Summer Reading Program

Reader's Guide - Honky by Dalton Conley

Chapter Eleven: “No Soap Radio” (pages 121-28)

Content Questions:

1. Describe the different dynamic at Conley’s junior high school, Intermediate School 70.
2. What did Mr. Baumann do to the black and Hispanic kids in the lunchroom?
3. What is the point of the “no soap, radio” joke that Alexandra explains to her brother?

Discussion Questions & Journal Ideas:

1. Explain the sorts of things that contributed, at I.S. 70, to the “natural tendency” of preteens to form cliques (121).
2. Conley returns to the word “nigga” in this chapter, calling it “the ultimate gulf between my neighbors and me” (123).  Why is he happy to be called that, and why can he not use it himself?
3. How are the “your momma” jokes of his neighborhood different from jokes like “no soap, radio,” according to Conley?  How do they contribute to the racial and class divisions in I.S. 70?
4. How would you explain what happens between Marcus and Conley at the end of this chapter that resulted in their never speaking to each other again?  What happened, and why?

 

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