A Clash of Cultures: A Guest Post by Gordon Korman
Dexter is an old soul, and when he’s forced to leave homeschooling behind, he learns seventh graders aren’t known for being accepting. Beloved author Gordon Korman is back with a quirky and raucous romp through middle school alongside one of our new favorite characters. Read on for an exclusive essay from Gordon on writing Old School.
Hardcover $19.99
Old School
Old School
In Stock Online
Hardcover $19.99
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Unteachables comes a hilarious story about a boy who is homeschooled in his grandmother’s retirement community…until he is forced to go to public school.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Unteachables comes a hilarious story about a boy who is homeschooled in his grandmother’s retirement community…until he is forced to go to public school.
The opening scene of OLD SCHOOL is a Bingo tournament at The Pines Retirement Village and that’s not too far from where the inspiration for the novel began. I accompanied my wife’s grandmother to Bingo Night and the atmosphere was more Hunger Games than Assisted Living. It was spirited, competitive, raucous, and loud. At one point, I almost had to step in and break up a fistfight. All over the grand prize: A mason jar about half full of quarters.
But what I came to love most about the place were the personalities, the idiosyncrasies, the quirks. Take away the hearing aids, walkers, and canes and it reminded me of a middle school, with its colorful cast of characters and bizarre yet fascinating customs. I became obsessed with the idea that a kid might be caught between those two starkly different, but oddly parallel societies.
Dexter Foreman has lived with his grandmother at The Pines Retirement Village for half his life, homeschooled by Grandma and the other residents. As a result, he gets along better with senior citizens than kids his own age. He is twelve going on eighty, and that’s the way he likes it – right up until the day the county truancy officer arrives to tell Dex he has to go to the local middle school. What happens next is nothing less than a clash of cultures.
My favorite of these clashes is the Mr. Fix-It story. Dex grew up among an older generation who abhor waste and try to repair and preserve things, while younger people are more inclined to toss everything and buy new. Dex shows up at a dilapidated, falling down school and can seemingly fix everything with his trusty Swiss Army Knife. (This especially resonates with me because my ninety-year-old dad – nickname: McGuyver – is as handy as I am hopeless.)
At first, the other kids view Dex’s handiness as just another part of what makes the new guy so weird. But over time, they come to see it as almost a superpower – until Dex’s Mr. Fix-It tendencies ends up putting him in a situation that could either make or break his school career.
The cover of OLD SCHOOL depicts Dex as a dodo. I thought this was pure genius the first time I saw it – the twelve-going-on-eighty kid as an extinct bird. Who better than Dex, stuck between golden age and adolescence, to prove that there’s nothing extinct about the older generation. On the contrary, Dex’s friends, young and old, come to see they have a lot more in common than either group ever could have imagined.
