I first want to start off this blog with a quote. “You’ll never understand someone until you get into their skin and walk around in it” (Spufford 30). I truly believe in this quote because it is true. We never know what others are thinking or what they are going through until we take make that first step to understanding who they really are. To find out who they are we need to get into their skin and be able to go through what they are going through. I believe that Dicey’s Song really helps us as readers take that first step in trying to understand who Dicey is. The first question we answered was, how does Dicey’s Song get you to step into Dicey’s skin? This took me a minute to find the perfect answer because I could not find it at first. I decided to go with the paper she wrote to Mr. Chappells. I really was able to get into her skin and feel what she was feeling. Right before Mr. Chappelle started reading her paper she did not know what to think. I know that feeling as well. When I was in school and a teacher was reading my paper I was a nerves wreck because I did not know what the teacher thought about the paper. Was it a good paper? Did I do really bad and the teacher wanted to read a good paper and then a bad one to show the students the difference between the two? My head was always spinning and my heart beating really fast. Voigt goes into so much detail about what Dicey is thinking that we can really feel it as well. We learn that the paper is too good to be written by Dicey and that Mr. Chappelle believes that she plagiarized. If I heard this I would have gone crazy. Trying to cope with what I just heard and going off saying that every word was my own. This then leads us to the next question. What does it mean that Dicey’s skin is already full? When we go through something that maybe someone else has as well we are not all going to perceive it the same way. Dicey just stood in silence and did not care about the grade she got. On the other hand I would have really cared about my grade. Asking why he said the things he did, or what should I have done better? I would have not been able to just sit there and accepted the grade like Dicey did. I think this is very important to know when getting into someone else’s skin, to know that I might already be full and not to judge on what we see.
I also what to add in that I really do think this could be a children’s book for students in middle school. I had to read this book for my other Children’s Lit class and we discussed that it is a good novel to read not only for its readability but also for its emotional text. We really need to understand that his novel is not a fantasy but a reality of someone’s life that we are having to get inside of. When reading this novel we might have faced similar problems but not everyone will solve to problems same way. I think this novel shows us that we are not always alone, because there are people everyday that could be facing similar problems as well.
