My Weird School #2

  Mr. Klutz Is Nuts!

  Dan Gutman

  Pictures by

  Jim Paillot

  To Emma

  Contents

  1 The Flying Principal

  2 Big Trouble

  3 The Principal Is Your Pal

  4 The Present

  5 My Big Mouth

  6 The Chocolate Party

  7 Teacher for a Day

  8 Mr. Klutz Puckers Up

  9 I Pledge Allegiance to Mr. Klutz

  10 Mr. Klutz Is Getting Weirder

  11 The Last Straw

  12 A Hard Bargain

  13 Poor Mr. Klutz

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The Flying Principal

  “Watch out!” somebody screamed.

  Mr. Klutz, the principal of my school, was tearing down the sidewalk on a skateboard! It was early morning, just before the school bell was about to ring.

  Mr. Klutz must have built up too much speed coming down the hill. He was weaving in and around the kids and their parents, totally out of control. Most principals are really serious and dignified. They look like they were born as grown-ups! But not Mr. Klutz. He’s more like a grown-up kid. When he isn’t skateboarding to school, he rides his motorcycle, his scooter, or wears his in-line skates.

  “Runaway principal!” some kid shouted. “Run for your lives!”

  The skateboard must have hit a crack in the sidewalk, because the next thing anybody knew, Mr. Klutz was flying through the air like a superhero. Kids and their parents were diving out of his way. Dogs were running in all directions.

  Mr. Klutz crash-landed in the bushes at the front of the school. Luckily he was wearing a helmet, and he had knee pads and elbow pads on over his clothes. Everybody stopped for a second, because Mr. Klutz was just lying there in the bushes without moving. We weren’t sure if he was alive.

  “Good morning, Mr. Klutz,” said Mrs. Cooney, the school nurse, as she walked past.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Cooney,” he replied.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Lovely.”

  Then Mr. Klutz got up, brushed himself off, and walked up the front steps, like it was totally normal for a principal to skateboard to school and crash headfirst into the bushes.

  Mr. Klutz is nuts!

  2

  Big Trouble

  “That’s the last straw, A.J.,” my teacher, Miss Daisy, told me. “I want you to go to the principal’s office!”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I protested.

  My name is A.J. and I hate school. Why do we have to learn so much stuff? If you ask me, by the time you get to second grade you already know enough stuff to last you a lifetime. School is way overrated.

  My mom says that all eight-year-old boys have to go to school, so I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. But when I grow up, I’m going to be a professional hockey player. You don’t have to know how to read or write or do math to shoot a puck into a net.

  Actually, that’s what I was doing when my teacher, Miss Daisy, sent me to the principal’s office.

  You see, me and my friends Michael and Ryan were playing hockey with a tennis ball during recess. We were shooting the ball at a tree to score a goal. I shot one wild, and it landed over by a bunch of girls in our class.

  “Ouch! That hit me!” shouted this girl named Annette. She was rubbing her leg like she had been hit by a train or something. It was just a tennis ball! Annette is such a crybaby.

  “Hey, A.J.!” Michael hollered. “That counts as a goal!”

  “How come?” I asked. “I missed the tree.”

  “Well, you did hit the puck into Annette. Get it? Annette? A net? Annette?” Well, after me and Ryan got it, we thought that was just about the funniest joke in the history of the world.

  Miss Daisy didn’t think it was very funny, though. She was already mad at me because I had forgotten to bring in a current-event article for the third week in a row.

  That’s when she said it was the last straw and I had to go to Mr. Klutz’s office.

  3

  The Principal Is Your Pal

  The principal is like the king of the school. He gets to tell everybody what to do and where to go. That is cool! If I can’t be a professional hockey player when I grow up, I want to be a principal so I can boss teachers around.

  My friend Billy from around the corner, who was in second grade last year, told me that principals have a dungeon down in the basement of the school where they torture kids who misbehave. I don’t know if Billy’s telling the truth or not. But one time we had gym class and we passed by this open door in the basement and there were all kinds of scary-looking things in there. Michael said he saw chains hanging from the ceiling over a chair with straps on the arms and legs, so I guess that’s what Mr. Klutz uses to torture bad kids.

  I was scared. I had never been to the principal’s office before. On the way there, I stopped into the boy’s bathroom. Maybe I could dig a tunnel out of the school and escape, I thought. My friend Billy told me he saw that in a war movie once. These guys dug their way out of prison camp with a spoon. But I didn’t have a spoon. And I didn’t want to touch the floor of the bathroom anyway. Yuck!

  When I got to Mr. Klutz’s office, his secretary made me sit in a chair for about a million hours. Mr. Klutz’s door was closed the whole time. I wondered if he was torturing some other kid. I didn’t hear any screams or anything.

  Finally the secretary said I could go inside. I opened the door and was surprised to see Mr. Klutz was hanging upside down from a bar near the ceiling. He had on boots that were attached to the bar.

  “What are you doing up there?” I asked.

  “Oh, just hanging around,” Mr. Klutz said as he pulled himself out of his boots and jumped down onto the floor. “When the blood rushes to my head, it helps me think.”

  Well, I know that blood rushing to your head doesn’t help you grow hair, because Mr. Klutz had no hair on his head at all. He was bald as a balloon. Mr. Klutz’s office looked pretty much like my dad’s office, except he had a big snowboarding poster on the wall and a foosball table in the corner. Oh, and he also had a punching bag with a face on it.

  Come to think of it, it didn’t look anything like my dad’s office.

  I kept my head down when he told me to take a seat, so he would feel sorry for me. When you get into trouble, always keep your head down, because if grown-ups feel sorry for you they won’t punish you as badly.

  “Miss Daisy told me why you’re here,” Mr. Klutz said, “but I’d like to hear your side of the story.”

  “Miss Daisy thinks I stole some straws,” I told him.

  “What makes you think that, A.J.?”

  “Well, she was all mad at me and she said, ‘That’s the last straw!’ Then she told me to go to your office. I swear I didn’t take any straws. I don’t even know where she keeps the straws.”

  “I see,” Mr. Klutz said, rubbing his chin. “I thought it had something to do with a hockey game that got out of control. And there’s this little matter of forgetting to bring in current events.”

  “Well, that too.”

  Mr. Klutz didn’t look like he was going to torture me. In fact, he didn’t look mad at all.

  “You may not believe this,” he told me, “but I was a boy once.”

  “Just once?” I asked. “I’m a boy all the time.”

  “No, what I mean is, I used to be young like you.”

  “I’ll bet you were really good in school,” I said.

  “No, actually, it was just the opposite,” the principal told me. “I didn’t like school at all, and I wasn’t a very good student.”

  “Really?” I figured that anybody who grew up to be a principal must have loved school as a kid. Why else would you want to hang around a school all day as a grown-up? Except maybe to boss teachers around.

  “When I was a boy, I could never sit still,” Mr. Klutz said. “I wanted to run around all the time. I didn’t have the motivation to do my schoolwork. Do you know what motivation is, A.J.?”

  “It’s like a motor inside you that makes you want to do stuff,” I said. “That’s why it’s called motor-vation.”

  “I guess you could say that,” Mr. Klutz said. “Sometimes my mother would give me a little reward if I did a good job on my homework. A piece of candy, for instance. You see, while I didn’t like school, I certainly did like candy. So I would try hard in school in order to get the candy. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “A.J., if I were to give you some candy, do you think it might help you remember to bring in your current event next time?”

  “My parents told me never to take candy from strangers,” I told him.

  “I’m not a stranger,” Mr. Klutz said. “Did you ever hear anyone say ‘your principal is your pal’? If you need to spell the word principal, you can always remember, your principal is your p-a-l. Get it?”

  “Well, if you put it that way, I suppose I could take some candy.”

  Mr. Klutz reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a chocolate bar. It was the kind with marshmallow inside, and caramel. My mouth was watering. “Go easy with the hockey. And let’s see if you can remember to bring in that current event tomorrow,” he said as he handed me the candy bar. “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay? It’s just a little secret between you and m
e.”

  “Okay!”

  I ran out of the office just in case he had only given me the candy bar so he could tie me to a chair and torture me.

  4

  The Present

  When I got back to the class, everybody looked at me. I guess they wanted to see if I was crying or bleeding or anything.

  “Did Klutz bring you down into his torture chamber?” Ryan whispered when I sat in my seat.

  “Nope,” I said. “He gave me a present.”

  “What did he give you?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I promised I wouldn’t tell.”

  “I’ll be your best friend.”

  “Well, okay. I’ll show you at lunch.”

  During lunch, I sat at a table with my new best friend Ryan, Michael, smarty-pants Andrea, and Emily, who cries all the time even if she isn’t hurt or anything. You should have seen their eyes bug out when I showed them the candy bar.

  “Where did you get that?” Michael asked. “Your mom usually gives you carrot sticks for dessert.”

  “Mr. Klutz gave it to me,” I explained. “He’s got a whole drawer filled with them.”

  “Why did he give you a candy bar?” asked Emily. I could tell she was jealous.

  “Because I didn’t bring in my current event,” I explained.

  “Wait a minute!” Andrea said, all angry and all. “You got sent to the principal’s office for being bad, and instead of punishing you, he gave you a candy bar? That’s not fair! I brought in three current events and I didn’t get a candy bar.”

  “Maybe you should try not being so perfect all the time,” I said. “You can have my carrot sticks, Andrea.”

  I love getting Andrea mad. She thinks she knows everything. Whenever we have a homework assignment, she does extra work just to show Miss Daisy how smart she is and to make the rest of us look bad.

  “Mr. Klutz told me he’s my pal,” I said, biting off a big piece of the chocolate bar right in front of Andrea’s face. “He said I could come in for a candy bar any time I want one.”

  That last part wasn’t exactly true, but it was fun to say anyway.

  “The principal should give candy to students who complete their assignments,” Andrea said. “Not to kids who don’t.”

  “Yeah,” Emily sniffed. She looked like she might run out of the room crying like she usually does for no reason.

  “I want to go to the principal’s office!” my best friend Ryan announced.

  “Me too!” Michael agreed. “I want a candy bar!”

  They all watched while I finished off the candy. I licked the extra chocolate off my fingers and rubbed my tummy, just to make sure they would know how good it was.

  5

  My Big Mouth

  It just so happens that I know of the perfect way to get sent to the principal’s office. All you have to do is put a tack on the teacher’s chair. My friend Billy told me he did this once and he got sent to the principal’s office.

  I waited until recess, when Andrea and Emily ran off to play with the girls. Then I told the plan to my best friend Ryan and Michael.

  “That’s genius!” exclaimed my best friend Ryan.

  “What if Miss Daisy gets hurt?” asked Michael.

  “She won’t get hurt,” I told him. “She’ll jump up so fast that she won’t hardly feel it.”

  So at the end of recess, the three of us snuck back into our classroom. It was empty. Miss Daisy was eating in the teacher’s room. Ryan pulled a tack out of the bulletin board and put it on Miss Daisy’s chair. Then we ran out to the playground just as the end-of-recess bell was ringing. When we filed back into the class, Ryan, Michael, and I could barely look at one another because we were afraid we’d burst out laughing. I could hardly wait to see the look on Miss Daisy’s face when she sat on her chair.

  Well, when Miss Daisy sat down, the most amazing thing happened.

  Nothing! She didn’t jump up or anything. She just sat there. Me and Ryan and Michael looked at one another. How could she not feel that?

  “She must have buns of steel!” Ryan whispered.

  “She’s like Superman.”

  Then I realized that I had forgotten to tell Ryan something very important. When you put a tack on the teacher’s chair, you’re supposed to put the tack a little bit on one side. When you put it in the middle of the chair, the tack sort of…well…you know, it doesn’t have any target to hit, if you know what I mean.

  Miss Daisy got up to do math, not even realizing there was a tack in her butt. When she turned around to write on the chalkboard, we could see the tack was just stuck there, hanging in the middle of her backside.

  Me and Ryan and Michael thought we were going to die trying to keep ourselves from laughing. It was probably the funniest thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. You should have been there!

  “Excuse me,” said Andrea, raising her hand to ruin everybody’s fun like always. “Miss Daisy, I think there’s something stuck to your skirt.”

  Miss Daisy turned around and pulled out the tack. “Who did this?” she demanded.

  “I did!” Ryan bragged.

  “Go to the principal’s office, Ryan.”

  “All right!” Ryan whispered, pumping his fist. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with a candy bar!”

  “Is there anyone else who wants to go to the principal’s office?” Miss Daisy asked.

  “I do!” said Michael.

  “Can I go again?” I said.

  “Hey, I asked first!” Michael complained.

  “Quiet, both of you.”

  Miss Daisy pretended nothing unusual had happened and went back to her lesson, but I saw her look at her chair carefully before she sat down again.

  A few minutes later Ryan came back to the classroom. Mr. Klutz was with him.

  “So did he give you a candy bar?” I whispered excitedly when Ryan sat down.

  “No,” Ryan whispered back. “When I told him that I thought he would give me a candy bar like he gave one to you, he got really upset. He told me he was going to call my parents and have them come in to talk about what happened. I think we’re all in big trouble.”

  Oh, man! I decided that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to be best friends with Ryan anymore. I should have kept my big mouth shut about the candy bar.

  6

  The Chocolate Party

  When I thought about it, putting a tack on Miss Daisy’s chair was a pretty dumb thing to do.

  Mr. Klutz went to the front of the class. I was sure he was going to bring all of us to the torture chamber in the basement. But he didn’t look all that mad, considering what we had done.

  “It has come to my attention that some of the students at our school need a little extra incentive to behave and work their hardest,” Mr. Klutz said. “Do you know what the word incentive means?”

  “An incentive is a reward that encourages a person to work harder to achieve something,” Andrea announced, all proud of herself. She thinks she knows everything. I hate her.

  “Very good, Andrea,” said Mr. Klutz. “What sort of incentive might bring out the best work in the students of our school?”

  “You could give us each a million dollars,” suggested Michael.

  “You could make summer vacation last all year long,” I said.

  “How about getting rid of homework?” asked Ryan.

  Miss Daisy went to the front of the room. “Mr. Klutz can’t do those things,” she said. “But remember when all the students in our school read a million pages in books, and as a reward we turned the gym into a video-game arcade? That was quite successful. Mr. Klutz even dressed up in a gorilla suit for the evening, if I recall.”