by Doug Wilhelm
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Praise for The Revealers
This is a story that reveals how hard middle school can really be. It makes you think twice about what you might be doing to hurt other people. Believe the unbelievable … and let Russell, Catalina, and Elliot reveal the truth.
—Kate, age 12 / Norwich, Vermont
This is an inspiring book about sticking up for yourself, and being brave. I believe every kid should read this book.
—Emily, age 12 / Jericho, Vermont
Fun, truthful, and realistic.
—Christina, age 13 / Danvers, Massachusetts
It was quite an experience reading this book to my homeroom reading group. There were kids speaking out who I would not have guessed would be willing to share their experiences. The Revealers touched a nerve.
—Mary Lou Massucco, teacher / Bellows Falls, Vermont
When my class read The Revealers, it was very addictive and I finished early. Now I’m reading it to my 18-year-old sister and my mom, and they are begging for more.
—Brian, age 12 / San Jose, California
This story about school bullies made me think about why kids are so mean to each other. It inspired me to step out of my clique and meet new friends, and help people who may be bullied.
—David Lackner, age 11 / “The Book That Changed Me,”
The Washington Post Book World
Every page and chapter rings true with the angst, isolation, drama, confusion, and humor of middle school kids trying to find their way through the cruel and complex social order of early puberty.
—Patricia S. Worsham, National Board Certified Teacher
and English Department chair / Lynchburg, Virginia
This book taught me how to cope with bullying. It actually really helped me. I had been having trouble fitting in and The Revealers allowed me to see that it was okay to be myself.
—Hannah, age 12 / Greenwood, Maine
This is one of the best books in a long time for getting kids to read. It’s even better for getting them to write.
—Karon Perron, teacher and parent / Castleton, Vermont
My teenage daughter and I highly recommend this book, not only for middle school students but for parents and teachers. My advice, after you read it: pass it on and share your feelings and thoughts with others!
—Becky Carlson, coordinator, Sussex County Coalition
for Healthy and Safe Families / Newton, New Jersey
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since The Revealers first appeared in 2003, it has been used, often in very creative and powerful ways, by middle schools, libraries, and other community organizations all over the United States and internationally. (For more on this, please see “The Revealers in Schools” on page 215.) When adults choose to make this novel the focal point of a reading-and-discussion project, their goal is often to open up the difficult issue of bullying. Sometimes it’s just to read the book. Whatever the purpose, I am very grateful to everyone, in the hundreds of schools that have so far worked with The Revealers, who has played a part in any of these projects. By now you’re all too numerous to even begin mentioning here by name. But thanks.
Here are my original acknowledgments for the book:
Even though all the people, the incidents, and the school portrayed in The Revealers are completely fictitious, I was greatly helped in developing this story by the students at three Vermont schools, who shared with me their own stories of bullying, harassment, and similar experiences. I want to thank the students, teachers, and administrators who helped me at Randolph Village School (now Randolph Elementary), Braintree Elementary School, and Barstow Memorial School, in Chittenden … . Thanks as well to the staff at Williston Central School, who showed me their school’s local area network.
I am also grateful to the teachers at Main Street Middle School in Montpelier, Rutland Town School and Christ the King School in Rutland (all of these also in Vermont), who read drafts of this book to their classes, and to the students in those classes for their valuable suggestions and critiques. Special thanks to my friend Mike Baginski, “Mister B,” an extraordinary teacher at Main Street School, for his continuing interest and support.
My journey only began with those first schools. In my years (so far) with The Revealers, I have done programs and joined in discussions with young people of every background, in all sorts of schools—even in a one-room schoolhouse. I’ve been from Maine to Florida, from Brooklyn to Silicon Valley with my book, and I’m still hoping to hear back from the teacher in South Africa who emailed that her school was reading The Revealers and do I ever come their way? (I replied that I’d be happy to.) I’ve seen how a novel can spread just because people believe in it—and I’ve discovered, when people do believe in a book, what champions for it they can be. Thanks to everyone, everyone, who has been a champion for The Revealers.
Most of all, I’ve seen what many adults don’t realize: that an enormous number of young adolescents are avid, passionate, deeply intelligent readers. Needless to say, not every young reader I’ve met has liked my book, but that’s not what matters. What matters is that they read. I’m so grateful—and it gives me new hope for our future—to discover, over and over again, how many really do.
Finally, I’m thankful that The Revealers has been in some ways useful to the growing, nationwide movement to face up to bullying, to bring it into the light and help young people who struggle with it understand that they don’t have to do that alone. In my travels I’ve come to see middle schools as laboratories for the rest of people’s lives. I think what’s most hopeful, and powerful, about the effort to open up new awareness around adolescent bullying is not just that some kids’ burdens are being eased. It’s that young adults all over the country, of all types and social situations, are getting the chance to discover that the person next to them—or on the other end of the social hierarchy—has hopes, dreams, and fears just like they do.
Early teens don’t always “get” this at this stage in their lives when they’re first forming their adult selves. Imagine the impact if we can help them cross this crucial bridge. I often find myself telling middle-school audiences: It’s generally the kids who seem in some way different, like I was, who get singled out for bullying—but the truth is, we’re all different. Every one of us is, because we’re all individuals. That’s the one way we’re all the same.
Thank you for the chance to say that. To discover that. And to be part of this.
Doug Wilhelm
Weybridge, Vermont
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Russell is the first character to be bullied. Richie is his tormentor. How do they fit the stereotypical images of target and bully? How is Elliot bullied? How is Catalina bullied? Are the methods the same? Is there only one type of target? Is there only one type of bully?
2. Russell, Elliot, and Catalina are very different from each other. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Is there an explanation for why they’re targets for bullying? Is there any justification for the bullying?
3. Richie Tucker, Burke Brown, Jon Blanchette, and Bethany DeMere are also very different from each other. Are they weak in any way? Are there any reasons for their cruelty to others? Are they good reasons?
4. Some types of bullies use their social status to torment other kids they find inferior. Are any of the bullies in this book doing that? That type of bully might be hardest for teachers to notice. Why might they be invisible to authority figures?
5. Big Chris Kuppel starts out as a supporter of Burke and Jon’s behavior, but then he changes. Why? How does he treat Elliot by the end of the book?
6. Name-calling is often the first bullying behav
ior learned. Why is that? Make a list of the names that are used in this book to hurt someone. Are they all words that would be considered insulting if used in a different way?
7. Richie seems to take pride in being a bully, but Russell sees something vulnerable in him. Do you agree or disagree with Russell? What might be Richie’s motivation? Why do you think he’s willing to do the interview for The Bully Lab?
8. Do you think this book is showing something that doesn’t happen very often, that bullying is uncommon? Do some research and see to see how big or small the problem of bullying is today.
9. Is bullying a problem at your school? Do you think everyone is treated equally by the teachers and principals? In the cafeteria, does everyone have a place to sit?
10. If there is bullying at your school, how does the school deal with it? Is there a bullying prevention program? Is there a way to report bullying that everyone is aware of? Do you think kids are safe to report it and that they will be taken seriously?
11. What could you do to help prevent bullying?
THE REVEALERS IN SCHOOLS
BY DOUG WILHELM
The writer of a book isn’t the only person who can have a creative relationship with it. I first saw this soon after The Revealers was published, when a few schools in Vermont, where I live, began to work with my novel. Over the next few years, this would become something that was happening nationwide—but it started here. And in those first schools I began to see what teachers and others, including students, can do to bring a story to life.
For example, there was the morning in the South Hero “gymnatorium.”
In this little K—8 school in rural South Hero, Vermont, grades 6—8 had read The Revealers, and they wanted to engage the younger classes with some of what the story had brought up. So on the morning of my visit, we were all brought together in the school’s biggest room—the kindergarteners and first graders sitting on the floor up front, then the middle grades, then the adults, including me, perched on chairs along the sides. At this school, the upper grades had a drama club; and the drama club had an idea.
On the stage were two tables, side by side. At one sat two middle-school boys. The adult who introduced the skit said this would be based on a scene in The Revealers, which the older kids had just finished reading. At that point I understood: This would be the library scene, in chapter four, where Russell and Elliot watch a nasty note get dropped on the next table where Catalina, the new girl from the Philippines, has been doing homework.
But I was wrong. The situation had come from the book, but the scene was new. As the two boys watched, as we all watched, a girl came out, sat at the next table, and began quietly reading. Then out came another student, who stood behind this girl and said: You don’t belong here. You don’t belong here. She kept chanting this as another came out and said: Nobody likes you. Nobody likes you. And a third: Go back where you came from!
The younger kids, looking up, were goggly-eyed. They got it, I got it—we all got it. As the crowd behind the new girl grew, and as its cruel chanting amplified, the bullying words seemed to echo, around the room and in our heads. Everyone who was there that morning saw, heard, and felt what it’s like to have taunts like these reverberate inside you, over and over, because you’re different or awkward or new or you’ve just somehow become a target.
And I had written none of those words. Just, you could say, provided a platform.
That’s what The Revealers has been, in school after school: a platform. The story seems to easily become a springboard for discussion, for opening up the social struggles that so often preoccupy middle schoolers, and sometimes even for breaking through to new understanding. But these outcomes don’t just happen because the book is assigned or read. They are generated, I’ve observed, when adults—and sometimes also students—who work with this book apply their own ideas for engaging young people with it.
That is the key.
I’m very lucky. I still get to visit schools that work with my book, and often I see fresh creativity brought to the challenge of turning the story into a springboard. Sometimes I get into funny or memorable situations. I’ve played Alex Trebek in a “Revealers Jeopardy” game show that was broadcasted on a school’s own TV system. I’ve found myself in a room full of fourth through sixth graders dressed as original superheroes, whose profiles and powers the kids had dreamed up, like the Purple Phantoms (“Our role during the reading was to find hidden acts, both good and evil”). I’ve listened to a classroom of sixth graders avidly explain how they put a bystander character from my story through a full-scale, court-simulation trial, where he was charged before a jury for failing to stop the bullying that he saw. (Was he convicted? From year to year, that can change.)
I’m lucky, too, because sometimes young people share things with me. At a visit I may be handed a note, often by a student who flees before I can read it. After I’ve been to a school, I may receive a letter or an e-mail. I’m not saying this happens every time, but it happens. “Your book relates to everybody in our school,” one girl wrote. “I am not going to lie I have been bullied before, but I have bullied people before, and I am not proud of it.”
I had no lesson to teach; I was trying to write a good story. What has happened with The Revealers, what continues to happen in schools around the country, always amazes me—and I give most of the credit to the kids and their teachers, librarians, guidance counselors, principals, and others. It takes courage to talk about this stuff in real life. And each new resonating experience always seems to have grown from someone’s idea for building on the book, for helping it be the start of young people talking with each other, and hearing or seeing each other, in some new way.
One last observation. When I hear from students who’ve been part of a reading and discussion project with my book, they will occasionally say something like this: “I used to do that stuff,” meaning bullying. “But I don’t anymore.”
When kids write this, they always seem to give the same reason.
The reason is this: “Now I know how it feels.”
GOFISH
QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR
Doug Wilhelm
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Oh, I wanted (at different times) to be a cartoonist, a football player, an oceanographer, a rock guitarist. I had no talent in any of these areas.
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
I had a ninth-grade English teacher, Mr. Behr, who had us discussing the realistic novels we were reading. I had a lot to say, because I was a big reader, but I was so unpopular that normally kids wouldn’t listen. Mr. Behr was tough, though, and in his class you had to listen with respect. That year, because of that class, some key turned inside me and I started writing stories and poems—even a play—but secretly, in my room. I didn’t want to give other kids any new ammunition for making fun of me. But that was the first time I discovered I might have something to say, and some ability to say it. It was a turning point in my life. Thanks, Mr. Behr.
What’s your most embarrassing childhood memory?
Whatever it is, I’ve suppressed it. I was just generally embarrassed about being me.
What’s your favorite childhood memory?
When I was in second grade, we moved into a new suburban neighborhood, and I took a toy rifle and led several kids on an exploratory expedition into its backyards. The neighborhood had the typical kid-legends and rumors—that a rat the size of a cat lived under one storm-sevver grate, that some other creature of a vague sort was in the cattails somewhere else. I wanted the adventure of going to see. I remember that afternoon so clearly.
As a young person, who did you look up to most?
My parents tried, but I was raised largely by television. So my first role models were black-and-white early TV characters. The Lone Ranger. Sky King. Rob Petrie. Rocket J. Squirrel. None of these characters were actually real people, so that was, I guess, part of the problem.
What was you
r favorite thing about school?
Safety patrol. I got to wear a badge. Also kickball, even though I would reliably be assigned a position like “fourth right field.” Only the least coordinated kids know what fourth right field is.
What was your least favorite thing about school?
Math! Also fourth right field.
What were your hobbies as a kid? What are your hobbies now?
Back then I loved baseball, the games we played in the neighborhood (we had a great neighborhood), and building airplane models. I wanted to play music, but everyone said I was terrible at it. Today I play music! I play harmonica, conga drums, and other percussion in a band called the Avant Garde Dogs. I love it when you play and people smile, and dance.
What was your first job, and what was your “worst” job?
My first job was as a farmhand on a dairy farm in Orwell, Vermont, which is actually near where I live now. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and in tenth grade I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a dairy farmer in Vermont. This lasted until I actually spent a summer working on a dairy farm. That summer I learned how to work; it was also the last time I dreamed about becoming a farmer. My worst job was doing inventory in a brass factory for a week, also as a teenager. I was horrified by the confinement of having to punch a clock, and that was the only time I ever did.