41 pages • 1-hour read
Jake Drake, Know-It-All
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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “K-I-A/D-I-A”
That evening, Jake tells his parents about the science fair. His father, Jim, briefly glances at the booklet that Jake offers them, signs the permission form, and starts enthusing about how Jake can build a rocket as his project. Jake’s mother reads the booklet carefully. She asks whether her husband noticed the prize being offered. It is clear that he did not notice; he continues talking about rockets. Jake’s mother asks Jake to explain to his father why a rocket will not work as a project. Jake explains that projects cannot use anything that explodes, smokes, or burns. Then, Jim starts talking about water-propelled rockets. Jake’s mother teases him about being a “K-I-A/D-I-A,” which Jake’s little sister, Abby, explains means a “Know-It-All/Do-It-All” (33). Jake knows that this describes his father well: Jim has a history of causing problems by refusing to take others’ directions and plowing ahead with incomplete information. When Jake’s mother hands the science fair booklet back to her husband, he reads it more carefully. Jake excitedly tells his father what the prize is for winning. Jim is similarly excited, and he tells Jake, “Well, I guess we had better get right to work on this” (35). His father’s use of the word “we” bothers Jake. He worries that his father is going to try to take over the project. He wants to do the project on his own—and the rules require this, anyway. Then, Jake panics as he wonders if his father expects him to share the new computer. He does not want to share the Bluntium Twelve with anyone, including his father.
Chapter 6 Summary: “What to Do”
Still uncertain about what kind of project to do, Jake takes the science fair booklet to his room and studies it. He reads about the scientific method: This involves observation of the world, coming up with a question related to those observations, generating a hypothesis about the question’s answer, methodically testing the hypothesis, and using the results of these tests to generate a conclusion. Since Jake cannot think of a question, he works through an exercise in the booklet that asks students to fill in blanks to help them generate research questions and hypotheses. After amusing himself with several silly potential answers, Jake decides to look in his junk drawer for inspiration. He begins making a list of the objects there but stops after reaching nearly 80 items. He worries that he will soon have to resort to asking his father for help, and he does not want to do this because of his father’s know-it-all tendencies.
Just as he is about to give up and go ask his father, Jake thinks about some of the items in his junk drawer and remembers reading about electromagnets. He thinks that he has the items needed to make one, and he pulls out a nail, some wire, toenail clippers, and a battery. He winds the wire around the nail and then uses the toenail clippers to strip the ends of the wire. He touches the wire ends to the battery leads, but nothing seems to be happening. For a moment, he thinks that the experiment has failed, and he tosses everything back into his junk drawer. Then, suddenly, he realizes that the battery may be dead. When he repeats the process with a fresher battery, it works, and he is able to draw metal objects to the nail with magnetism. Excited, he realizes that he has a question about this process: He wants to know how to make a stronger magnet, and he wonders whether more wire or more battery power will make a bigger difference. He imagines himself at the science fair, with his posters and some big electromagnets. He imagines the judges listening to him and smiling. He also imagines beating Kevin and Marsha, winning the computer, going home to play video games.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Secrets and Spies”
Over the next week, Jake reads everything he can find about electromagnets. As he reads, he realizes that no one person can be an expert on everything—there is just too much to know in the world. He thinks that “nobody ever told that to Kevin and Marsha,” who want to know “everything, all the time” (48). He takes pleasure in how hard they work to find out what his science fair project is about because it is something he knows that they cannot know. Kevin persistently questions him, but he refuses to tell. Jake notes that he is good at keeping secrets. He recalls a time when Abby broke one of their mother’s figurines and got very upset. Jake glued it back together for her and put it back on its shelf and kept her secret so that she would not get in trouble. He recalls a time when a friend—whose name he will not divulge—wet his bed at camp. Jake helped the friend change his sheets and hide the evidence so that others would not tease him, and he has never told his friend’s secret. Marsha does not ask directly about Jake’s project, but he can tell from her constant snooping that she is trying to find out what it is about. Jake deliberately waits until either Kevin or Marsha is nearby and looks up information about different things—snakes, weasels, and so on—to confuse them.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Dropouts”
Winter break arrives. This is Jake’s favorite time of year because there is snow and no school. His family celebrates Christmas, but instead of focusing on presents, family dinner with his grandparents, and other markers of the holiday, Jake is busy thinking about magnets. Aside from a single day of sledding with Willie, Jake does not play outside, either. He asks his mother to take him to the hardware store, and they buy supplies for his project. All throughout the break, Jake either works on or thinks about his science fair project. He feels that the project is coming very close to ruining his break.
When school resumes, Kevin begins talking about his project to anyone who will listen. He is working on a study of ants, and Jake can see that the work that Kevin has done is very impressive. Kevin has done things like using a digital camera to take photos of ants, and his poster looks amazing. By Thursday, Jake learns, Kevin’s constant showing off has had an impact on the other students: Willie tells him that he is going to drop out of the science fair because Kevin will surely win. Willie says that several other students from his class feel the same way. Jake tries to point out that this is probably Kevin’s plan—to make other students so intimidated that they drop out. Willie shrugs this off, saying that he does not really need a new computer, anyway. He asks, “[W]ho wants to just try to beat Kevin all the time?” (59). This makes Jake mad: He is mad at Kevin and Marsha, at Lenny Cordo and the adults at his school, and even at himself. He understands that he has been mean and sneaky, too. He almost let the science fair ruin his winter break. Worst of all, he has abandoned Willie. This whole time, he and Willie could have been working on the project together, having fun instead of feeling stressed and discouraged. Jake decides to quit the science fair.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Chapters 5-8 portray an important transition in Jake’s thinking about the science fair and the Bluntium Twelve computer. This transition leads to a moment of anagnorisis, or self-realization, for Jake and to Chapter 8’s cliffhanger ending, as Jake dramatically decides to quit the science fair.
Chapter 5 is focused on Jake’s interactions with his family. From this chapter, the reader learns that he lives with both his parents and his younger sister, Abby. Abby is depicted as a typical first grader through brief comical details such as stirring her ice cream until it is “soup” and her attempted mimicry of her father’s whistle (33), which results in nothing more than ice cream dribbling down her chin. Jake’s mother is also only briefly depicted; she is the somewhat more organized and meticulous of Jake’s two parents and the person who gently teases Jake’s father about being a “Know-It-All/Do-It-All” (33). The only cloud over this cheerful family gathering is Jake’s father’s tendency to assume that he knows more than he does. This portrayal of Jim makes it clear that Jake also has to contend with the impact of know-it-all behavior in his own home, and it sets up a potential conflict between Jake and his father over the execution of Jake’s science fair project. This helps to convey the story’s theme of The Importance of Staying Humble because Jim is, at heart, a kind father who would never want his know-it-all tendencies to cause Jake stress in this way.
Chapter 6 continues to characterize Jake and explore his motivations. The long list of items inside Jake’s junk drawer, for instance, helps to characterize Jake. There are collections of everyday items—paper clips, pencils, and batteries—and collections of more idiosyncratic items—a Pez dispenser, a broken snail shell, and Star Wars action figures. These are the kinds of things that any child might collect in their room. There are also many objects that others might consider trash—keys for forgotten locks, locks with no keys, and a broken flashlight, for instance. This shows a more personal side of Jake. He is someone who does not let go of things easily. He also lists “6 of Willie’s basketball cards” (40), which reinforces how close he and Willie are and is a reminder of The Importance of Loyalty to Friends. The fact that he offers clear descriptions of items and lists them according to category shows that Jake is a precise and organized thinker. Taken together, the items on this list show that Jake is a fairly typical yet intelligent child who values his friendships and his cherished possessions and sees value in things that others might not. Chapters 5 and 6 reinforce the idea that Jake is a likeable child from a likeable family—his one obstacle is know-it-all behavior, both within himself and in others around him. This makes the ending of Chapter 6 more poignant. Jake has an initial moment of genuine excitement about his electromagnet project in Chapter 6, showing the power of Learning as Its Own Reward. By the end of the chapter, however, he is again thinking about beating Marsha and Kevin and winning the computer, and this moment is lost.
As Jake’s out-of-character behavior accelerates in Chapter 7, the disconnection between his actions and his essential nature becomes more pronounced and more distressing, pointing out The Value of Personal Integrity. Jake barely participates in his family’s Christmas celebration and ignores Willie for most of their winter break because he is so busy with his quest to win the science fair. He complains about Kevin and Marsha’s sneaky and hostile behavior as they spy on his research and constantly question him about his work—but, ironically, he fails to see that he is also being sneaky and hostile. He refuses to answer any questions they ask, and he hides his real research books and instead conspicuously looks up information about sharks, weasels, snakes, and rats in order to mislead and confuse Marsha and Kevin. He reveals that he has chosen these particular animals as a kind of covert insult to his two know-it-all classmates. In Chapter 1, Jake claimed that “[t]here’s nothing worse than a know-it-all” (3). Many of Jake’s actions in Chapter 7, however, suggest that this is exactly what he has become.
After the low point of Chapter 7, it is clear that Jake needs to make a change. The catalyst for this change comes in Chapter 8. The conversation between Jake and Willie creates a moment of anagnorisis for Jake, in which he must face himself and recognize what he has become. Ashamed of himself, he announces that he will quit the science fair, creating suspense around the question of whether he will really give up on all his hard work and his chance at winning his dream computer.
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