The superteacher project, p.2
The Superteacher Project, page 2
“The numbers are different, but the ratio is the same,” I explain.
He makes a face. “Mr. Aidact told me it couldn’t be simpler. Yes, it could. Like if I understood it!”
“Why is Mr. Aidact teaching math, anyway?” Ainsley puts in. “He’s a social studies teacher. I have him for American History 101.”
“Really?” Kevin is surprised. “I have him for English and gym.”
“He’s in the art department too,” adds Laki Heathwood. “And he teaches French on the side.”
“Wow.” I’m impressed. “I’ve heard of teachers covering a couple of subjects, but never all of them. He’s like a superteacher.”
“Seems to me he isn’t any kind of teacher if he can’t explain ratios,” Nathan grumbles. “And don’t even get me started on probability. What’s up with that?”
“You guys are missing the point,” Oliver announces in that superior tone of his. “The real problem with Mr. Aidact is he has no sense of humor. Has anybody seen him crack a smile even once since he got here?”
I can’t resist. “Well, obviously, he doesn’t smile around you. People don’t usually feel like smiling when someone has just tried to put a giant spitball through the back of their skull.”
“Seriously,” he insists, “if you don’t ever find anything funny, how smart can you be?”
“You mean throwing a computer fan into the girls’ bathroom like it’s a grenade?” I ask savagely.
He doesn’t have the decency to be embarrassed. “Every single minute, the world around us is filled with things to laugh at. You just have to have the brains to notice it.”
“Maybe Mr. Aidact doesn’t consider education one big comedy routine,” I counter.
“Are you kidding? This school is a gold mine for stuff to make fun of. Have you ever read the Code of Student Behavior? There’s an actual rule in the handbook that says you’re not allowed to ride a Big Wheel down the hall. You know—those toy bikes for six-year-olds. Like anybody here could even fit on one!”
Kevin snaps his fingers. “I heard about that. Supposedly, it all started back when Brightling was an elementary school. Some kid brought his Big Wheel for show-and-tell and bowled an entire kindergarten class down the stairs. That’s why they made a rule against it.”
“And it made sense—back then,” Oliver concludes. “But this place has been a middle school for how long? Fifty years? And it’s still right there in the handbook.”
“Okay, fine,” I say impatiently. “We’ve got one dumb rule. So what?”
“So every time Principal Candiotti lectures us on where we can’t use our phones or why we shouldn’t run on the stairs or how gum chewing is a big no-no,” he explains earnestly, like he’s making a speech, “I think about that rule and I laugh inside. Because if the rules are so important, why didn’t she bother to take that old one out?”
“I like Principal Candiotti,” I retort. “She went to middle school right here, like us. She was captain of the last Brightling Bobcats field hockey team to win a state championship.”
That trophy still holds a place of honor in our school, on a special pedestal in the main hallway. And, sure, it isn’t football or basketball or one of those other sports people make a big deal out of. But it’s nice to have something to be proud of. “Every time I pass that trophy, it makes me feel good to go to Brightling.”
“Candiotti’s a little nuts about that trophy, though,” Kevin puts in. “I touched it once and got a week’s detentions for ‘finger marks.’”
“Hi, honey!” A singsongy voice rings out across the cafeteria.
Uh-oh. I forgot Mom was going to be at school today. She flits across the lunchroom, a little tilted to one side by the weight of the giant shopping bag looped over her left arm. She takes a seat on the bench beside me and delivers a peck to my check. “Don’t mind me. Don’t let me disturb you and your friends.”
I hate to tell her this, but she’s already disturbed me and my friends. Ever since Mom and Dad split, she’s been throwing herself 110 percent into her role as PTA president. That means she spends more time at school than I do, and maybe even more than the principal.
“Hi, Mom.” I keep my attention laser-focused across the table on the empty space between Ainsley and Nathan. If you meet her eyes, that only encourages her.
“Hi,” she says again, and rustles the paper of the shopping bag.
Now I’m supposed to ask what’s in the bag. I keep my lips clamped shut. I love my mother, but when she stalks me in the cafeteria—which happens almost every day that ends in Y—it drives me around the bend.
“What’s in the bag, Mrs. Arnette?” Oliver pipes up.
Thanks a lot, friend.
She beams. “Great news—the Halloween dance is back on. This is what we’re going to sell to raise the money.”
She reaches in and pulls out what, at first glance, looks like a candy bar. That’s until you read the label: FLAXPLOSION.
Nathan frowns. “Flax?”
“Halloween has a bad rap these days, with all the emphasis on candy and sugar,” my mother explains. “This is healthier.”
“But it tastes like vacuum cleaner fuzz!” I protest. “Nobody’s going to buy these!” And when kids get thrown out of every house in town for trying to sell birdseed bars, they’re going to remember whose mother is the president of the PTA.
“Great idea, Mrs. Arnette,” Oliver exclaims with an infuriating wink in my direction. “Hey, speaking of PTA stuff, what do you think about Rule 24-B in the student handbook?”
Mom looks blank. “Is that the one about nut-free tables in the lunchroom?”
“It’s the one about no Big Wheels,” Nathan supplies.
“Big Wheels.” Mom looks puzzled. “That doesn’t sound like a sensible rule for a middle school. Tell you what—I’ll bring it up at the next PTA meeting.” She stands, depositing a second peck on my cheek.
“Don’t forget your flax,” Kevin puts in helpfully.
“You mean your flax,” she says cheerfully. “You’re the ones who’ll be selling the bars.”
Don’t remind me.
“By the way,” Mom goes on, “I finally met your homeroom teacher, Mr. Aidact. I tried to shake his hand, but he was holding the door and he wouldn’t let go of this gigantic briefcase.”
“I think you’re talking about Mr. Perkins,” I tell her. “He’s the student teacher. Mr. Aidact is the younger one.”
“Really!” she exclaims in surprise. And then again: “Really!”
The last time I saw that look on my mother’s face, it was the day she found out there was an opening for president of the PTA.
3
Nathan Popova
Seems to me our school has the neediest guidance department in the whole state. It’s not like the high school, where everybody’s lining up to get help with college applications and summer internships and fancy stuff like that. Here in middle school, you go to guidance only to complain about a class. And nobody wants to do that, because if you tick off your teacher, it only makes things worse.
But something has to give with math and me, and that’s why I finally go to see Mrs. Rostenkowski.
“Nathan!” she exclaims when I poke my head in the door. “Wonderful to see you! Come in, come in! Have a Jolly Rancher!”
She sits me down in a padded leather chair. Guidance always has the most comfortable chairs in the whole school, barely even sat in. “I can’t understand my math teacher,” I mumble around my candy. “And when I go to extra help, he explains everything the same way, and I can’t understand that either.”
“And have you brought this up in homeroom?” Mrs. Rostenkowski asks.
“I can’t,” I explain. “My homeroom teacher and my math teacher are the same person.”
“I understand,” she says sympathetically. “I’m happy to bring up the subject with your teacher. Who is . . . ?”
“Mr. Aidact,” I supply.
Maybe it’s just me, but I swear she goes white as a ghost. “Mr. Aidact,” she repeats.
I nod. “The new guy.”
She isn’t pale anymore. Suddenly, her cheeks are bright red, like she’s blushing. “Have you, by any chance, mentioned this to Mr. Perkins?”
“The student teacher? Why?”
“Oh—no reason. Never mind.” She’s obviously flustered about something. I don’t know why. She’s not the one flunking math.
She shoves another Jolly Rancher into my hands and promises to take care of everything. And sure enough, at lunch that day, I see her in the special faculty line in the cafeteria. She’s standing with Mr. Aidact, speaking forcefully, with hand gestures. But she’s got her back turned to him, and she’s talking to Mr. Perkins! What’s up with that? He isn’t even a real teacher yet.
He’s barely a student teacher. Oliver has English with Mrs. Berg, and he says her student teacher, Miss Alito, takes over the class all the time. Not Perkins. The only time he ever opens his mouth is at lunch, when he’s Hoovering down food as fast as he can shovel it in. He should take a lesson from Mr. Aidact, who skips lunch, as far as I can tell. Either that, or he brown-bags it—but I’ve never seen him with a lunch bag either. Not even a coffee cup or a bottle of water.
I go to math extra help after school again and find Mr. Aidact waiting for me. He sets the other kids working on some practice questions and turns his full attention on me. I feel my eyes glazing over as he tries to explain ratios—if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was using exactly the same words as last time and the time before that. When he’s done, I honestly feel worse for him than I do for myself. Because maybe the problem isn’t his teaching; it’s my learning.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Aidact,” I say, shamefaced. “It’s not you; it’s me. I’m just never going to understand this stuff.”
He looks at me for a long time—and that’s a big deal when you’re talking about Mr. Aidact. When he looks at you, his gaze doesn’t move a millimeter. It’s like his eyes are twin blue lasers boring into your head.
And it doesn’t help that, from the other side of the room, Perkins is watching too, scribbling in his notebook. I can picture the opening line of his student teaching report: I witnessed the dumbest kid in the history of math today. . . .
Finally, Mr. Aidact replies, “Tell me what you do understand.”
“I understand at the start of class where you say, ‘Good morning,’” I admit. “After that everything’s a blur. I know that ten-to-five and two-to-one are the same ratio, but I don’t know why. How can ten”—I hold up both hands—“be the same as two?” Two fingers.
He stares at me again. “You’re using your fingers to visualize the numbers.”
I shrug sadly. “Too bad we can’t cut them off and spread them out on a desk.”
“Too bad,” he agrees without even smiling. “But I think we can find a substitute.”
He strides to the window and rips down an entire venetian blind, sending brackets and hardware flying. The other kids jump out of their seats, shocked. The notebook drops out of his student teacher’s hands and hits the floor.
Mr. Aidact doesn’t seem to notice. He rips the slats out of the ruined blind and slams them on the tabletop in front of us. “We’ll make two piles. And the ratio between them will be two-to-one. For every two pieces on the left, we’ll add one to the right.”
Well, who am I to say no? Not only is Mr. Aidact a teacher, but he’s just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s bananas.
So I do as I’m told, adding two slats to the left for every one to the right. By this time, we have everybody’s undivided attention. There are even a few random kids looking on from the doorway.
“Stop!” Mr. Aidact barks suddenly, holding out his hand like a policeman halting traffic. “Now, count the piles.”
I do. There are ten slats in the pile on the left and five in the one on the right. By dividing the pieces in a two-to-one ratio, I ended up at ten-to-five. Amazing!
“What’s going on?” Mr. Benrahma, the custodian, pushes through the crowd and stands gaping at the naked window and the wreckage of the blind on the table. “What happened here?”
I have the answer to that. We trashed a classroom.
But it’s a small price to pay because I finally understand ratios.
4
Oliver Zahn
The prank kicks in during the change between fourth and fifth periods.
Kids rush to lockers and classes and the lunchroom. The sound is a buzz of voices, shuffling feet, and slamming metal doors. The halls go from nearly empty to packed in the space of a second or two. It’s something that happens in overcrowded middle schools eight or nine times a day.
The first sign that something is different about this particular class change comes when the volume goes up, way up. The noise swells into cries of alarm and, finally, an earsplitting scream. The bodies that were milling in all directions start to move in one direction—and pick up speed. Pretty soon it’s a full-blown stampede, with students tripping over fallen books and backpacks and slamming into the rows of lockers that line the hall.
Agitated voices ring out.
“What is it?”
“It’s a rat!”
“It’s a squirrel!”
“An escaped hamster!”
It’s enough to make any rule-wrecker swell up with pride.
From that undulating forest of wildly scrambling legs darts the toy car—the cheap kind you can get for $7.99 at any mall. It’s lightning quick and programmed so it always heads for open space, avoiding all obstructions. In other words, it could keep speeding around the hallways of a school forever—or at least until its battery charge runs out. Across the chassis, the number 2 has been drawn in fluorescent blue paint.
Number 2? I’m impressed. Nathan released number 2 clear on the opposite end of the building, next to the library. How did it make it all the way over here so soon? Man, these things are even faster than I thought!
The agitated crowd calms down a little as the car slaloms past my feet, rounds the corner, and disappears. A split second later, it’s back again. No, wait. That’s a different one—number 4. I unleashed 1 and 4 in opposite directions in front of the science lab. I try to picture the route it must have taken to get here. These cars are unstoppable—the best eight bucks anybody ever spent.
Number 4 zooms up the hall, herding all those kids back in the direction they just came from. There’s even more screaming.
“It’s a mouse!”
“A raccoon!”
“A baby alligator!” Okay, that was me. I get creative when a prank is firing on all cylinders.
By now teachers are starting to appear in the halls, desperately trying to get their students under control. Fat chance of that. Who’s going to follow instructions if you think you’re being chased by an alligator?
In the foyer outside the main office, Principal Candiotti rushes to protect the pedestal that supports the school’s beloved 1974 girls’ field hockey trophy from the rampaging horde.
“Everybody calm down!” she bellows. “There’s no alligator in the school!”
“It’s not an alligator, it’s a car!” someone blurts.
“How could it be a car?” the principal demands.
I guess if you’ve got a whole rule against Big Wheels, a car is a definite no-no.
At that moment, Coach Gilderoy approaches her, carrying a lacrosse stick. Nestled in the webbing is car number 1, its wheels still spinning.
Nathan appears at my elbow, his face an unhealthy shade of purple. “We are so dead,” he whispers.
“You’re only dead if you get caught,” I lecture him. “Quit looking guilty and they’ll never pin it on us.”
Eventually, Mrs. Candiotti gets on the PA system and orders everybody to go to homeroom and shut the door. As we’re filing into Mr. Aidact’s class, we see Mr. Benrahma, the custodian, marching toward the office, holding car number 4 high over his head in triumph.
“What’s going on, Mr. Aidact?” Kevin asks.
Leave it to him to have no idea about a stunt that’s turned the whole school on its head.
“I honestly can’t explain it,” the teacher replies. “What purpose could possibly be served by running toy cars through hallways crowded with pupils? It creates nothing but chaos and danger.”
I know I ought to keep my mouth shut. But he seems so truly clueless that I feel like I have to set him straight. “It’s a prank, Mr. Aidact.”
Nathan stares at me in horror. The first rule of pranking is never draw attention to yourself. I’m usually the one telling him that.
Mr. Aidact tilts his head to one side, as if he’s trying to drain water out of a swimmer’s ear.
“You know,” I go on. “Like a joke.”
“A joke,” he repeats. “An action that is intended to be amusing or to make someone look foolish.”
“Right.” Somehow, hearing him explain it takes most of the fun out of it.
All at once, the teacher stiffens like a pointer and holds up his hands for silence. He drops to the floor, pressing his ear against the tiles.
“What is it, Mr. Aidact?” Ainsley asks.
In a single catlike motion, he jumps up and propels himself out the door and into the hall. Sensing its path blocked, car number 2 adjusts course to pass directly between the new teacher’s legs. At the last second, Mr. Aidact throws out an arm, bends backward almost double, and plucks the speeding toy up off the floor.
The entire class bursts into applause.
“Now we just have to find car number three,” Rosalie announces.
Oh, how I was hoping somebody would say that!
Here’s the thing: there is no car number 3.
On the surface, the toy cars seem like the joke, but they’re just the setup. The real prank is having the whole school looking for car number 3—which they’re never going to find because it doesn’t exist.
For the rest of the day, adults wander the halls, searching for the missing car—teachers, administrators, custodians. At one point I see a couple of police officers and even the local fire chief.
