Dewey Fairchild, Teacher Problem Solver

by Lorri Horn

  “Sure,” agreed Dewey. “Why not?” He scrolled through the messages, reading aloud one from William Sanai. “Class is super boring.” Then another one from Charlie. “‘Too much homework,’ he says. That’s a good one.”

  “Well, I gotta go,” he handed Clara back her phone. “I’ve got a ton of homework to do,” he sighed. “I can’t even think about all these cases until tomorrow.”

  “No problem, sir. More tomorrow!” Clara smiled as Dewey gathered his things.

  It felt good to know Clara stayed behind back in the office with Wolfie. Dewey had a feeling he would be able to focus better on his homework tonight, and that he was going to get a better night’s sleep.

  Let’s Go Fly a Drone

  After school let out for the weekend, Dewey headed over to Colin’s place to fly the mini quad-copter. Colin had been asking ever since the new battery arrived. The mini quad-copter was about the size of Colin’s palm when rested in his hand. Its small component parts made a solid case for indoor flight, but neither of his parents ever seemed convinced.

  “Let’s fly her!” called out Dewey.

  “Her?” replied Colin. “What about this fine piece of micro-machinery speaks girl to you?”

  “Every historical military reference to ships and guns.” Dewey grabbed his phone from his pocket and searched online to back up his stance before Colin had a chance to protest.

  “Here,” he read. “‘She is also used instead of it for things to which feminine gender is conventionally attributed: a ship or boat (especially in colloquial and dialect use), often said of a carriage, a cannon or gun, a tool or utensil of any kind AND occasionally of other things.’”

  Dewey slowed down his reading on the words, “utensil of any kind,” and paused before finishing the rest of the sentence for dramatic effect.

  “So says Wikipedia. And I know of no better online authority than that.” Dewey rested his case.

  “Wikipedia,” Colin repeated sarcastically. “Not exactly a huge authority, but I guess it’ll do. I’m still not calling my drone a she,” Colin laughed. “You’re an idiot!”

  They gathered up their things and headed down the block to the elementary schoolyard tennis courts. Colin carried the drone like a baby chick in his open hand, and Dewey held the controller. When they arrived, no one seemed to be around.

  “Looks like a good time to let her fly!” joked Dewey.

  “Looks like a good time to—” threatened Colin.

  “I’m kidding. I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” Dewey chuckled, patting Colin on the shoulder.

  Colin laughed, calling him some choice names again, and they set the mini quad-copter down to launch it in the air.

  “Go ahead,” offered Colin. “You can go first.”

  The mini quad-copter hovered well and could get up high in the air, which explained why Colin’s dad got upset when they used it indoors. More often than not, it would bump into the ceilings. Here, though, outdoors, with the sky as their ceiling, their height was limitless.

  Dewey pressed the left stick slowly, and the copter began its ascent.

  “Wait!” called out Colin, and the drone dropped back down to the ground. “Let’s go do it on the field where the ground is softer.”

  That made more sense. Chances of crashing seemed likely.

  Once on the field, Dewey managed to get the drone into a good hover. “Now what?” he asked.

  “Now give it to me,” replied Colin.

  Dewey handed Colin the controller. He pushed the stick diagonally up to the right and suddenly the little drone buzzed through the air and did a circle with a loud noise that sounded like a mosquito on steroids.

  “Nice!” admired Dewey. “How’d you do that?”

  “Pitch and roll at the same time. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Dewey gave it a try and flew the mini quad-copter straight into the ground.

  Colin laughed.

  As Dewey bent over to pick it up, Colin made a fake fart sound with his mouth. “Ptttt.”

  “Donkey,” objected Dewey.

  “Here,” laughed Colin, extending his hand. “Let me have a go at it again.”

  As Colin took over the controller, Dewey heard the buzz of the quad-copter as it whizzed by his head and took off across the field.

  “Whoa, did you see that?!” exclaimed Colin. He had guided the drone into almost a complete figure eight.

  “Yeah!” replied Dewey. He wanted Colin to do more. In his own hands, somehow, the little copter just seemed to flip and lose control. In Colin’s, it maneuvered around trees, around poles, and did flips.

  Colin had just settled the small drone on his palm to show Dewey how to do a smooth lift off when Dewey’s pocket vibrated. Seraphina had texted.

  Where r you? I have news must tell u in person

  “She wants to come meet us at your place,” Dewey told Colin.

  “Sure,” replied Colin.

  Dewey looked at the time on his phone.

  “Oh, that’s not gonna work. It’s getting too late. I have to get home soon.”

  Dewey texted her back.

  “I wonder what she wants to tell us?” asked Colin, sending the copter off again into the air. “Why didn’t she just tell you what’s up?”

  “Dunno,” answered Dewey.

  What Seraphina wanted to share would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Bored Work

  As Dewey sat in math class the next morning, he thought about his next case. According to his paperwork, William wanted “to hit himself over his head with a large mallet” in his Humanities class because the teacher, Mr. Nisano, was “sooo boring.”

  What makes a teacher boring or not boring? Dewey wondered. Was it the subject or the teacher?

  “Dewey,” Mr. Jordon called on him to answer question three on the SMART Board. Dewey felt his face flush. He had not heard the question. Luckily, he had done the homework and easily went up to the board and completed the problem.

  This meant that another five kids would be asked to do the same, and he’d be free to think some more. He made two columns in his binder: “Boring/Not Boring.” He tried to consider the different teachers he had and what qualities made them one way or the other.

  “Dewey,” Mr. Jordon shot a paper-wad through a big straw that hit him on his shirt. “Kindly give us your undivided attention.” Not boring. Mr. Jordon, definitely not boring. He’d have to go back to thinking about this later!

  “Sorry! Right. Here! I mean, paying attention. Now.” Dewey smiled and refocused on the board.

  “Gus, here, was wondering how it is that the answer comes out negative. Care to give it a shot?” asked Mr. Jordon.

  Dewey looked at it and looked at his own paper. He got a negative, so he looked back at his own steps on the board and tried to retrace Gus’s to see where he might have made an error. “A positive times a negative needs to be a negative?” he asked.

  “That’s always true, sir. Go up to the board and help us out.”

  Dewey went up and drew on it with his finger, correcting where Gus had made his mistake. He turned to go back to his seat, but Mr. Jordon stopped him.

  “Now Dewey, say: ‘Gus, do you understand it now, or do you have any remaining questions?’”

  Dewey smiled and repeated, “Gus, do you understand it now, or do you have any remaining questions?”

  “I get it,” Gus confirmed, nodding.

  “Excellent. Now you can return to your seat, Fairchild.”

  Dewey went back to his seat just as the bell rang. He quickly packed up his stuff. Study hall came next and he would see Colin and Seraphina, and they’d finally get to hear what she had on her mind.

  When he got to the class, Dewey found Colin pestering Seraphina to spill the news.

  “Oh, good,” she turned around and motioned to
him to come over. “Hurry up. Sit down. I waited for you.” Just like Dewey, Seraphina’s eyes were named for the golden hue of the hazelnut shell. But whereas Dewey’s eyes were fair, with a yellow ring of sun around his pupil that tinged toward the sea foam greenish-blues, Seraphina’s hazel eyes were rivers of forest greens, rich earth browns, and sky blues, flowing into a ring of deep green around each black pool. Right now, her eyes focused in with intent.

  “What’s going on?” asked Dewey.

  “I’m telling you two, but you can’t let this leak. It’s big.”

  “What?” Dewey and Colin pressed.

  “I don’t exactly know,” whispered Seraphina. “But I heard Shawn talking to his guys and he said, ‘The kids are not going to like this.’” Shawn worked as the custodian who took care of all the grounds and facilities at school. All the kids loved him. If anyone knew of something going on that kids would or wouldn’t like at school, it was Shawn.

  “We should jus-th-t as-th-k him,” shrugged Colin.

  Colin had gotten a new retainer, and all his words came out funny.

  Before Dewey could speak, the bell rang, and the teacher started taking roll for study hall. Seraphina shook her head emphatically and mouthed, “No!” Her eyes were dark as she reprimanded him for not listening to her.

  “I told you,” she whispered. “You can’t tell anyone. He didn’t know I was listening!”

  “Okay, okay,” Colin nodded back.

  They pulled out their work but none of them could focus. What change could possibly be happening that they wouldn’t like?

  Colin and Dewey whispered and passed notes asking Seraphina to talk more about it, but she tucked their notes away and didn’t even look at them for the rest of class.

  Dewey turned his thoughts back to William, and he took out his boring/not boring list. He soon got incredibly bored by his own list though. It just seemed so obvious. The boring teachers, well, uh, were BORING. Did he really have to bore himself with why?

  His math teacher made them laugh but got them learning at the same time. His English teacher almost never made him laugh, but she totally made the stories they discussed exciting by making them seem real with how she read or interesting with the crazy stuff she had them do. He could tell his science teacher last year cared about science a lot by how excited he got. This year, not so much. Oh, the boring ones sure do talk a lot, thought Dewey.

  Dewey sat there tapping the point of his pencil in the boring column, trying to think how he might help William’s teacher to not be such a bore. Can you make someone funny or force them to make a subject interesting? he wondered.

  Maybe if he held up cue cards for her, he considered. Or was it a him? He couldn’t remember who William had for Humanities. That solution seemed unlikely, but he smiled at the thought of it. Too bad teachers probably wouldn’t go for it. Little electronic teleprompters. Haha! The thought of that made Dewey laugh quietly to himself, two almost indiscernible short, fast blasts of air out of his nostrils.

  Dewey recalled his own times trapped in classes with boring teachers droning on and on. The more he thought about it, the more furious he became. They take a bunch of kids who come bounding in perfectly happy and eager, close the door, and wham! Boredom and no escape. In the name of humanity, Dewey would figure out how to right this wrong.

  T-issue

  Going to the bathroom at middle school was about as enjoyable as going to the dentist. Dewey should know. His dad used to be a dentist, and they had talked a lot about dental visits while Dewey was growing up. He knew just how enjoyable people found them. Plenty of days, Dewey’s dad came home with a finger that had bite marks to show for it.

  That’s probably part of the reason Dewey’s dad wanted to be a math teacher—for some crazy reason, Dewey’s dad thought kids would like to go to math class more than the dentist. That made Dewey laugh. Although he loved going to Mr. Jordon’s class, and that was math, so anything was possible.

  Middle school bathrooms had the great time-saving invention, urinals. They recently installed waterless, no-flush urinals, which generally inspired Dewey to hold his breath. In the final estimation, though, the bathrooms in middle school enjoyed a marked improvement over the elementary school ones, where the little kids kept missing the bowl and left a puddle of pee on the floor.

  What he really didn’t love, and he’d do his very best to avoid if humanly possible, was going number two at school. He remembered going home one day saying he had a stomachache rather than facing that in elementary school. He was older now, though, and could—if he had to—do it. Colin, on the other hand, seemed to have no problem with it at all. In fact, he’d walk right into a stall with his independent reading book and settle in for a “sit-down,” as he’d call it, pretty much daily. Dewey tried never to touch Colin’s books for that reason.

  He and Dewey went into the bathroom at the end of break, and Colin had his book tucked under his arm. Dewey was washing his hands when Colin called out from the stall.

  “What? What is this?!”

  “What?” asked Dewey through the stall.

  “The toilet paper. They changed the toilet paper.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. It won’t roll! Every time I try to roll it, only one little piece will come off at a time. Check the other stall.”

  Dewey walked into the other stall and sure enough, the toilet paper roller had been rigged to no longer roll. You could only roll one little perforated piece at a time.

  “Same here,” reported Dewey. “It’s the same paper, I think, but the roller’s different.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” complained Colin. “How am I supposed to get out of here on time? It’s going to take me ten minutes to get enough paper!”

  Dewey laughed. The bell rang.

  “Come on, Colin. Let’s go.”

  “I can’t!” objected Colin. “I’m not ready!”

  Dewey laughed again.

  “Here, take my book,” urged Colin, handing the book under the door to Dewey.

  “Uh, no. That’s okay. You hold onto it,” insisted Dewey.

  “I need two hands!”

  “Nooo,” Dewey reiterated.

  Colin growled and stuffed the book under his armpit.

  Somehow Colin managed and came out, washed his hands, and they ran to their respective classes where they both arrived tardy.