Skip to main content

Deadline


Summary: 
When Ben finds out that he has a blood disease and only has a year left to live, he decides to keep it a secret. He is an 18 year old high school senior who chooses to live his last year to its fullest. He spends that year training to be a star football player, going after the girl of his dreams and working to make his community and the people in it a little bit better. Along the way, Ben discovers that he's not the only one with secrets and learns that maybe keeping those secrets isn't always the best choice.

Strengths:
Crutcher writes incredibly good sports actions scenes. The sports parts alone will be enough to draw many readers into the book. In addition, Ben's voice is authentically teen. His sometimes glib, often humorous and sometimes sober reflections on his own mortality are thought provoking but realistic when considering that he is a teenager. The overarching theme of how people keep secrets is relate-able, even if some of those secrets are less so. This book also deals with racism, child abuse and incest.

Other Books by Chris Crutcher: 

 Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
Ironman

 Crutcher, C. (2007). Deadline. New York: Greenwillow Books. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bloom's Taxonomy for a Digital Age

Bloom's Taxonomy. One of the things we are constantly hearing in our school is the push for increased rigor in our classroom, as a result of the STAAR tests and others like it becoming more rigorous. We are told to push for higher order thinking and questioning from our students. One of the tools we use to look at how we can increase rigor is Bloom's Taxonomy. But some things about Bloom's don't translate exactly when we are talking about the digital age and the classroom or library. For example, remembering is the lowest piece of the triangle for Bloom's, but remembering looks different when you have instant access to a powerful computer that can use essentially limitless online resources to find answers. I've mentioned to my husband just how much more this and future generations will know about the world around them simply because they no longer have to remember everything they're interested in knowing. If I pass a historical marker for a place I haven...
7 comments
Read more

One book, Every Day, One Year

I have been horrible about posting to my book blog, and as a result, I'm going to start a project. Beginning today (October 12th) I am going to post one book blog every day! That's right, 365 days of bibliophile goodness! I'm lucky that I work at an elementary school and that my librarian loves me - plenty of access to short but beautiful books. You should know by now that I enjoy books with a sense of humor, and today I picked up a cute little twist on a well known classic called "The Wolf Who Cried Boy". Written by Bob Hartman with illustrations by Tim Raglin, its a cute little retelling of (of course) The Boy who Cried Wolf. First off, I was drawn by the cover art, which looks like a cross stitched sampler. However, I'm not 100% sure why its a cross stitched sampler, since that theme doesn't even appear in the details of the illustrations within, but oh well. The story follows a young boy wolf who HATES what his mom makes for dinner every night. Lamburg...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Clark-Kozma Debate in the 21st Century

In the 1980s and 1990s, as educational technology was first becoming a budding field, Richard Clark published an analysis of data where he determined that the media that delivers instruction is no more than a delivery tool. He used an analogy of a truck carrying the information to the learner. He concluded that the media chosen has no effect on the learning taking place - that the instruction in the only thing that influences the learning.  In 1994, Kozma responded and prompted the current debate. Kozma states that some media have specific characteristics that do effect learning as more than a vehicle. While there is little research to support Kozma's claim, he suggests that the way the media helps shape the learning does have impact and that evaluating this impact requires more than raw data as the media and the way we use it has become more complex and nuanced. Clark has stood by his original conclusions and has even subsequently released articles further supporting his stanc...
2 comments
Read more