4.1

Zac Chandre
10/1/2008
8:00 English 101
Ass.4.1


“What You Know” by Peter Ho Davies is a very interesting read. I enjoyed this piece very much, which my sound kind of creepy because it is about a school shooting, but I enjoyed the venting part of it. I also enjoyed how it was so informal with the incomplete sentences, cursing, and the self revisions with in the piece its self.
The narrator is an English teacher/substitute that has a typical teenage class. The part that I find shocking about this piece is that he refers to his students as stupid, he calls them stupid because most of them have never read a book or they can’t put their feelings down on paper or they just don’t care. I think it is very interesting that he is so negative about student writers when he himself had to of once been a student writer. I find it rather odd that he puts so many restrictions on the students work, “No stories about suicide”, “No flashbacks longer than a page”, “No narrators from beyond the grave”, “No. and then I woke up. Endings”, if this is what his students want to write about let them. After all, writing is supposed to be your emotions on paper.
After he is done ranting and raving about how bad his students are he tells us about one of his students that sat in the back of his class with his hat over his eyes, Clark, who shot his father, his classmates, and then himself. Maybe if he just would have let his students talk about there feelings he might have seen this coming, but instead he was to busy bitching about how terrible they were.
After the death of Clark the narrator spoke to CNN and gave them an over the phone interview. After this interview he started to think about why Clark would have done this? I think it is great that he tries to understand this by using examples from his own life, when he came home late and his father barred the door to his room and after arguing he punched his father in the face, he then said that if he had a gun it would have just not been worth killing for.
Up until this point he is confused as to why someone would do this, but when he is at the shooting range and Vern (the guy behind the counter) recognizes him and says what are you teaching these kids? It really gets to him he begins to show some emotion. This emotion he is feeling is shown when he goes to the school and reads the first letter and begins to tear up, but after he reads a couple more he becomes angry with the letters because of grammatical errors.
This entire story is about emotion and how different people deal with it. Emotion is shown in many different forms like crying, yelling, rage, or even the simple rolling of the eyes when someone says something that you don’t believe. But the main thing that I learned here is that everyone is their own person and like it or not that is just who they are so deal with it don’t try to control it.