The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs Page B

deeply during Skeet’s three years in jail awaiting trial—nearly a third of her son’s life by the time it was finished—was especially destructive. But its source came from a time and place from which Jackie had already willfully moved on, and she didn’t have the heart to revisit it. She could only hope that over time, Rob’s feelings would fade, the way all of anger’s counterpart emotions—hatred, sadness, love, joy—tended to do.

    Â . . . Later Jack and Ralph had an argument and Jack went off into the forest. Jack and the hunters went hunting again. They invited Ralph and the others to the feast. During the feast, Simon ran out of the woods, and the hunters killed him. The next night Jack, Roger, and Maurice stole Piggy’s glasses. Ralph, Piggy, and Sam ’n’ Eric went to retrieve his glasses. This action resulted in Piggy’s death. Ralph was now alone running from Jack and the savages. Jack set the whole island on fire which flushed Ralph out. Fortunately a military group saw the fire and were waiting at the beach. Ralph fell at the officer’s feet and told him the story.
    Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because the boys fought each other and the savages within themselves.
    Voice: The story was written in the third person point of view because the author, William Golding, is narrating the story.
    Tone: The tone of this story is the adventure, nothing happy or sad about it (with the exception of two deaths).
    For the most part, Mt. Carmel’s English teachers let students choose their own books from a predetermined list rather than assigning specifictitles to all students. Rob opted for the classics, relatively dense books with big themes often rooted in mortality: Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (“Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because Buck had to prove to his owners as well as himself that he was a leader”), John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (“Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because Kino fought many people and the emotions of shooting his son”), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (“Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because Tom fought many people in the story and his own bad judgment”). He always made a cover for his book reports with crayon illustrations and large elaborate lettering (the above excerpt, written on Lord of the Flies in sixth grade, received an A along with a note scrawled diagonally by the teacher, “I would like you to share this with the class!”). He wrote succinct sentences, each leading quietly into the next, short on adverbs and adjectives, penned in cursive perfected under Skeet’s watch. His teachers were accustomed to grading book reports composed of a few poorly punctuated and often illegible sentences, and Rob quickly found himself singled out, often prodded to read his work aloud to the class. His ability to consume and digest pages was iconoclastic at Mt. Carmel. As his teachers gradually learned through parent-teacher meetings with Jackie, he read these books and wrote these reports with minimal help from her, as on the nights she wasn’t working he tried to finish his homework before she came home from the day shift so that the two could hang out.
    His real passions were math and science, subjects in which hard conclusions were calculated from known variables by way of clear, logical processes that were largely absent from his life. The key component of middle school math was “showing the work,” mapping the pathway between questions and answers. His teachers graded the format and logic of the problem solving with the same weight as the solution itself. At first, Rob took issue with this and would repeatedly write only the answer. His fifth-grade math teacher was fairly convinced he was cheating on his homework by using a calculator, that he wasn’t learning how to problem-solve (in fact, Rob