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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the chapter's structural bridge — it moves the reader from the admired teacher to the unwashed suitor in a single paragraph, using an antimetabole ('more interested in the teacher than in getting an education... But all they ever got was an education') and a 110-year causal jump (Trout's foot fungus linking forward to Clyde Livingston's sneakers). Copying the passage lets students feel how Sachar does the work of character introduction, rhetorical symmetry, and temporal bridging in one quiet, amused paragraph.
She taught classes in the evening for adults, and many of the adults loved her as well. She was very pretty. Her classes were often full of young men, who were a lot more interested in the teacher tha...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 23 in order, tracking the narrator's movement from the lake as 'heaven on earth' through the introduction of Miss Katherine Barlow as the town's wonderful schoolteacher, through the arrival of Trout Walker, to the refusal scene that closes the chapter.
Discussion Questions
- The chapter's opening paragraphs are written in a narrative voice that never appears elsewhere in the book — a warm, story-telling, almost fairy-tale register ('heaven on earth,' 'food for the angels,' 'giant emerald'). Why does Sachar grant the lost Green Lake a register of prose no other part of the book receives, and what is the argument this prose-choice makes about what was lost?
- Miss Katherine's spiced peaches are described as being made with 'cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and other spices which she kept secret.' Earlier chapters have carefully catalogued what other characters keep secret (the Warden's makeup kit, Zero's intelligence). What distinguishes Miss Katherine's secret from the secrets the other chapters have shown, and what does the distinction argue about the novel's ethics of privacy?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Shone with many small flashes of light, especially as a surface catches and throws back sunlight.
Item 2
A precious green gemstone; also used as an adjective to describe a deep, luminous green.
Item 3
To treat food, usually with sugar, salt, or spices, so that it keeps without spoiling over a long period.
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Critical Thinking
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