Pony From The Outsiders

“I sat down and picked up my pen and thought for a minute. Remembering. Remembering a handsome, dark boy with a reckless grin and a hot temper. A tough, towheaded boy with a cigarette in his mouth and a bitter grin on his hard face. Remembering-this time it didn’t hurt-a quiet, defeated- looking sixteen year-old whose hair needed cutting badly and who had black eyes with a frightened expression to them” (S.E. Hinton 179,180). That was the last sentence of the writing assignment I had given one of my favorite students, Ponyboy Curtis, a few weeks ago. I had assigned him to write about anything he wanted to as a last effort to raise his grade. It was to be no less than five pages so when he plopped a book on my desk, I was completely blown away. …show more content…
He would choose one person; tell a little bit about them, and then why he chose them and how they are a hero in his eyes. I think this would be a really good prompt for Pony because he has experienced so many hardships and I would be curious as to who he would choose to write about whether it be someone like his best buddy Johnny or one of his brothers like Sodapop. No matter who he chose to write about, it would also give the readers who read his previous work some more detail and insight on that character. For example if he chose to write about Dally maybe we could learn a little bit more about his past and how he came to be such a cold and hard person. “His eyes were blue, blazing ice, cold with hatred of the whole world” (S.E Hinton 10). This is towards the beginning of Pony’s work and I’d love to know the story behind those cold, blue eyes filled with hatred. Another example would be Johnny. “If you can picture a little dark puppy that has been kicked too many times and is lost in a crowd of strangers, you'll have Johnny” (S.E. Hinton 11). Although there are lots of information about how Johnny acts and what he looks like there isn’t much information about his personal thoughts like his dreams and what he wanted to do with his life besides when he and Pony talk in the lot about moving to the country but that was mainly about Pony’s dream. If I chose to give him this one as his new …show more content…
This would also be kind of an elaboration on his past work because readers only received a little bit of insight on how Pony thought the problem could be solved. “And tonight…people get hurt in rumbles, maybe killed. I’m sick of it because it doesn't do any good. You can’t win, you know that don’t you?” (S.E Hinton 117). In this quote, Randy is talking about how fighting doesn’t do any good and it shows that there are both Greasers and Socs who think that the rivalry between each other is pointless. The purpose of this writing would be to really dig deeper on the feud between Socs and Greasers and how someone in the middle of all of that thinks it can be resolved. This work would be very cool to show to other students to see if it had some kind of an impact on those who were involved and for those who weren’t involved in the rivalry; it would really give them a better understanding of what is going on. This prompt would give a more detailed version of the feud that we have come to know about in Pony’s previous writing. In his past writing it really doesn’t tell us much about the feud itself, just that Greasers are less fortunate, they live on the East side and Socs live on the West side, and Greasers show more emotion than Socs. The point of this writing would be to go into more depth about how the feud affects both Socs and Greasers as Cherry touched upon and