4.1 Giving advice

English home language

Grade 7

Module 15

Giving advice

What advice would you give to a friend who …

When giving advice, take care to _______________

and not to _________

Most parents welcome the interest shown by loving grandparents in their offspring.

However, when 15-year-old Edmund Emil Kemper was invited to spend a weekend with the old folks in August 1964 in California, his mother told them, “Don’t bother. The boy’s a real weirdo!” But his grandparents insisted and Edmund duly appeared.

On August 27, Ed phoned his mom to report on his holiday. It had not gone well. Standing with a still warm shotgun in his hands he told his mom, “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.” Kemper was jailed for 5 years.

In 1973 Ed made another call. It was to the local police department. “I think I should give myself up …” he announced, and then listed sadism, cannibalism, murder, mutilation and other ghastly activities of which he was guilty. In particular he had used a hammer to finish off his own mother and a visiting friend after he had killed them with his own hands. Kemper continues to serve his life sentence.

Read the short extract well and then answer the questions below by only ticking or highlighting T for True or F for False in the grid provided.

• The boy’s grandparents loved him dearly and invited him to spend the weekend with them in California.
• Edmund Kemper turned 15 in 1973.
• The mother warned his grandparents that he was a strange child.
• He was still holding the shotgun because he had just returned from hunting buck when his mother called him by telephone.
• Kemper was jailed for assaulting and injuring his grandfather.
• In 1973 when Kemper gave himself to the police, he was a free man.
• Kemper told the police that he was guilty of eating the flesh of his victims.
• He also informed the police that he had tortured his victims.
• He had shot and killed his mother and the postman.
• Kemper was sentenced to death and is still awaiting his sentence to be carried out.

Mark the answers clearly:

TEEN WORDS (association)

1. List 10 words with which you, being a teenager, associate (e.g. pimples; daydream; moods)
2. Use a dictionary to find the correct, yet brief, meanings of these words.

1. Design a crossword puzzle, using these words as the answers and their definitions as the clues.
2. Use the grid provided, and shade the unused blocks.

IT COULD HAPPEN TO ME . . .

Test your reading skills

Carefully read this extract taken from It can’t happen to me , by Adele Searll. This extract is a shortened and slightly adapted version of Greg’s case history, pages 20 – 22 in the book.

When Greg turned 14, his mother met and married her fourth husband, Peter. Shortly afterwards, the family was relocated to Cape Town from Durban and Greg was sent to a local high school. This was where he came into contact with dagga for the first time.