The Wave Todd Strasser Reading Comprehension Questions

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the writer's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Whatsoever resemblance to bodily persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 1981 past Dell Publishing Co., Inc., and T.A.T. Communications Visitor

Cover art copyright © 2013 past Blake Morrow

All rights reserved. Published in the United States past Ember, an banner of Random House Children's Books, a sectionalisation of Random Firm, Inc., New York. Previously published in paperback in the United states by Dell Laurel-Foliage, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, New York, in 1981. This piece of work is a novelization of a teleplay past Johnny Dawkins based on a short story by Ron Jones.

Ember and the East colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Educators and librarians, for a diversity of pedagogy tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-97913-one

RL: five.6

Random House Children's Books supports the Commencement Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

FOREWORD

The Wave is based on a true incident that occurred in a loftier school history course in Palo Alto, California, in 1969. For iii years later, according to the teacher, Ron Jones, no one talked about it. "It was," he said, "one of the about frightening events I have ever experienced in the classroom."

"The Wave" disrupted an unabridged school. The novel dramatizes the incident, showing how the powerful forces of group pressure that accept pervaded many celebrated movements and cults can persuade people to join such movements and give up their individual rights in the process—sometimes causing great damage to others. The full impact on the students of what they lived through and learned is realistically portrayed in the book that follows.

In addition to the novel, The Wave has been made into a one-60 minutes tv evidence for ABC by Virginia L. Carter, an executive director at Tandem Productions and T.A.T. Communications Company.

HARRIET HARVEY COFFIN

Project Consultant

T.A.T. Communications Company

Contents

Comprehend

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Chapter i

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Affiliate v

Chapter half dozen

Affiliate 7

Affiliate eight

Chapter 9

Affiliate ten

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Affiliate 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

CHAPTER ane

Laurie Saunders sat in the publications role at Gordon High Schoolhouse chewing on the end of a Bic pen. She was a pretty girl with brusque light-chocolate-brown hair and an almost perpetual grinning that only disappeared when she was upset or chewing on Bic pens. Lately she'd been chewing on a lot of pens. In fact, there wasn't a single pen or pencil in her pocketbook that wasn't worn downward on the butt cease from nervous gnawing. All the same, it crush smoking.

Laurie looked around the pocket-size office, a room filled with desks, typewriters, and low-cal tables. At that moment there should have been kids at each one of those typewriters, punching out stories for The Gordon Grapevine, the school newspaper. The art and layout staff should accept been working at the light tables, laying out the next issue. But instead the room was empty except for Laurie. The problem was that information technology was a beautiful twenty-four hour period exterior.

Laurie felt the plastic tube of the pen scissure. Her mother had warned her once that someday she would chew on a pen until it splintered and a long plastic shard would gild in her throat and she would asphyxiate to expiry on information technology. Only her female parent could have come up with that, Laurie idea with a sigh.

She looked upward at the clock on the wall. Only a few minutes were left in the period anyway. There was no dominion that said anyone had to work in the publications office during their gratuitous periods, but they all knew that the side by side edition of The Grapevine was due out next week. Couldn't they give up their Frisbees and cigarettes and suntans for just a few days in order to get an upshot of the paper out on time?

Laurie put her pen back in her pocketbook and started to gather upwards her notebooks for the next period. It was hopeless. For the iii years she'd been on staff, The Grapevine had always been belatedly. And at present that she was the editor-in-chief it fabricated no difference. The paper would be done when everyone got around to doing it.

Pulling the door of the publications part airtight behind her, Laurie stepped out into the hall. It was practically empty now; the bell to change classes had non yet rung, and there were just a few students around. Laurie walked down a few doors, stopped exterior a classroom, and peered through the window.

Inside, her all-time friend, Amy Smith, a petite daughter with thick, curly, Goldilocks hair, was trying to endure the terminal moments of Mr. Gabondi's French form. Laurie had taken French with Mr. Gabondi the year earlier and information technology had been ane of the most excruciatingly boring experiences of her life. Mr. Gabondi was a short, night, heavyset human who always seemed to be sweating, even on the coldest winter days. When he taught, he spoke in a deadening monotone that could hands put the brightest pupil to slumber, and fifty-fifty though the course he taught was not difficult, Laurie recalled how hard it had been to pay enough attention to get an A.

Now watching her friend struggle to stay interested, Laurie decided she needed some cheering up. And then, positioning herself outside the door where Amy could see her but Gabondi could not, Laurie crossed her optics and made an idiotic face up. Amy reacted past putting her mitt over her rima oris to keep from laughing. Laurie made another face and Amy tried not to expect, but she couldn't assist turning back to encounter what her friend was doing next. Then Laurie did her famous fish face: she pushed her ears out, crossed her optics, and puckered her lips. Amy was trying then hard not to express joy that tears started to curlicue downward her cheeks.

Laurie knew she shouldn't make any more than faces. Watching Amy was likewise funny—annihilation could make her express mirth. If Laurie did any more, Amy would probably fall out of her seat and curlicue into the aisle between the desks. Just Laurie couldn't resist. Turning her dorsum to the door to create some suspense, she screwed up her oral fissure and eyes, and and so spun effectually.

Standing at the door was a very aroused Mr. Gabondi. Backside him Amy and the rest of her class were in hysterics. Laurie's jaw dropped. But before Gabondi could reprimand her, the bell rang and his class was of a sudden spilling out into the hall effectually him. Amy came out holding her sides in pain from laughing and then hard. As Mr. Gabondi glared at them, the ii girls went off arm in arm toward their next class, too out of jiff to laugh anymore.

In the classroom where he taught history, Ben Ross crouched over a film projector, trying to thread a film through the complex maze of rollers and lenses. This was his quaternary try and he all the same hadn't gotten it right. Frustrated, Ben ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair. All his life he had been addled by machinery—motion-picture show projectors, cars, fifty-fifty the self-service pump at the local gas station collection him bananas.

He had never been able to figure out why he was so inept in that mode, and so when information technology came to anything mechanical, he left it to Christy, his wife. She taught music and choir at Gordon High, and at home she was in charge of anything that required manual dexterity. She frequently joked that Ben couldn't even be trusted to alter a low-cal bulb correctly, although Ben insisted this was an exaggeration. He had inverse a number of light bulbs in his life and could only recall breaking two in the process.

Thus far in his career at Gordon Loftier—Ben and Christy had been teaching there for two years—he had managed to hide his mechanical inabilities. Or rather, they

had been overshadowed by his growing reputation as an outstanding young instructor. Ben'southward students spoke of his intensity—the mode he got so interested and involved in a topic that they couldn't help but be interested also. He was "contagious," they'd say meaning that he was charismatic. He could get through to them.

Ross'due south fellow faculty members were somewhat more divided in their feelings toward him. Some of them were impressed with his energy and dedication and creativity. It was said that he brought a new outlook to his classes, that whenever possible, he tried to teach his students the practical, relevant aspects of history. If they were studying the political organisation, he would divide the class into political parties. If they studied a famous trial, he might assign 1 educatee to be the defendant, others to exist the prosecution and defense force attorneys, and still others to sit down as the jury.

But other faculty members were more skeptical about Ben. Some said he was just young, naïve, and overzealous, that afterward a few years he would calm down and start conducting classes the "correct" fashion—lots of reading, weekly quizzes, classroom lectures. Others only said they didn't like the way he never wore a suit and tie in class. One or 2 might even admit they were just plain jealous.

But if there was one thing no teacher had to exist jealous of, it was Ben's total inability to cope with picture projectors. While maybe brilliant otherwise, now he just scratched his caput and looked at the tangle of celluloid bunched in the machine. In just a few minutes his senior history course would arrive, and he had been looking forward to showing them this film for weeks. Why hadn't his teachers' college given a grade in moving-picture show threading?

Ross rolled the motion-picture show back into its spool and left information technology unthreaded. No incertitude i of the kids in his class was some kind of audiovisual whiz and could get the machine going in an instant. He walked dorsum to his desk and picked up a pile of homework papers he wanted to distribute to the students earlier they saw the film.

The marks on the papers had gotten anticipated, Ben thought as he thumbed through them. As usual, at that place were two A papers, Laurie Saunders'southward and Amy Smith'due south. At that place was one A-, so the normal bunch of B's and C's. There were two D'southward. 1 was Brian Ammon, a quarterback on the football team, who seemed to savour getting depression marks, fifty-fifty though it was obvious to Ben that he had the brains to do much better if he tried. The other D was Robert Billings, the class loser. Ross shook his head. The Billings boy was a real problem.

Exterior in the hall the bells rang, and Ben heard the sounds of class doors banging open and students flooding into the corridors. Information technology was peculiar how students ever left class so rapidly but somehow arrived at their next class at the speed of snails. More often than not Ben believed that high school today was a improve place for kids to acquire than information technology was when he went. Simply in that location were a few things that bothered him. I was his students' lackadaisical attitude about getting to class on fourth dimension. Sometimes 5 or even 10 minutes of valuable class time would exist lost while students straggled in. Back when he was a pupil, if you weren't in class when the second bell rang, you lot were in problem.

The other problem was the homework. Kids simply didn't feel compelled to do it anymore. You could yell, threaten them with F'due south or detention, and it didn't affair. Homework had get practically optional. Or, every bit one of his ninth-graders had told him a few weeks before, "Sure I know homework is important, Mr. Ross, only my social life comes commencement."

Ben chuckled. Social life.

Students were starting to enter the classroom now. Ross spotted David Collins, a tall, good-looking boy who was a running back on the football game squad. He was likewise Laurie Saunders'south swain.

"David," Ross said, "exercise y'all think you could get that film projector set upwardly?"

"Sure thing," David replied.

Equally Ross watched, David kneeled beside the projector and went to piece of work nimbly. In merely a few seconds he had it threaded. Ben smiled and thanked him.

Robert Billings trudged into the room. He was a heavy male child with shirttails perpetually hanging out and his hair always a mess, every bit if he never bothered to comb it after getting out of bed in the forenoon. "Nosotros gonna see a movie?" he asked when he saw the projector.

"No, dummy," said a male child named Brad, who especially enjoyed tormenting him. "Mr. Ross only likes to prepare projectors for fun."

"Okay, Brad," Ben said sternly. "That'southward enough."

A sufficient number of students had arrived for Ross to outset handing out the homework papers. "All right," he said loudly to get the class's attention. "Here are last week'due south papers. Generally speaking, you did a skillful chore." He walked up and down the aisles passing each paper to its author. "But I'k warning you again. These papers are getting much too sloppy." He stopped and held one up for the course to run into. "Wait at this. Is it really necessary to doodle in the margins of a homework newspaper?"

The course tittered. "Whose is it?" someone asked.

"None of your business." Ben shuffled the papers in his hand and kept handing them out. "From at present on, I'm going to starting time lowering grades on any papers that are really sloppy. If you've fabricated a lot of changes or mistakes on a paper, make a new, neat copy earlier you hand information technology in. Got that?"

Some members of the class nodded. Others weren't even paying attention. Ben went to the front of the classroom and pulled down the motion-picture show screen. It was the 3rd time that semester he'd talked to them about messy homework.

CHAPTER two

They were studying World War Two, and the film Ben Ross was showing his course that day was a documentary depicting the atrocities the Nazis committed in their concentration camps. In the darkened classroom the class stared at the movie screen. They saw emaciated men and women starved so severely that they appeared to be goose egg more than skeletons covered with skin. People whose knee joints were the widest parts of their legs.

Ben had already seen this moving-picture show or films similar it half a dozen times. But the sight of such ruthless inhumane cruelty by the Nazis still horrified him and fabricated him feel angry. As the film rolled on, he spoke emotionally to the class: "What yous are watching took place in Federal republic of germany betwixt 1934 and 1945. It was the work of a man named Adolf Hitler, originally a menial laborer, porter, and house painter, who turned to politics after Earth War One. Germany had been defeated in that state of war, its leadership was at a low ebb, aggrandizement was high, and thousands were homeless, hungry, and jobless.

"For Hitler information technology was an opportunity to ascent quickly through the political ranks of the Nazi Party. He espoused the theory that the Jews were the destroyers of civilization and that the Germans were a superior race. Today we know that Hitler was a paranoid, a psychopath, literally a madman. In 1923 he was thrown in jail for his political activities, merely past 1934 he and his political party had seized command of the German authorities."

Ben paused for a moment to let the students scout more of the picture show. They could run across the gas chambers at present, and the piles of bodies laid out like stove forest. The human skeletons still alive had the gruesome task of stacking the dead nether the watching eyes of the Nazi soldiers. Ben felt his breadbasket churn. How on God'southward earth could anyone make anyone else practice something like that, he asked himself.

He told the students: "The death camps were what Hitler called his 'Final Solution to the Jewish problem.' But anyone—not just Jews—deemed past the Nazis every bit unfit for their superior race was sent in that location. They were herded into camps all over Eastern Europe, and once there they were worked, starved, and tortured, and when they couldn't piece of work anymore, they were exterminated in the gas chambers. Their remains were disposed of in ovens." Ben paused for a moment and then added: "The life expectancy of the prisoners in the camps was ii hundred and 70 days. Just many did not survive a week."

On the screen they could encounter the buildings that housed the ovens. Ben idea of telling the students that the fume rising from the chimneys to a higher place the buildings was from burning human flesh. But he didn't. The experience of watching this film would be awful plenty. Thank God homo had non invented a fashion to convey smells through picture show,

because the worst thing of all would have been the stench of it, the stench of the nigh heinous act ever committed in the history of the human being race.

The film was catastrophe and Ben told his students: "In all, the Nazis murdered more than 10 million men, women, and children in their extermination camps."

The film was over. A student near the door flicked the classroom lights on. As Ben looked around the room, nigh of the students looked stunned. Ben had not meant to shock them, but he'd known that the film would. Most of these students had grown up in the small-scale, suburban community that spread out lazily around Gordon High. They were the products of stable, middle-course families, and despite the violence-saturated media that permeated society around them, they were surprisingly naïve and sheltered. Even now a few of the students were starting to fool around. The misery and horror depicted in the pic must have seemed to them like just another television program. Robert Billings, sitting near the windows, was asleep with his head cached in his arms on his desk. Only near the front of the room, Amy Smith appeared to exist wiping a tear out of her eye. Laurie Saunders looked upset too.

"I know many of you are upset," Ben told the class. "Merely I did not bear witness yous this picture show today just to go an emotional reaction from you. I want you to remember about what you saw and what I told you. Does anyone have any questions?"

Amy Smith quickly raised her manus.

"Yes, Amy?"

"Were all the Germans Nazis?" she asked.

Ben shook his head. "No, as a matter of fact, less than x percent of the German population belonged to the Nazi Party."

"Then why didn't anyone try to stop them?" Amy asked.

"I can't tell you lot for sure, Amy," Ross told her. "I can only guess that they were scared. The Nazis might have been a minority, but they were a highly organized, armed, and unsafe minority. You take to call back that the rest of the German population was unorganized, and unarmed and frightened. They had likewise gone through a terrible menstruation of inflation that had virtually ruined their land. Perhaps some of them hoped the Nazis would be able to restore their society. Anyway, after the war, the majority of Germans said they didn't know nearly the atrocities."

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