No Messin' with My Lesson (2 page)

“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?”

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:

 

 

Suzanne had answered:

 

 

 

 

“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.

“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 don’t want to run into Mrs. Derkman.”