Wayside School
Closed for Repairs
The Wayside School of series of books are not novels in the traditional sense of telling a unified and coherent story across the multiple chapters comprising them. In some instances, individual chapters exist entirely as self-contained short stories have almost no connection to the rest of the book. In other cases, several chapters spread across the entirety of the book are connected as a result of adding more information to the narrative of a subplot.
The previous entry in the series, Wayside School Is Falling Down, is notable for ending on a cliffhanger in which the school had accidentally been overrun by cows and was forced to shut down. As this sequel to that book opens, the sign announcing that Wayside is closed for repairs is in a bad condition: hanging upside down. But it is also a sign whose use is coming to a close as the school is about to reopen for business.
Before Mrs. Jewls ever came to Wayside School, the children had a teacher named Mrs. Gorf. She wasn’t very nice.
Mrs. Jewls is about to go away on a vacation from teaching. She has announced to her students that she is going to have a baby is thus taking maternity leave. Which means, of course, a long-term substitute teacher. When the students learn that the substitute is named Mr. Gorf, all heck breaks loose. They begin to muse over the connection, wondering if this Mr. Gorf is the husband of the dreaded Mrs. Gorf even though they all agree that it seems highly unlikely anyone as fundamentally mean as Mrs. Gorf really ever managed to get married. As it turns out, Mr. Gorf is not the husband of the hated former instructor. He is, however, her son. And he is out for revenge.
1. She was nice.
2. She thought up ways to make learning interesting.
3. She was patient
4. She was fair.
5. She was a good cook.
6. She knew was a goozack was.
Wayside School is a strange place and the title here indicates, of course, that it will get even stranger. The foundation of strangeness at Wayside is irony and paradox. And this weirdness is arguably best demonstrated in the chapter titled “Why the Children Decided They Had to Get Rid of Mrs. Drazil.” The six points listed above are all examples of the paradoxical irony of why Mrs. Drazil should not be gotten rid of. After all, what sense could made of colluding together to ensure the dismissal of a woman who could be described by all six of those admirable qualities? Every once in a while, however, somebody fundamentally good makes a bad decision which deemed is a bridge too far and a line that cannot be crossed. Such is the case with Mrs. Drazil: “But she made Louis shave off his mustache. And so she had to go.”
