Madelyn Diaz Discussion 3

Instead of going for a lofty, vague sense of a meaningful topic like ChatGPT would, I’d actually be more disposed towards analyzing the “side characters” of this short story as a collective. It’d be fun to think about why they react how they do to the plot’s events, or glean info about what their lives might be like from what we see of them. Tentatively, I’d call this theoretical paper “The Young and Foolish of ‘The Lesson'”, in a reference to that very first line of the text.
Through Sylvia’s viewpoint, observant as she is, readers get a great deal of insight into these children already. From Little Q.T. who is often targeted for ribbing because his smallness keeps him from fighting back, but is “liable to come up behind you years later and get his licks in when you half expect it”; to “Fat Butt,” usually called “Big Butt” everywhere but here, as if to further emphasize the disparagement that he’s probably confronted with all the time, “already wasting his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich like the pig he is”; to Flyboy who’ll take pity over bullying and is even deemed effeminate by our narrator for reasons that may be related; we have a whole crew’s worth of young boys, all facing mildly less principled forms of social pressure. A whole day could be made out of cataloging individual descriptions and interactions between those characters!