The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Parent-Teacher Trouble

by Henry Winkler

  I thought my ear was going to fly off my head and run into a cave and hide with embarrassment. My dad was still in his rock ’n’ roll mode. Or as he would say … and this is very hard for me to repeat … he still had his groove mojoing. The only thing worse than being kept back is having your dad hear about it while he’s got his groove mojoing.

  I hope this kind of thing never happens to you. But in case it does, I’m going to pause my story for a minute to give you a list of some things you should tell your dad never to say when he’s meeting your teacher.

  Actually, he should never say these things when he’s meeting anyone.

  Actually, he should never say them at all.

  Memorize this list and make your dad take a solemn oath that he will never say these things in your presence or around anyone you know or anyone you have ever met or may one day meet.

  OK, now we can go on with my story.

  I guess I was so busy making up the list that I missed the sound of footsteps, because when the door suddenly opened next to my ear, I was taken totally by surprise. I lost my balance, fell headfirst into the classroom, tripped over the bin, stumbled across the floor and slid on my butt right into my dad’s feet.

  “Who’s your daddy?” my father said.

  “No, Dad,” I whispered. “That’s number eight on the list. You have to stop saying that! Now!”

  “I’ll try,” he said, “but don’t count on it.”

  I looked over to see who had opened the door to the corridor. It was Head Teacher Leland Love, the head honcho at PS 87. Oh, boy, things must have been really bad to have the head teacher in my parent-teacher meeting.

  “Hello, Head Teacher Love, sir,” I said, pulling myself to my feet.

  “What are you doing lurking outside the door, young man?” he asked in his big, booming voice. Head Teacher Love is a short man with a tall man’s voice.

  “I was listening, sir,” I said.

  “And were you invited to listen?” he asked. Head Teacher Love has this mole on his face that’s shaped like the Statue of Liberty. When he’s upset, his face twitches and the Statue of Liberty mole looks like it’s doing the hula. She was dancing up a storm right then.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Then why were you listening?” he demanded to know.

  “Because I wanted to,” I answered. “After all, they’re talking about me.”

  I know this was a disrespectful thing to say, but I figured that as long as I was going to have to repeat fourth grade, I might as well go down in flames.

  “There are some things children should know,” Head Teacher Love said, “and some things they should not know. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr Zipzer?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Well, then, I’ll say it again,” he said. “There are some things children should know and some things they should not know. Now do you understand?”

  The truth was, I understood the words, but I really didn’t know what he meant. I think if someone knows something about me, then I should know it too.

  Head Teacher Love is known for saying everything twice, but sometimes on special days, he’s been known to say the same thing three times. In my state of mind, I didn’t think I could survive that. So instead of arguing with him, I just nodded and said that now I understood everything as clear as glass.

  He left. We all listened to his rubber-soled Velcro tennis shoes squeak down the linoleum corridor until we couldn’t hear them any more.

  Well, there I was inside the classroom during a parent-teacher meeting. Now what? I looked at the group sitting round Ms Adolf’s desk. I searched my mum’s face to see any signs of bad news. She seemed tired. I looked at my dad, but he was busy looking over a stack of papers that looked like they were in my handwriting. I recognized my handwriting because it looked like it was written in Chinese except it was English.

  Ms Adolf was holding a report and making marks on it with a red pencil. She was probably correcting her own report. She can’t stop correcting papers, even when they’re her own. She loves that red pencil.

  The only one who looked like she was interested in me was Dr Berger. She was holding another one of her favourite coffee mugs. This one said: “Children are our future.” That made me smile. She noticed and smiled back.

  “Hello, Hank,” she said. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “Excuse me, Dr Berger,” Ms Adolf said, “but that’s against the rules. This is a parent-teacher meeting, not a child-teacher meeting.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, Harriet, I think Hank made a very good point to Head Teacher Love,” Dr Berger said. “He has a right to know what we’re talking about. After all, it’s his future we’re discussing.”

  Harriet?

  I had completely forgotten that Harriet was Ms Adolf’s first name. You never think of your teachers as having first names. I always just assumed that everyone calls her Ms Adolf. Even her husband. I can hear him now:

  Nighty-night, Ms Adolf. Happy anniversary, Ms Adolf. Give me a little kiss, Ms Adolf.

  Yuck, Hank! Stop your brain before you throw up!

  Dr Berger pulled up a chair for me, but I didn’t sit down. It looked like it was tilted. I looked at Ms Adolf’s desk, and it seemed tilted too. As a matter of fact, the whole room looked like it was at an angle. I wondered how all the adults were sitting upright in their chairs and not sliding into the wall when the room was almost sideways.

  “Sit down,” I heard Ms Adolf say, but, boy, did her voice sound weird. It sounded like her words were trying to push through thick, gooey maple syrup to get to my ear. Like the way the mutant moth sounded in The Moth That Ate Toledo just after he swallowed the potion that made him turn into his baby-larva state inside the furry cocoon. In case you haven’t seen The Moth That Ate Toledo, let me just tell you, that is the scariest part, and you may want to cover your eyes when it comes on.

  Everyone was waiting for me to sit down and say something.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll stand,” I said. My voice sounded weird to me too, like it was coming out of a loudspeaker at Shea Stadium, where the Mets play baseball.

  What’s going on with me? I was seeing funny, hearing funny, and my heart was beating a mile a minute like it does when I’m really scared on a rollercoaster.

  Wait a minute, Hank. That’s it. You’re scared. Scared of what they’re about to say to you.

  My father got up, pushed the chair under me and said, “Chill, little dude. Take a load off your soles.”

  Maybe that’s not really my dad. Maybe my real father is still on tour with Stone Cold Rock, and this guy is from another dimension, a duplicate dad who looks like mine but isn’t.

  Dr Berger was looking at me over the top of her glasses. Her glasses have lavender lenses, so you’re not sure if they’re sunglasses or real glasses. She says she likes them because they smooth the rough edges from the world. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sure sounds great.

  “Hank,” Dr Berger said. Thank goodness her voice was starting to sound normal. I noticed I was holding my breath, waiting for the rest of her sentence to come out. I heard Frankie in my mind saying, “Breathe, Zip, breathe,” but I absolutely couldn’t. “Do you have something you’d like to ask us?” she said.

  “Just one question,” I said. “And only one.”

  Suddenly, it came blurting out of my mouth. I had to say it fast and get it over with.

  “Am I going to be kept back?” I asked.

  It seemed like for ever until somebody finally said something. Why wasn’t anybody answering me? It was obvious. They didn’t know how to break the bad news.

  “Please,” I heard myself saying. “I’m begging you. Don’t do it. It would be horrible. I’d be so embarrassed, I couldn’t show up for school ever again. Everybody would be talking about me. Hank, the stupid loser. The moron. The kid who’ll never get out of fourth grade. I really do try. I did well on that test about the Hopi Indians. Doesn’t th
at count for anything? I’ll try harder. I promise. I’ll make my brain do what it doesn’t want to do. Honestly.”

  Suddenly, I felt my mum’s arms round me. Normally, I don’t allow public displays of affection, but this felt awfully good.

  “It’s OK, honey,” my mum said. “We haven’t decided to hold you back.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “Even though holding you back is not the worst idea in the world,” Ms Adolf said. “We are thinking about recommending that you go to summer school instead.”

  “Hank,” Dr Berger said, taking off her glasses. “We believe that for you to be successful in fifth grade, you need to strengthen your basic skills in maths and reading.

  She made some sense, I had to give her that. Maths and reading are not exactly my strong points.

  “Because of your learning difficulties, if you are going to succeed in school, you are going to have to be willing to put in some extra time,” Dr Berger went on.

  “Are you down with that, Hank?” my dad asked.

  If it meant I could go on to the fifth grade and be with Frankie and Ashley, I’d be down with anything!

  “Sure, Dad! I am so down with that, it’s not even funny.”

  “The summer-school class is small, so you’ll be able to get a lot of extra attention and individual instruction,” Dr Berger said.

  “You mean, all I have to do to go into the fifth grade is go to summer school?” I asked.

  Dr Berger nodded. I felt like jumping up and down and screaming at the top of my lungs.

  “Cool,” I said instead. “Where do I sign up?”

  Wait a minute. I’m agreeing to go to summer school?

  I can’t believe I just heard myself say that.

  Hank, shut up before you volunteer to write a report for extra marks on why the Japanese people like blowfish.

  “We want to give you every opportunity to succeed, Hank,” Dr Berger said.

  “I thought you were going to make me repeat fourth grade,” I said.

  “I know that both you and your friend Bernice were worried about that,” Dr Berger said. “But I want you to know that we’re on your side. We are here to help you.”

  “But what about the brown envelope? The one that said I was going to be held back?”

  “You mean this one?” my dad said, taking the brown envelope out from underneath all my papers he held on his lap. “It was full of samples of your tests and homework from this year.”

  That’s all? Then I don’t hate you any more, brown envelope!

  “Your papers are full of spelling errors, Hank,” my dad said, shaking his head. “Looks like you gave Ms Adolf’s red pencil a real workout. Perhaps I should give her one of my mechanical ones.”

  He reached into the pocket of his leather trousers and pulled out a shiny silver mechanical pencil. Then he twisted it so a thin, smooth piece of lead popped up from the point. He handed it to Ms Adolf.

  “You can keep it,” my dad said. “I have a whole collection of them. Would you like it, Ms Adolf?”

  Hold on to your hats for this one. Ms Adolf actually smiled – and not that little snarky thing she does in class, but a big wide grin.

  Then she said, “I’m down with that.”

  We all laughed.

  I felt like a five-ton sack of smelly socks had been lifted off my back.

  “I promise you guys that I’ll work hard at summer school,” I said. “I’ll do all my maths and I’ll read the dictionary and I’ll learn lots of new vocabulary words. In fact, I’d like to start now. How about the word ‘redo’? I thought that meant ‘do over’, but maybe I was wrong.”

  “You were quite right,” Ms Adolf said. “I often use the word ‘redo’ to indicate things that I need to correct. For example, Henry, I sometimes write it in my register to indicate a certain report I need to rewrite because I did a messy job on it.”

  “Really?” I asked. “That’s why you write redo?”

  “Somehow, I feel you may have run across the use of that word recently,” Ms Adolf said. “Didn’t you, Henry?”

  “I have to confess,” I said, looking into her grey face. “I did recently run across the word.”

  There it was. I knew she knew I had looked in her register. What was she going to do with that little piece of information?

  “That will be another conversation, Henry, that you and I will have in private. Let me just say that it appears that you will have the opportunity to improve your reading skills even before summer begins. Perhaps in some after-school sessions with me, shall we say?”

  I may not be smart in a lot of things, but one thing I’ve become really good at is the ability to sniff out a punishment. And to me, that sounded like detention. I’ll bet you five dollars that I’m going to be getting to do that extra-marks report on why the Japanese like blowfish way sooner than I had thought.

  But, hey, at least I was going to be in fifth grade next year.

  Hank Zipzer, fifth-grader.

  That sounds great.

  Oh yeah.

  An interview with Henry Winkler

  What’s your favourite thing about Hank Zipzer?

  My favourite thing about Hank Zipzer is that he is resourceful. Just because he can’t figure something out doesn’t mean that he won’t find a way. I love his sense of humour. Even though Lin and I write the books together, when we meet in the morning to work we never know where the characters or the story will take us. Hank and his friends make us laugh all the time.

  Hank likes to write lists. Are you a list person, too? (If so, what sorts of lists do you make?)

  Hank likes to write lists, and so do I. My whole life is organized on scraps of paper in a pile on my desk by my phone. If I didn’t make lists, I would get nothing done, because I would forget the important things that I had to do. And then, I’m constantly rewriting those lists and adding to them. So yes, I’m a list maker.

  Who was your favourite teacher?

  Believe it or not, Mr Rock, the music teacher at my high school, McBurney’s School for Boys, was my favourite teacher. He seemed to understand that learning was difficult for me. He understood that just because I had trouble with almost every subject, it did not mean I was stupid.

  Where did you grow up?

  I grew up on the West side of New York City in the same building Hank lives in. The neighbourhood, the stores, the park, the school and even Ms Adolf are all taken from my life. I took the Broadway bus number 104 to school every day.

  What was it like growing up with dyslexia?

  When I was growing up in New York City, no one knew what dyslexia was. I was called stupid and lazy, and I was told that I was not living up to my potential. It was, without a doubt, painful. I spent most of my time covering up the fact that reading, writing, spelling, maths, science – actually, every subject but lunch – was really, really difficult for me. If I went to the shop and paid the bill with paper money and I was given coins back for change, I had no idea how to count up the change in my head. I just trusted that everyone was being honest.

  What’s it like working as a team to write the World’s Greatest Underachiever books?

  We have the most wonderful time working together. Lin sits at the computer, and I walk in a circle in front of her desk. If I start talking like the characters, Lin kindly types it in because I don’t use a computer. Or, she’ll tell me to stop for a minute because she’s got a great idea and her fingers fly across the keyboard. Sometimes, I’ll write my chapters in long hand and Lin will transcribe them and correct my spelling. When the book is done, we both go over it to see if we’ve left anything out, or perhaps we’ll find a better joke for one of the characters or better action in a scene. When it’s completely done, we send it to our editor, and she sends back her notes that we then incorporate.

  Also available as eBooks

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever series

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever Takes on the Universe

  (Bind-u
p of The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Crazy Classroom Cascade and The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Crunchy Pickle Disaster)

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Crazy Classroom Cascade

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Crunchy Pickle Disaster

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Mutant Moth

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Lucky Monkey Socks

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Soggy School Trip

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Killer Chilli

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever and the Parent-Teacher Trouble

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.

  First published in Great Britain as

  Hank Zipzer the World’s Greatest Underachiever: Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade (2009) by Walker Books Ltd, 87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  First published in the United States as

  Hank Zipzer #07: Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade (2004) by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver. Published by arrangement with Grosset & Dunlap™, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved.

  This edition published 2013

  Text © 2004, 2013 Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver Productions, Inc.

  Cover illustration and design, and interior illustrations © 2013 Nigel Baines

  The right of Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988