Peer Pressure

The issue presented in Chris Crutcher and the Mild Frontier that i chose to research is peer pressure. In this case its more like brother pressure, but i don't think thats a real thing. I chose this issue because to me it seemed like the most dominant issue was his brother, John, pressuring him into doing things. Things including: peeing in the heater grate, letting John shoot him in the head with a BB gun, and doing many other embarrassing, trouble-making type things. After researching peer pressure i found that peer pressure is the main cause of most the mistakes people make. Drinking, doing drugs and smoking are some of the most terrible things that can be caused by peer pressure. There are many, many, many other things that are extremely terrible that peer pressure is the cause of. Another is teen pregnancy which has grown tremendously over the past, maybe, 10 years? It is surprising what unimaginably dishusting and terrible things can come from peer pressure. Another amazing thing is the percent of the teenage population that is effected by peer pressure. ITS NEARLY ALL OF US! One study i found reported that about 80 percent of high school student fall into the act of doing what their peers tell them to when that or those certain peers are committing peer pressure.

Citation

Crutcher, Chris. King of the Mild Frontier. HarperCollins Children's Books, 2004

Evaluation

The Six Traits + 1 grading procedure is a pretty complex thing to follow. Ideas and Content should be clear and complete, focused, have sufficient information, be insightful and original, and include interesting details. I would have to say that this book has good "Ideas and Content". It provides many great ideas such as the mistakes he made and going into the depth of that. He also explains everything to full detail in this book. I am seriously questioning his "Organization" because he jumps around his whole life throughout the whole book and it got very confusing at times. Obviously this book holds amazing "Individual Voice". It definitely shows an obvious person behind the words seeing as it is an autobiography. A book's "Word Choice" is supposed to consist of active, energetic verbs, paint pictures in your mind, add new twists to everyday words, minimize redundancy, have precise, concrete nouns and modifiers and be very creative. I would say that this book does have a good list of funny, creative words within it's pages. The sentence fluency is supposed to be smooth, fluent, graceful, hold variety, be effective and sometimes even follow good rythym. This book has good, but also questionable sentence fluency. Convetions is basically having correct EVERYTHING! Correct spelling, correct grammar, correct capitalization, etc. It does have correct conventions and a possiblility of having a good presentation as well.

Summary, Setting and Characters

This book is about Chris Crutcher. He wrote this book as an autobiography and it tells us a lot about him. One of the major things he outlines in this book is how he had a major anger problem, which i pointed out in one or two of my blogs. He talks about his life from around the age of five to around, i think, thirty-five or forty. He takes us through family issues, through his elementary, junior high, and high school life and briefly talks about his life as a college student and adult. From this i can say that he likes to pick on himself, his mistakes, all the times he was stupid and tell them to the world. Personally, i would love to be able to look back on mistakes I've made and laugh when I'm his age. He also, this is quite rare, but he also tells us about good times he experienced and tells us about good things that happened to him throughout his life. Basically, this book contributes to talking about his everyday, hilarious screw-ups/mistakes. This whole book's main setting is in the tiny townof Cascade, Idaho which is the town in which Chris grew up and experienced his many issues and mitakes. The time he lived there was from about the 1950's to1960's or possibly 70's. Chris Crutcher= There's nothing you can do to explain Chris. He was a skinny, wimpy, weak kid who had anger problems followed by crying problems which earned him the name "Bawlbaby". He ALWAYS got in trouble, no matter who did whatever it was, he was the one who got blamed and punished. John Crutcher= This is the brother that Chris loved so much. Not! John is the one who normally got Chris into the trouble. Just like when he told Chris to pee in a heater and it filled the house with a terrible smell of evaporated pee which /was disguised as a yellow steam. John also never got into trouble. Once he shot Chris in the head with a BB gun and he didn't get in trouble for it.

Third Blog

Chris mentions the many times when he's shown his stupidity in life, screwed up and been just plain dumb plenty of times in this book considering it's an autobiography. The most famous "section" of his stupidity would have to be the "Wanna do something neat?" section. "'Wanna do something neat?' are four words that strike terror in my heart to this day. My answer was always yes when the question came from my brother. Then he'd tell me what the neat thing was, and it would always seem not so neat until he explained how what seemed like something that could really get you in trouble was, in fact, neat. Then I'd get in trouble. Once when he was playing cowboys outside with his friend and a bunch of other neighborhood kids and he gets to be Roy Rogers but he really has to pee and he knows that if he goes in the house to pee and comes back out again someone will have taken the part of Roy Rogers. But finally he really NEEDS to get it out and runs into the house. "John, sitting in a chair reading a book, observes the obvious as i burst through the door and says, 'Wanna do something neat?' 'Yeah, but just a sec, i have to go to the bathroom.' 'That's the neat thing, go there.' He points to the four-by-five heat-register grate in the middle of the leaving room floor. 'Huh-uh, you'll tell, I said.' 'Promise i won't, just wait till you see what happens, it's really neat.'"(Crutcher 36 and 37). So he ended up doing it and what happened wasn't neat at all! The pee evaorated and gassed the whole house and guess what? Chris got in trouble! Another favorite of mine is when John gets his neighbor to let him borrow his BB gun because the Crutcher parents won't allow them to have one. But anyways, we get into the "Wanna do something neat?" thing again and this time John gets Chris to run in front of him while he tries to shoot him with the BB gun and Chris ends up getting hit in the head and John never gets in trouble because he makes his little brother think that the more he cries about it the farther the BB will go into his head even though there never was a BB in his head it just bounced off thankfully.

Second Blog

This is about his total failure at nearly all sports ever invented, well basically he was bad at every activity and everything involving activness. Once he became a freshman in high school they MADE him play the brutal sport called football. They only had an 8-man team because there were barely any high school guys to play football in Cascade, Idaho. Apparently if you didnt show up at practice they would come find you and drag you outside to practice. "At the beginning of my freshman year in high school i weighed 123 pounds, with all the muscle definition of a chalk outline. I couldn't complete a push-up. I could run a hundred yards in approximately the same amount of time it took for me to get a haircut. And i was terrified. My brother, John, was a junior that year, at around six feet and 230. He started at center on offense and middle linebacker on defense, and he had waited seventeen years to get me into an arena where he and his friends could pummel me without my bawling to my parents. And pummel me they did. I couldn't have bawled to my parents anyway; to bawl you must breathe" (Crutcher 50). Another sport he had no achievements in was basketball. He never got any points, rebounds, assists or even fouls during any game of any season. He didn't even get a real jersey. "Three track meets into the 1961 season, I have established myself as the only runner in the league ho can actually make a track meet longer. Each team is allowed two ebtries per event with the exception of the mile run, the event in which all "athletes" who don't qualify for any other event are dumped. I have not received an official time in any of my first three mile runs because by the time i finish the timers have packed up their stopwatches and headed for their cars" (Crutcher 51) Back then they didn't have any girls sports except for one game of softball which they get three practices for. He showed up at a practice when they couldn't figure out what to do because the girl batting didn't want to run. He volunteered to run for her and they agreed cause they figured Chris couldn't run any faster than this girl. Unfortunately when she swung she missed by forever and hit him right in the mouth!

First Blog

This topic is about Chris' anger management problem as a kid and adult as well. In the beginning he comes right out and says how he has a terrible anger management problem or at least memories on his anger problems as a child. He said that when Paula Whitson asked a different boy to the Sadie Hawkins Dance instead of him he went home and kicked a hole in a plasterboard wall. He also cracked a full-size mirror from top to bottom once. His dad left them all there as a reminder of what he’d done. Throughout this book he talks about how he was considered a "bawlbaby" because he would cry at nearly or actually everything. "Until about the age of twelve, the best use i found for my temper to keep me from being a bawlbaby"(Crutcher 19). He explained how he cried when anyone hit him. "I cried when i was down to my last-second-cookie; when it was my brother John's turn to ride with my dad or granddad in the gas truck; when my mother gave the second half of my Popsicle to someone else(that fell in to the second-cookie category); when the New York Yankees lost a World Series game; anytime i had to share and anytime someone wouldn't share with me. Any event that could light up my temper could also reduce me to tears"(Crutcher 19 and 20). He even goes into detail of what he looked like when he did this. He says: "The moment i considered myself either the cause or the focus of disappointment, my eyes would squint, my lips would spread wide over my buckteeth, and it was a race to my chin between tears and snot"(Crutcher 20). Whenever he did something wrong or got in trouble which apparently happened a lot he would just start crying and crying and crying. I would supposed that this got annoying and that he would get in even more trouble for it. As a matter of fact he states "Faced with that, my dad would simply grimace and shake his head, or if he was feeling particularly irritated, ask another of those famous questions to which he didn't want the correct answer: "Do you want me to give you something to cry about?" (No, Crutch, I do not want you to give me something to cry about. I already have something to cry about,thank you. Why don't you give your something to cry about to John or Candy?) My mother on the other hand, when she wasn't suckered in by my drama and despair, hated it. Her question was more taunting: "What are you going to do now, be a big bawlbaby?" That made it worse because the answer waa s yes, but the response had to be no" (Crutcher 20).