My Weird School #1

  Miss Daisy Is Crazy!

  Dan Gutman

  Pictures by

  Jim Paillot

  To Emma

  Contents

  1 I Hate School!

  2 Dumb Miss Daisy and Principal Klutz

  3 How to Spell Read

  4 Miss Daisy Is Crazy!

  5 The Most Genius Idea!

  6 What Do You Want to Be?

  7 Bonbons and Footballs

  8 A Lot of Books!

  9 Put Those Books Away

  10 Football Players Are Really Dumb

  11 We Rule the School!

  12 Poor Miss Daisy

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  I Hate School!

  “My name is A.J. I like football and video games, and I hate school.” Our teacher, Miss Daisy, was taking attendance. It was the first day of second grade. Miss Daisy told everyone in the class to stand up, say our name, and say something about ourself.

  All the kids laughed when I said I hated school. But there was nothing funny about it. I have learned a lot in my eight years. One thing I learned is that there is no reason why kids should have to go to school.

  If you ask me, kids can learn all we need to learn by watching TV. You can learn important information like which breakfast cereal tastes best and what toys you should buy and which shampoo leaves your hair the shiniest. This is stuff that we’ll need to know when we grow up.

  School is just this dumb thing that grown-ups thought up so they wouldn’t have to pay for baby-sitters. When I grow up and have children of my own, I won’t make them go to school. They can just ride their bikes and play football and video games all day. They’ll be happy, and they’ll think I’m the greatest father in the world.

  But for now, I wanted to let my new teacher, Miss Daisy, know from the very start how I felt about school.

  “You know what, A.J.?” Miss Daisy said, “I hate school too.”

  “You do?”

  We all stared at Miss Daisy. I thought teachers loved school. If they didn’t love school, why did they become teachers? Why would they ever want to go to a school as a grown-up? I know that when I’m a grown-up, I’m not going to go anywhere near a school.

  “Sure I hate school,” Miss Daisy continued. “If I didn’t have to be here teaching you, I could be home sitting on my comfortable couch, watching TV and eating bonbons.”

  “Wow!” we all said.

  “What’s a bonbon?” asked Ryan, a kid with black sneakers who was sitting next to me.

  “Bonbons are these wonderful chocolate treats,” Miss Daisy told us. “They’re about the size of a large acorn, and you can pop the whole thing right in your mouth so you don’t need a napkin. I could eat a whole box of bonbons in one sitting.”

  “They sound delicious!” said Andrea Young, a girl with curly brown hair. She was sitting up real straight in the front of the class with her hands folded like they were attached to each other.

  Miss Daisy seemed like a pretty cool lady, for a teacher. Anybody who hated school and liked to sit around watching TV and eating chocolate treats was okay by me.

  Me and Miss Daisy had a lot in common. Maybe going to school wouldn’t be so terrible after all.

  2

  Dumb Miss Daisy and Principal Klutz

  Miss Daisy said it was time for us to clear off our desks and see how much we knew about arithmetic.

  Ugh!

  “If I gave you fifty-eight apples and Principal Klutz took twenty-eight of them away,” Miss Daisy asked, “how many apples would you have left? A.J.?”

  “Who cares how many apples you would have left?” I said. “I hate apples. If you ask me, you and Principal Klutz can take all the apples away and it wouldn’t bother me one bit.”

  “You would have thirty apples,” said that girl Andrea Young in the front of the class. She had a big smile on her face, like she had just opened all her birthday presents. Andrea Young thinks she’s so smart.

  “I hate arithmetic,” I announced.

  “You know what?” Miss Daisy said. “I hate arithmetic too!”

  “You do?” we all said.

  “Sure! I don’t even know what you get if you multiply four times four.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I have no idea,” Miss Daisy said, scratching her head and wrinkling up her forehead like she was trying to figure it out. “Maybe one of you kids can explain it to me?”

  Boy, Miss Daisy was really dumb! Even I know what you get when you multiply four times four. But that smarty-pants-I-know-everything-girl Andrea Young beat me to it and got called on first.

  “If you put four crayons in a row,” she told Miss Daisy as she put a bunch of crayons on the top of her desk, “and you make four rows of four crayons, you’ll have sixteen crayons. See?” Then she counted the crayons from one to sixteen.

  Miss Daisy looked at the crayons on Andrea’s desk. She had a puzzled look on her face.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” she said. “Can somebody else explain it to me?”

  Michael Robinson, this kid wearing a red T-shirt with a dirt bike on it, explained four times four again, using pencils. He had sixteen pencils on his desk, in four rows of four pencils. Miss Daisy still had a look on her face like she didn’t understand.

  “What would happen if you subtracted half of the pencils?” she asked.

  Michael took away two of the rows of pencils and put them in his pencil box.

  “Then you would have eight pencils!” we all said.

  Andrea Young added, “Half of sixteen is eight.”

  Miss Daisy wrinkled up her forehead until it was almost like an accordion. She still didn’t get it!

  She started counting the pencils on Michael’s desk out loud and using her fingers. She got it all wrong. We gathered around Michael’s desk and tried to explain to Miss Daisy how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers using the pencils.

  Nothing worked. Miss Daisy had to be the dumbest teacher in the history of the world! No matter how many times we tried to explain, she kept shaking her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It will take me a while to understand arithmetic. Maybe you can explain it to me more tomorrow. For now we have to clean off our desks because Principal Klutz is going to come in and talk to us.”

  I know all about principals. My friend Billy from around the corner, who was in second grade last year, told me that the principal is like the king of the school. He runs everything.

  Billy says that if you break the rules, you have to go to the principal’s office, which is in a dungeon down in the basement. Kids in the dungeon get locked up and are forced to listen to their parents’ old CDs for hours. It must be horrible.

  Miss Daisy told us to be on our best behavior so Principal Klutz would see how mature we were. Finally he walked into our room.

  “Welcome to the second grade,” he said cheerfully. “I’m sure we are all going to have a wonderful year together.”

  Principal Klutz said a lot of stuff about the rules of the school. We’re not allowed to run in the halls, and we’re not allowed to chew gum. Stuff like that.

  But I wasn’t listening very closely because I kept staring at his head. He had no hair at all! I mean none! His head looked like a giant egg.

  When Principal Klutz was all done telling us the rules of the school, he asked if anybody had any questions about what he had said.

  “Did all your hair fall out of your head,” I asked, “or did you cut it off?” Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny. Miss Daisy looked at me with a mean face.

  “Actually, it was both,” Principal Klutz replied with a chuckle. “Almost all of my hair fell out on its own, so I decided to shave the rest of it off.”

  “That’s the saddest story I ever heard!” said this girl named Emily, and she burst into tears.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Principal Klutz said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  “How?” sniffled Emily.

  “Well, at least my brain didn’t fall out of my head!”

  We all laughed, even Emily. Principal Klutz was a pretty funny guy, for a principal.

  “Any other questions?”

  “Do you have a dungeon down in the basement where you put the bad kids?” I asked.

  “Actually, the dungeon is on the third floor,” Principal Klutz replied.

  Nobody laughed this time. He quickly told us that he was just making a joke and that he didn’t even have a dungeon at all.

  Principal Klutz must have felt bad that we didn’t think his joke was funny, because he invited us all up to the front of the room to touch his bald head.

  We did, and that made everybody feel a lot better.

  Principal Klutz seemed nice, but a lot of people seem nice when you first meet them. Then later you find out that they are evil villains who plan to take over the world.

  I bet he was lying about the dungeon.

  3

  How to Spell Read

  Before school started, my mother told me that second grade was the most interesting grade because this was the year that I would be able to read chapter books all by myself. I already knew how to read, even though I had tried very hard not to learn.

  You see, my friend Billy told me that you really don’t have to know how to read. Billy says that when you grow up and make lots of money, you can pay people
to read for you. That sounded good to me.

  “I hate reading,” I announced when Miss Daisy passed out some spelling worksheets.

  “Me too!” agreed Miss Daisy.

  “You do?” we all asked.

  “Yup,” she said. “I can’t read a word.”

  “You can’t?”

  “Nope.”

  “You can’t even spell the word read?” Michael Robinson asked.

  “I don’t have a clue,” she said, scratching her head the same way she did when she told us she didn’t know how to multiply four times four.

  “Just sound it out, Miss Daisy!” Andrea suggested.

  “R-e-e-d?” Miss Daisy said.

  “No!” we all shouted.

  “I give up,” she said. “Do any of you know how to spell the word read?”

  “R-e-a-d,” we all chanted.

  “Wow! I didn’t know that!” marveled Miss Daisy. “You have taught me a lot today.”

  “How did you get to teach second grade if you don’t even know how to spell read?” asked Ryan.

  “Well, I figured that second graders don’t know how to spell very well, so it wouldn’t matter whether or not I could spell.”

  “I know how to spell lots of hard words,” Andrea Young announced.

  “Me too,” everybody else said.

  “Really?” Miss Daisy said. “Like what?”

  Everybody started shouting out words and how to spell them, but Miss Daisy stopped us and made us take turns. She had each of us go up to the chalkboard and write three words we knew.

  I wrote tonight, writing, and McDonald’s.

  By the time we were done, the whole chalkboard was filled with words. There wasn’t even any room left for more.

  “Wow!” Miss Daisy said. “You kids have taught me so much this morning. I’m really glad I decided to become a teacher.”

  4

  Miss Daisy Is Crazy!

  In the lunchroom I opened my lunchbox and saw that my mom had packed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I traded it with Michael Robinson for his potato chips. Everybody was talking about Miss Daisy.

  “Miss Daisy is crazy,” Ryan said.

  “She’s the weirdest teacher I ever had,” said Emily. “She can’t read, she can’t write, and she can’t even do arithmetic. What kind of a teacher is that?”

  “A bad one,” I said.

  “Hey, I just thought of something,” Michael Robinson was able to say even though his mouth was filled with peanut butter. “Do you think that maybe Miss Daisy isn’t really a teacher at all?”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

  “Maybe she’s an impostor,” said Andrea.

  “An impostor? What’s that?” I asked. “Somebody who imposts?”

  “No, silly. An impostor is somebody who pretends to be somebody else,” Andrea explained. “She might be a fake teacher.”

  “Maybe Miss Daisy is really a jewel thief or a bank robber,” I guessed. “Maybe she snuck into the school and is hiding so the police won’t catch her.”

  “I think you’re the one who’s crazy.” Andrea giggled, choking on her milk.

  But what if Miss Daisy was a bank robber? Or she could be a horse thief or a cattle rustler or somebody who parks where there is a yellow line on the curb. My head was starting to fill with all kinds of awful things Miss Daisy could be.

  “Maybe Miss Daisy kidnapped our real teacher and is holding her for ransom!” I suggested.

  “Wow, you think so?” Emily asked, looking all scared.

  “What’s ransom?” asked Ryan.

  “My mom tells me I’m handsome,” Michael Robinson claimed.

  “Not handsome! Ransom!” said Andrea. “I don’t know what it is, but whenever somebody is kidnapped, they get held for it.”

  “In cartoons people who get kidnapped are always tied up to railroad tracks,” I reminded everybody. “Maybe our real teacher is tied up to some railroad tracks right now!”

  “We’ve got to save her!” said Emily, and she went running out of the lunchroom.

  “Wait a minute,” said Michael Robinson. “That doesn’t make sense. If Miss Daisy can’t even read or do arithmetic, how is she going to be able to kidnap a teacher and tie her to railroad tracks?”

  “She doesn’t look like a kidnapper to me,” Ryan said.

  “We should tell Principal Klutz,” said Andrea. “He’ll know what to do.”

  “No!” I shouted. “Don’t you see how good we have it? If we tell Principal Klutz how dumb Miss Daisy is, he will fire her and replace her with a real teacher. A real teacher who knows reading and writing and arithmetic. We’ll have to learn all that stuff. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “No way!” said Michael Robinson.

  “I don’t care if she is an impostor or a bank robber or a kidnapper,” I said. “I like her. I say we keep her.”

  “Me too,” Michael Robinson agreed. “I think she’s cool.”

  “Okay, let’s not tell anybody,” I said. “It will be our little secret.”

  We all agreed. Our lips would be sealed. But not sealed with glue or anything. That would be gross.

  5

  The Most Genius Idea!

  After lunch we had recess, which means we get to go out in the playground and run around. Miss Daisy said we needed to burn off energy.

  “Now this is more my style,” I announced when we got outside. I made a beeline for the monkey bars. Then me and some other kids hit the swings.

  After that all the boys had a contest to see who could spin around in circles the longest without throwing up. Michael Robinson won. Then we all sat down on the grass.

  Even though Miss Daisy was pretty cool, we all agreed that we hated school. We made a promise to one another that we would hate school forever, even if we changed our minds and decided that we liked school.

  That’s when Ryan came up with the most genius idea in the history of the world.

  This was his idea: We should buy the school.

  Ryan told us that his father worked for this big company and that once his father’s company bought some other company just like you would go into a store and buy a candy bar. Ryan said it happens all the time. He said he didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t buy the school just like that.

  “If we bought the school, what would we do with it?” Michael Robinson asked.

  “We could do anything we want with it. We’d own it.”

  “Could we turn it into a video-game arcade?” I asked.

  “Sure, why not? Instead of teaching reading and writing and arithmetic, we could teach kids how to play video games.”

  “And we could ride skateboards in the hallways?” asked Michael Robinson.

  “Sure we could,” Ryan said, “if we owned it.”

  I got all excited, because if there’s one thing that I like to do almost as much as playing football, it’s playing video games. Oh, and riding skateboards. I started emptying out my pockets. I had a nickel, three pennies, and a LifeSaver. The other boys emptied their pockets too. We separated all the pennies, nickels, and dimes into little piles. Then we added up all the money. We had one dollar and thirty-two cents.

  “Wow!” Michael Robinson said. “That’s a lot of money!”

  “I don’t think it’s enough to buy a school,” said Ryan, who knew a thing or two about financial matters because his father worked for this big company.

  “Well, how much do you need to buy a school?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” said Ryan. “We’d better ask Miss Daisy.”

  We all rushed inside after recess and asked Miss Daisy how much it would cost to buy the school.

  “Gee, I don’t know,” said Miss Daisy, who didn’t seem to know much of anything. “Why do you want to buy the school?”