No Messin' with My Lesson

by Nancy Krulik

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  For my parents, Gladys and Steve—N.K.

  For Julia Andrews—J&W

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Text copyright © 2004 by Nancy Krulik. Illustrations copyright © 2004 by

  John and Wendy. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09866-0

  ABCDEFGHIJ

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Chapter 1

  “Cinderella, dressed in yellow. Went upstairs to kiss a fella. Made a mistake, and kissed a snake. How many doctors did it take? One, two, three . . .”

  Katie Carew began to count as she turned her end of the double Dutch jump ropes. Her best friend, Suzanne Lock, was jumping between the ropes. Becky Stern was turning the other end.

  Katie’s other best friend, Jeremy Fox, was on the soccer field. He was kicking a ball around with Kevin Camilleri and Mandy Banks. George Brennan and Manny Gonzalez were on the swings, laughing at something. Probably at one of George’s jokes.

  Everyone was having a great time.

  The strange thing was, the only kids on the playground were the kids in class 3A. Everyone else had already gone in to start the school day. But no one had told the kids in Katie’s class to stop playing and come inside.

  “I wonder where Mrs. Derkman is?” Becky asked.

  Usually, their teacher was on the playground before school began. When it was time for classes to start, she would blow her whistle, and the kids would line up to go into the building. But, this morning, Mrs. Derkman was nowhere to be found.

  “Do you think we should go inside on our own?” Katie wondered. “School started five minutes ago.”

  “No way,” Suzanne said between jumps. “I’m not going in there until someone tells me I have to.”

  Just then, Mr. Kane, the school principal, strolled onto the playground. “Class 3A,” he called out. “You need to be in school now. Line up.”

  Katie immediately dropped her end of the double-Dutch ropes, and ran for the door. Suzanne tripped over the fallen ropes. Plop. She landed right on her rear end.

  “Nice one, Suzanne,” George Brennan teased. “How about giving us an instant replay?” He raced past her.

  Suzanne glared at George.

  As the kids lined up, Jeremy turned to Katie. “Do you think Mrs. Derkman is absent today?” he asked her.

  Katie shook her head. “No way. Mrs. Derkman is never absent.”

  “I know,” George agreed. “She’s always at school. She’s here when we get here in the morning, and she’s here when we leave in the afternoon. I’d swear she lived in the school—if I didn’t know she’d moved in next door to you, Katie Kazoo.”

  The other kids all looked sympathetically at Katie. Imagine having your teacher live right next door. Especially a strict teacher like Mrs. Derkman. Talk about bad luck!

  “Maybe she’s preparing a surprise for us in the classroom,” Miriam Chan suggested.

  “Oh, that would be awful,” George moaned.

  “How do you know?” Miriam asked him. “It could be something great.”

  “Any surprise Mrs. Jerkman could dream up would have to be bad,” George told her. George did not like Mrs. Derkman very much.

  “You children keep quiet as you walk down the hall,” Mr. Kane warned as he led them inside. “The other classes are already busy learning.”

  Sure enough, Mrs. Derkman was there when the kids walked into the room. She was standing in the back of the room, looking through the lens of a video camera. The camera was planted firmly on top of a stand.

  “What’s that for?” Manny asked Mrs. Derkman.

  “I’m going to tape our day,” Mrs. Derkman explained.

  “Why?” Manny asked.

  Mrs. Derkman checked the lens one more time, and then walked to the front of the room. “After school, I’m going to watch the tapes to see how I teach. That way, I can study what I’m doing right, and what I’m doing wrong. I can come up with ways to be a better teacher.”

  Katie looked at George. She could tell by the expression on his face that he was practically bursting with ideas for how Mrs. Derkman could be a better teacher. He opened his mouth to say something, but Mrs. Derkman shot him a look. George kept quiet.

  “So you’re going to watch the tapes the way a coach does after a football game, to see where the team went wrong,” Jeremy said.

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Derkman told him. “You see, I’ve been entered in the Cherrydale Teacher of the Year Contest. One of the judges is going to come here and watch me teach. I want to make sure that I do my best.”

  “When is the judge coming?” Kevin asked.

  Mrs. Derkman shrugged. “It’s a surprise. I don’t know when he will come or what he will grade me on.”

  The kids all stared at their teacher with amazement. Someone was going to give Mrs. Derkman a grade? Now that was a switch!

  Mrs. Derkman walked over to the board and picked up a piece of chalk. “Now, just forget about the camera. Pretend it’s not there. We have work to do.”

  Chapter 2

  Mrs. Derkman may not have wanted anyone to think about the camera, but the kids couldn’t help it. In fact, it was all they could think about.

  “Who can tell me one problem the pioneers faced on their trip out west?” Mrs. Derkman asked the class during social studies. Many hands shot up. “Suzanne?” Mrs. Derkman said.

  Usually, Suzanne would just give her answer from her seat. But not today. Suzanne stood up. She turned her face to the video camera, reached up, and wiped her forehead. Then she clutched her throat like she was in pain.

  “During the summer months, the sun was strong, and sometimes the settlers didn’t have enough water to drink,” she moaned in a pained voice. “People actually died of thirst.” She collapsed on her chair and threw her head back, pretending to faint.

  The class began to laugh. A few kids actually applauded. Suzanne stood up and bowed.

  “Watch out, Suzanne Superstar is ready for her close-up,” Kevin teased.

  “Suzanne, sit down,” Mrs. Derkman said with a sigh. She looked at the class. “That’s true. Both food and water were hard to come by. Now, does anyone else have a thought?”

  Katie had some ideas about what problems the pioneers might have had. But she didn’t raise her hand. She didn’t want to risk giving a wrong answer. If she did, it would be on film forever!

  But George wasn’t afraid to be on camera. He raised his hand high.

  Mrs. Derkman looked around the room to see if anyone else had a hand up. But George was the only one. “George,” Mrs. Derkman said finally.

  Like Suzanne, George stood up and turned toward the camera. He held his pencil in his hand, and pretended it was a microphone. “Speaking of westward travel,” he said. “Do you know why a drama teacher is like the pony express? Because he’s a stage coach!”

  A few kids laughed.

/>   “Does anyone know who settled in the west before anyone else?” George continued.

  “Who?” Manny asked.

  “The sun!” George exclaimed.

  The kids all laughed. “Tell another one, George,” Kevin shouted.

  George grinned. “Why did the criminal carry glue with him when he traveled out west?”

  “Why?” Kevin shouted out.

  “He wanted to stick up the passengers!”

  Everyone laughed . . . everyone but Mrs. Derkman, that is. “George, this is a classroom, not a comedy club,” she scolded.

  Mrs. Derkman did not look happy. Her face was all scrunched up, her glasses were halfway down her nose, and she’d squeezed her fist so tight that she’d snapped the chalk in half.

  Katie glanced at the video camera in the back of the room. I wonder how Mrs. Derkman will feel when she sees herself looking like that, she thought to herself.

  Mrs. Derkman didn’t turn off her video camera at all during the day. And the more the camera recorded her, the stricter she got. During math time, the kids were all answering multiplication problems in their notebooks. Mrs. Derkman walked around the room, checking their work.

  “Mandy, you know that by third grade all of your work has to be written in cursive,” Mrs. Derkman scolded her.

  Mandy seemed confused. “But this is math,” she told her teacher. “There’s no such thing as a cursive 7.”

  Mrs. Derkman continued walking around the room. She stopped in front of the third row. “Class, what is the rule about eating in this room?”

  Katie looked around. She didn’t see anyone eating anything.

  “There is no eating in this classroom,” Mrs. Derkman said, answering her own question. She strutted over to the window, and stared at Speedy. “You’ve been here long enough to know that,” she scolded the hamster.

  Speedy took one look at Mrs. Derkman’s angry face, and leaped away from his food bowl. He ran to hide inside his plastic tube.

  The kids stared at their teacher. Worrying about the contest had obviously made her nuts!

  “Boy, Mrs. Derkman is in a really bad mood today,” Katie whispered to Kevin and Suzanne.

  “I’ll say,” Suzanne agreed. “I think it has to do with that video camera. Some people act strange when there’s a camera around.”

  Katie looked at “Suzanne Superstar” and laughed. “Gee, you think so?”

  Chapter 3

  Mrs. Derkman finally turned off her camera just before the bell rang. She relaxed right away. So did the kids. “Okay, children,” the teacher said, a slight smile returning to her face. “Jeremy is now going to pass out this week’s edition of the Class 3A Times.”

  Jeremy stood and proudly began to hand out the newspapers. He really loved being the editor of the class newspaper. “There are lots of great articles this week,” he told the other kids. “Like the one about . . .”

  “My new column is in there,” Suzanne interrupted him. “It’s called ‘Ask Suzanne.’ I know everyone is going to love it.”

  “I can’t think of anything I’d want to ask her,” Kevin whispered to George.

  “I can,” George answered. “I want to ask her to go away.” Kevin and George laughed.

  Suzanne scowled at them. “Shows what you know. I’m going to answer very important questions in my column. This week, I wrote about friendship.”

  Katie watched as Suzanne argued with George and Kevin. “Are you sure giving Suzanne her own column was a good idea?” she whispered to Jeremy.

  “I needed another article to fill the page,” Jeremy admitted.

  “But you know Suzanne. This could be trouble,” Katie told him.

  “It’ll be okay,” Jeremy answered. “Actually, her advice was pretty good. Read it.”

  Katie opened the newspaper to page three. Suzanne’s column was at the top of the page.

  The question was:

  Dear Suzanne,

  My friend has a pair of pants that she loves to wear. But they are too tight and short on her, and I’m afraid they will split open! I want to tell her, but I don’t want her to get mad at me.

  Signed,

  What Do I Do?

  Suzanne had answered:

  Dear What Do I Do?:

  You should definitely tell your friend that her pants are too small. What if they split in the middle of recess? You will save her from embarrassment. Friends should always be honest with each other. When it comes to friendship, honesty is always the best policy.

  “You see,” Jeremy said after Katie had read the column. “Suzanne said people should be honest. What trouble could that cause?”

  Katie shrugged. “I guess you’re right,” she agreed.

  That afternoon, Katie went home and did her homework. Then she went out into her yard to look for her cocker spaniel, Pepper. She found him next door, playing with Mrs. Derkman’s dog, Snowball. They were both sniffing around the tomatoes and cucumbers in Mrs. Derkman’s yard.

  Katie figured Mrs. Derkman must not be in the yard. Otherwise, she would have shooed the dogs away from her vegetables. Mrs. Derkman loved her garden. She treated her plants like babies. She even sang to them!

  Katie was right, Mrs. Derkman wasn’t in the garden. But Mr. Derkman was. Katie was very surprised. She’d never seen her teacher’s husband working in the garden before. He liked to lie in a big hammock under the tree while his wife dug up weeds and planted flowers. But, today, he was the one out there picking fresh cucumbers from the vine.

  “Hi, Katie,” Mr. Derkman greeted her.

  “Hi,” Katie replied. “I didn’t know you liked to garden.”

  “I don’t,” Mr. Derkman admitted. “But my wife is so busy watching her videotapes that she doesn’t have time to pick vegetables. These cucumbers will rot on the vine if I don’t bring them in.”

  “Mrs. Derkman sure is excited about the Teacher of the Year Contest,” Katie said.

  “I know,” Mr. Derkman agreed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her this way before. She says if she had only one wish, it would be to win Teacher of the Year.”

  Katie gulped slightly when Mr. Derkman said that. She knew a lot about wishes. Sometimes, when they came true, they caused a lot of trouble.

  Katie learned all about wishes one evening after she’d had a really bad day. She’d lost the football game for her team, ruined her favorite pair of pants, and let out a big burp in front of the whole class. That night, Katie had wished she could be anyone but herself.

  There must have been a shooting star overhead when she made that wish, because the very next day, the magic wind came and turned Katie into Speedy the class hamster! All morning long, she gnawed on chew sticks and ran on a hamster wheel, until she finally turned back into herself!

  The magic wind continued to come back again and again. It had already turned Katie into other kids, like Suzanne’s baby sister Heather, and her friends Becky Stern and Jeremy Fox. Another time, it turned her into her dog Pepper—and she’d gotten into a huge argument with a particularly nasty squirrel. Once, the wind even turned her into Mr. Kane, the school principal. The whole school was almost destroyed that time!

  Katie never knew when the magic wind would come back again. All she knew was that when it did, she was going to wind up getting into some sort of trouble—and so would the person or animal she turned into.

  That was why Katie knew it was important to be careful what you wished for!

  “Freddy Bear, you have a phone call,” Mrs. Derkman called suddenly from the front door.

  Mr. Derkman looked up. “Coming, Snookums,” he called back. He turned to Katie. “See you later, kiddo.”

  Katie sighed as Freddy Bear walked up to the house and went inside with his Snookums. She was never going to get used to having Mrs. Derkman as a next-door neighbor.

  Chapter 4

  “Are you sure it’s safe to play in your yard today?” Suzanne asked Katie as they left school with Jeremy and George at the end of the next day. “I d
on’t want to run into Mrs. Derkman.”

  “Mrs. Derkman’s not going to be home yet,” Katie assured Suzanne. “And when she does get home, she’s not going to bother us. She’ll be spending all her time inside watching her videotapes.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jeremy said. “I don’t like playing at your house very much now that Mrs. Derkman is your neighbor. I see enough of her at school.”

  Katie frowned. It made her feel bad that her best friend didn’t want to play at her house.

  “I was just being honest,” Jeremy told her.

  The kids began to walk in the direction of Katie’s house. A minute later, Becky came up behind them.

  Katie jumped. “Becky, you surprised me,” Katie exclaimed.

  “She didn’t surprise me,” Suzanne said. “She always shows up when Jeremy’s around.”

  Jeremy and Becky both blushed. Then Jeremy looked angry.

  “What?” Suzanne asked. “I was just being honest.”

  Jeremy scowled at Suzanne, but said nothing. What could he say? He was the editor of the class paper. It had been his idea to print Suzanne’s advice column in the first place.

  “Hi, kids,” Mrs. Carew greeted them as they walked up the walkway to Katie’s house. “I hope you’re hungry. I’ve got lots of chocolate chip cookies.” She held out a large plate.

  Becky grabbed a chocolate chip cookie and took a bite. “This is pretty good, Mrs. Carew,” she said. “But my mom makes them much better. Hers are chewier, and they have a lot more chips.”

  Katie’s mom didn’t know what to say. The kids all stared at Becky with surprise.

  Becky shrugged. “I was just being . . .”

  “Honest,” George, Jeremy, Suzanne, and Katie finished her sentence for her.