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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the emotional bottom of the chapter. Clyde 'Sweet Feet' Livingston — Stanley's hero, whose poster hung on the bedroom wall, who had once been poor enough to live at the homeless shelter himself — takes the stand and calls Stanley a 'horrible person' without looking at him. Sachar lets the last sentence do the wounding. He does not describe Stanley's face or Stanley's tears. He just writes, 'His hero thought he was a no-good-dirty-rotten thief,' a sentence borrowed from the family curse on the great-great-grandfather in Chapter 3. The word 'no-good-dirty-rotten' has now moved from Latvia to Texas, and from the ancestor to Stanley — the curse finding a new address.
Clyde Livingston testified that they were his sneakers and that he had donated them to help raise money for the homeless shelter. He said he couldn't imagine what kind of horrible person would steal f...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 6 in four or five sentences. Include Stanley's first camp shower and dinner, the moment the boys in D tent ask what he did, Stanley's flashback to the day the shoes fell from the freeway overpass, Clyde Livingston's courtroom testimony, and the judge's offer of Camp Green Lake or jail.
Discussion Questions
- Stanley says to himself, 'Nobody had believed him when he said he was innocent. Now, when he said he stole them, nobody believed him either.' How is this one of the chapter's most important sentences, and what is Sachar showing us about the difference between truth and belief?
- The sneakers hit Stanley on the head under a freeway overpass, and Stanley decides they must be 'destiny's shoes' because his father is trying to invent a way to recycle old sneakers. Later, Stanley decides, 'It wasn't destiny. It was his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!' How does Stanley's interpretation of the same event flip completely — and what does the flip tell you about how he understands his own life now?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Gave a formal statement in a court of law as evidence for or against the accused person — Clyde Livingston did this against Stanley.
Item 2
Gave away, usually to a charity or cause — Clyde had done this with the sneakers before they were stolen from the display.
Item 3
Without a place to live — the shelter raised money for people in this condition, and Clyde had once been in it himself.
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Critical Thinking
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