by Janice Repka
Mindy slammed her book closed and tossed it in her backpack.
“What are you doing?”
She headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the principal’s office. I figured I might as well save you the trouble of sending me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Aren’t you giving me detention for yesterday?”
“Detention?” I almost laughed. “I should give you a medal. That was the smartest thing anyone ever said to me.”
Her face went blank.
“Seriously,” I added.
The whole class stared as Mindy slipped back into her seat.
“Logic dictates that when an approach to a problem doesn’t work, it should be abandoned.” Then I realized I was doing it, explaining things in a way that wasn’t getting through. “We’ve gotten off to a bad start, and I’d like to begin again. But this time, I’d like you to tell me what math concepts you want to learn.”
“You’re asking us what to teach?” said Roland.
I nodded, and the room fell quiet for what felt like a millennium. Finally, Roland folded his arms and pursed his lips. “Fractions,” he said. “Multiplying and dividing them.”
I wrote the word fractions, being careful to continue facing the class so I could tell if anyone was losing interest. “What else?”
It was like I had turned on a faucet. First their requests came in drips, then streams, and then a torrent: fractions and decimals, ratios, positive and negative numbers, square roots, number lines, orders of operation, and perimeters and circumferences. By the end of the class, the lower section of the blackboard was covered, and I had to drag the stool over to add things on top. The stool tooted away, but the students were so busy yelling out things for me to add they acted like they didn’t hear it. Finally, I jumped down.
“Professor Wigglesmith?” It was Eugenia. She lowered her hand. “Isn’t that an awful lot of things to learn? I mean, for us you-know-whats?”
“She means boneheads,” Mindy said. “That’s what they call us.”
“Who calls you that?” I asked.
“Everyone,” said Roland.
I’d never even heard the expression before. “Why?”
“Because we’re stupid,” said Roland. “This class will never learn all that stuff. Not the morons you have in here.” To illustrate his point, he scratched his head with his right hand and under his arm with his left while making monkey sounds. A couple of the other students made jungle noises, too, apparently to demonstrate their agreement.
“Shut up,” Adam yelled. “Some of us want to pass this class.”
Mindy ripped a page out of her math book, crinkled it into a ball, and threw it at Roland. “Yeah, keep your mouth shut. Some of us need to pass this class.”
Roland blew bad breath in her direction. “What you gonna do about it? Hit me with a pom-pom?”
“Twirlers don’t use pom-poms, you idiot. We use batons.”
While students insulted one another, I erased the board and, in the precise spot I knew was best, wrote “11.” Then I waited for silence. “Who knows what this is?” I asked.
“We’re dumb, but we’re not that dumb,” said Salvador, adjusting his glasses. “It’s the number eleven. So what?”
“Eleven is how old Winston Churchill was when he failed sixth grade. Did he give up on himself? No. He went on to become a great leader and the prime minister of the United Kingdom.” Then I wrote “10” on the board. “In tenth grade, Michael Jordan is reputed to have failed to win a spot on his high school’s basketball team. Did he question his athletic ability and accept failure? He wouldn’t have become the greatest basketball player of all time if he had. The history and record books are full of people whose ability in their youth was doubted. They had to believe in themselves to succeed.”
I clapped the chalk dust off my hand, satisfied, and the bell rang. Roland was the first to move. His chair lifted off the ground with him. The other students also tried to get up, but their chairs were glued to their butts as well.
“I took the liberty,” I explained, “of applying special temporary glue to your chairs before class began.”
“You did what?” asked Salvador, pushing against his chair in vain.
“I wanted to make sure you would sit and listen to me. But there’s no cause for concern. The glue lasts only fifty minutes.” I checked my watch. “It should wear off in twenty-three seconds.”
The scene dissolved into a twisted version of musical chairs as students hopped around with chairs stuck to their rears.
“It’s not coming off,” LeeAnn complained.
I counted down. “Sixteen seconds, fifteen seconds.”
“This is ridiculous,” Hunter said, searching his overstuffed backpack for something to pry loose his seat.
“Twelve seconds, eleven seconds.”
Mindy was the only student who could stand. She looked confused.
“I didn’t think it necessary to get your attention,” I told her.
“No fair,” said Keisha as she tried to wrench the chair from Eugenia’s tush.
I expected Mindy to be pleased, but she just shook her head and left. “Five, four, three, two, one.”
As we waited for the chairs to drop, the room fell silent. The late bell rang and the room erupted in complaints again. It was then that I checked the glue bottle and realized I had misread the glue’s holding time. It was five hundred minutes.
8
Mindy Wows Them in the Alley
A lot of the kids were totally ticked about having chairs stuck to their butts at first, but then word spread and everyone was talking about it and they were like celebrities. It helped that the glue was just stuck to their clothes and not their skin so they could hop to the bathroom, squirm out, and change into clothes from the Lost and Found. When Principal DeGuy found out what had happened, he said it was an “innovative teaching strategy” and called Professor Wigglesmith brilliant. Can you believe that? I would have been in detention for a month if I had pulled a “brilliant” stunt like that.
The next day, in math class, Professor Wigglesmith promised not to do it again and said she hoped we could put the incident “behind” us, but among the students you could tell something had changed. There’s a kind of weird respect you get for pranking, and we all realized we had witnessed the most awesome teacher prank ever at Carnegie Middle School. It may sound dumb, but knowing your teacher could spring such a trick made class more exciting. What could be next?
Professor Wigglesmith started giving us daily pep talks. She said, “We are all born with intelligence, but use only a small fraction of our potential. That means some of it is sitting there going to waste. All you have to do is use it.” Then she wrote the symbol for infinity. “This is what you are—potential,” she told us. “Not boneheads. From now on, you should treat yourselves, and one another, with respect for your potential.”
That was the day she gave out the honorary degrees. Maybe it was because she had just made a mistake in front of all of us, or maybe it was something she had planned all along, but she pulled out a stack of fake “diplomas” and made each one of us come up. Then she read a bunch of gobbledygook that I think was Latin. She said that since she had just as much to learn as we did, from now on she was going to call each of us professor, too.
“What am I a professor of?” I asked as she handed me a scroll.
She said, “You are a Professor of Unlimited Potential, Professor Loft.”
You could tell that most of the kids thought it was really cool, and right away they started calling one another Professor this and Professor that, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. In my whole life, nobody had ever called me smart. Let’s face it; some girls are not destined to be rocket scientists. I was descended from a particularly long line of total scatterbrains.
“If my eyes weren’t glued to their sockets, I’d forget where I left them,” my grandma Lucy always says. Onc
e she volunteered to help decorate my elementary school for a reading festival. She was in charge of hanging pictures of fictional characters in the cafeteria, but instead of using removable tape, she used superglue, so when the festival was over, the parts where she had used the most glue wouldn’t come off. Even today, you still can see the Cat in the Hat’s head hanging over the salad bar, the Queen of Hearts’ left arm near the juice machine, and Wilbur the Pig’s rump over the cashier station.
And Grandma Lucy’s reputation was nothing compared to my mom’s, whose mix-ups are really legend. Once Mom needed to buy new hair rollers for the beauty shop, so she went onto eBay and bid on what she thought was a lot of 1,200 French curlers but was actually 1,200 French crullers. Turns out, a cruller is a type of doughnut. A week later, a bakery truck appeared with one hundred boxes of them. Do you know how hard it is to use up 1,200 doughnuts? We gave a free doughnut away for every inch of hair cut and every fingernail painted. We even strung them on a line and hung them on a sign that said: “If your hair is in a rut, try our homemade shampoo à la doughnut.” Then someone called the Department of Health on us and the police came and took all the doughnuts and we never saw the police or the doughnuts again. Even today, when people in town do something stupid you can sometimes hear them say they’re having a “doughnut moment” in honor of my mom.
Anyway, to make a short story long, after I confronted her in the bathroom and she decided to pay more attention to teaching us the basics, Professor Wigglesmith went into overdrive with her lesson plans. On Mondays, she would teach a concept, and the next day we would do reinforcement exercises. On Wednesdays, she would give a pretest, and on Thursdays the students who had scored highest on the pretest would be assigned as “peer mentors” to help the others. Friday would be another test, and the Student-Teacher of the Week would win a free homework pass.
Students who didn’t get a least a C on the test would be put on a list for home tutoring, which Professor Wigglesmith herself would do. Three weeks passed, and a lot of the kids were bragging about how their stupid grades were improving and how the system seemed to be working. But when I checked the home tutoring list, my name appeared again for the third week in a row.
That evening, my plan was to zip through my dumb science homework fast as I could. I would leave math for last, since Professor Wigglesmith was coming over at 7:30 p.m. to torture—I mean tutor—me. At 7:15, the doorbell buzzed like someone was holding it down. I thought it was rude of Professor Wigglesmith to lean on it and I was going to tell her, so I flung open the door.
“Hey, girl,” Veronica, Jordeen, and Summer chirped in unison. The three had been my closest friends since forever, and were so inseparable that people often called them “The VJs.” When we hung out, people called us “VJs & M,” sort of like “PB & J.”
“Our moms are getting their nails done and they gave us twenty bucks to get lost,” Summer said. “You want to hang out? They changed the display at the Shoe Palace. You know what that means.”
“New shoes!” the other girls chimed.
“I am so totally with you,” I told them. I was grabbing my coat when I saw it: my math book. I felt so low, I practically crawled to the door. “I can’t. Miss Math Genius is coming to tutor me.”
“I’m so glad I’m not a bonehead like you,” said Veronica.
I almost said we don’t call one another boneheads anymore, but then I remembered that was just in Professor Wigglesmith’s class. To the rest of the school we were still boneheads. When my friends made a comment about my crappy grades, I always pretended it was funny and laughed about it. That way they wouldn’t know it bothered me.
“It’s bad enough you have to take remedial math,” Veronica continued, “but to have to take it with that nerd teaching! She’s so lame.”
“Ditto,” said Summer. “I’ve heard her talking when I walk past her classroom. She’s always ‘infinity this’ and ‘potential that.’ And every time she climbs on that stool, she farts.”
I wanted to tell Summer that the stool only makes that sound because Roland took out a couple of screws and slipped in a whoopee cushion to mess with her, like he does for all the substitutes, but I didn’t want them to think I was trying to defend Professor Wigglesmith.
Veronica flipped a strand of her copper-highlighted hair and laughed. “Plus she’s got a funny voice, like, I don’t know, tin or something. And she’s so stiff about things—”
“Wait. I can do an impression of her,” said Jordeen. “Okay, I’m Wigglesmith on a date.” She made her voice sound like a robot. “Excuse me, young man. It would give me pleasure if you would relocate the fleshy folds surrounding your mouth to the fleshy folds surrounding my mouth.”
It sounded so much like the kind of clueless thing Professor Wigglesmith might actually say, I laughed a little even though it felt wrong.
“Like Wigglesmith would ever have a date,” said Veronica. “Who would want to get close to that weirdo?”
“Excuse me,” said a soft voice. “I have a 7:30 appointment with Professor Loft.” Professor Wigglesmith stepped forward. She was wearing dark pink pants and a pastel pink jacket, and was carrying a bulging black leather briefcase.
Veronica, Summer, and Jordeen turned and clomped down the steps before I could even think of a way to explain the “Professor Loft” thing without it sounding stupid. I wasn’t sure if Professor Wigglesmith’s face had turned pink because she had overheard us or if it was just part of her monochromatic outfit.
After the girls left and Professor Wigglesmith and I got settled inside, Mom brought a tray of tea and cookies into the living room. I picked up a chocolate chip cookie and nibbled around the edges, trying my best not to notice that Professor Wigglesmith looked like the victim of an explosion at a pink paint factory. It was strange, because when she taught she wore gray suits all the time. Now here she was in a getup that made her look like a giant pink hot dog waiting for a bun. You’d think she’d know better than to dress like Oscar Mayer when she’s trying to get a bonehead—I mean “Professor Bonehead”—like me to take her seriously.
“No offense,” I said, “but can I ask you a question? I mean, do you think you look good in that outfit?”
She examined her clothes like she was looking for a stain.
I rolled my eyes. “I mean, the whole thing is just so . . . so . . . pink.”
“It’s my favorite color,” she explained.
“That doesn’t mean you need to wrap yourself in it from head to toe. You look like a piece of bubblegum stuck in a cotton candy machine.”
She gave me one of those polite half smiles that aren’t really smiles at all, and I felt a little bad about leveling with her. That’s when I noticed I was wearing a blue T-shirt with my blue jeans. Of course, in my case, the single-color thing was just a coincidence. I didn’t know how to explain why it looked cool when I did it by accident but weird when she did it on purpose, so I decided to ask her another question. I picked at my cookie. “So, do you really believe that stuff about none of us being dumb?”
“Why else would I say it?” She broke her cookie into four equal bites. “I’ve looked at your tests. The longer you do a particular type of problem, the more you get wrong.”
“So I am stupid.”
“No. Making mistakes doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It means you’re human.”
“Then why have I been failing?”
“Students who second-guess themselves often get the right answer but erase it because they don’t trust themselves. I’ve seen a lot of that on your papers. Plus, your fundamentals are a bit rusty, but that’s something we can work on. The real focus in secondary mathematics these days is not on memorizing formulas or facts. It’s on nurturing a deeper understanding. You’re best at word problems, and that’s meaningful because word problems require one to delve deeper into the central mathematical concept being explored.”
“Um, could you translate that for me?” I asked.
“Sorry,” she
said. “It just means word problems can be tricky, but you have a knack.”
“A knack, huh?” She looked totally serious when she said it, like she wasn’t just pretending so she could turn around and make fun of me. It made me feel I was special when she said it, like the way I felt when I pulled off a perfect routine and won a trophy, and that gave me an idea. I stuffed the last of the cookie into my mouth. “There is something that I know I’m good at. Want to see?”
I led her down the steps and through the beauty salon, grabbed a baton, and slipped out the back door. The alley was just a dump, but I liked it for baton practice because there were only nine feet between the buildings, making it easier to tell if my baton was flying straight when I threw it. The smell in the alley was a combination of peanut shells from the Irish pub across the way, used animal litter from Sid’s Pet-O-Rama a few doors down, and whatever else happened to be in the Dumpster. I was afraid Professor Wigglesmith might say something mean about it, but she said the alley smelled like her baby brother.
I had her stand against the wall and started doing my routine from when I’d won second place at the Mid-Atlantic Junior Twirl Finals. I threw the baton up, spun three times, and caught it with the hand behind my back. That opening always got the crowd excited. Then I did some rolls and aerials, all while dancing and tumbling to the routine’s theme song in my head, “I’m Walking on Sunshine.” I wasn’t sure I would get the timing right without my music, but by the time I got to the end, I hadn’t made a single drop. I did a double walkover, threw the baton all the way to the third story, did another double walkover, then stretched out my right hand and closed my eyes. The baton landed in my palm. I flung it across my chest and bowed. “So? What do you think?” I asked.
Professor Wigglesmith clapped so hard I thought she might hurt herself. Then she walked around me staring up and down at the walls, as if calculating their height. “How did you know the baton would land in your hand without looking?”
