids who got caught up. They don’t realize the process. In Monster, if there had been no death and if these guys had just taken the money and split, he might have felt that it was an easy thing to do, so maybe he would have gone on to do something else. When people plan their crimes, they always think that everything will work out perfectly, and it doesn’t. That's what scares me. That’s what I hope kids reading this book will do…they’ll think more in advance about what they’re doing and the outcome.

Q. What do you tell readers who want to be writers?
A. I have two skills: one skill is the ability to use language. You learn language from other people…from reading people who are good, so you have to be a good reader. The second skill I have is discipline. You sit down and you start something, and you have to finish it. Do you have the ability to work at this trait? You don’t have a boss… it’s not easy. Sometimes I’ll add that writing is work—it’s hard work, but hard doesn’t mean bad.

Q. What’s the favorite thing a reader ever said to you?
A. I was at a school talking to very young girls, and at the end one girl came up to me and said, “You’re not that much!” I was taken aback, but then I realized she had made a connection with me. She saw me as a real person. If I can give kids an idea that I’m an ordinary person who is doing something that they like a lot, that’s a wonderful thing. I had the same misconceptions about authors when I was a kid. I thought you had to be at least white…every author I saw when I was going to school was white, and usually dead and male. Then I met Langston Hughes, and I thought…he can’t be an author. I initially rejected him internally, but eventually he gave me permission to be a writer. Yes, you can write about your own life, even if your life is not that glamorous.

Q. How did the books you read when you were young influence you?
A. I was lucky—the English teacher in high school was just fabulous, and she turned me on to some really good literature… I read a lot. Reading great literature influenced me tremendously because it gave me a sense of the ideal. You reach an ideal. What’s the best in life? What do you think about, hold up as wonderful? I got that through literature.

Other Books About Celebrating Differences and Meeting Challenges

Scorpions
By Walter Dean Myers
Trophy Digest
ISBN 0-06-440623-7 ($4.95)
Trophy Rack
ISBN 0-06-447066-0 ($4.95)

1989 Newbery Honor Book
Notable Children’s Books of 1988 (ALA)
1988 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1989 Recommended Books for
Reluctant Young Adult Readers (ALA)
The USA Through Children’s Books 1990 (ALA)
Young Adult Choices for 1990 (IRA)

1989 Judy Lopez Children’s Books Award, Honorable Mention

Children’s Books of 1988 (Library of Congress)
1989 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)

Monster
By Walter Dean Myers
Trade
ISBN 0-06-028077-8 ($15.95)

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and Darlene Z. McCampbell
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Necessary Roughness<BR> by Marie G. Lee
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