How are Mr. Keesing and Mr. Keptor different from each other in Anne Frank's diary?
Answers
Mr. Keesing, a school teacher who Anne describes as an "old fogey." Although a math teacher, he assigns her extra homework in the form of writing essays because she talks too much in class. She writes her first three-page essay about herself as a chatterbox, saying it is both a female and an inherited trait, as her mother chatters all the time too. The essay writing does nothing to stop Anne's chattering in class, so Mr. Keesing assigns her a second and then a third essay. By the third one she is tapped out, so she writes a poem instead, which amuses the class and Mr. Keesing. The episode illustrates the carefree nature of Anne's life as a school girl as late as 1942. More subtly, her first essay about chattering shows the influence of the sexual and racial (genetic) ideas permeating the times: women as a gender have certain characteristics (chattering) and these traits are passed on. Anne writes innocently, but the idea of inherited "racial traits" helped justify the genocide against the Jews that Anne and her family got tragically caught up in.