Gordon Korman. The Unteachables. Balzer + Bray, 2019.
———. The Superteacher Project. Balzer + Bray, 2023.
One year I was between jobs. Like many teachers between jobs, I substituted. One day at one of the high schools, I replaced a distinctive teacher. I forget what the official name of the class was, but it was basically the proto-delinquents. They stayed in the same classroom all day and had to be supervised any time they left the classroom. When I entered the classroom, one of the custodians was using a heavy duty cleanser to wipe off some graffiti that had been written on some desks with a magic marker. Teachers there asked me whom I was subbing for. When I told them, they all shook their heads and offered their sympathy. It was not too bad of a day, but that was the only time I ever had to sub for that class.
Gordon Korman’s The Unteachables is about one such class of eighth graders. Just as Welcome Back Kotter’s group became known as the Sweathogs, this group was nicknamed the Unteachables. As is true with many of Korman’s YA tales, the story is told from numerous points of view, but the main character is truly Mr. Kermit, their teacher.
Twenty-seven years before, Mr. Kermit was caught up in a cheating scandal. He was innocent, but he took most of the blame anyhow. After that, he simply lost motivation. He was given different assignments no one else wanted and ended up with the Unteachables. Guess what? He does not teach them. He does crossword puzzles and hands out worksheets. Nothing is ever graded. The class is simply a student holding tank for a year when Riverview Middle School can pass them along to the high school.
As usual, there is a cast of distinctive characters. Their town of Greenwich is somewhat rural, so Parker has a provisional driving license to drive his family farm’s produce to town even though he is only fourteen. Aldo has anger management problems that get him into trouble. There is Elaine, bigger than most of the students in the class and feared by everyone in the school for her strength. She is always referred to as “Elaine, as in pain.” And by pain, we mean physical pain.
Then there’s Barnstorm, top athlete on the football team until an accident puts him on crutches. Not only is he off the team, but teachers no longer give him a “gentleman’s” passing grade just because he is a sports’ star. He ends up in the Unteachables, too. Bitter.
And Kiana, whose parents are divorced. She lives with her mother normally, but her mother is an actress on a film shoot in the Utah desert. Kiana, then, goes to Greenwich with her father and his new wife and their baby son. Her stepmother never bothers to register Kiana at the school, so she wanders into the Unteachables room and stays there. It’s only going to be eight weeks, so who cares if she learns anything?
To complicate things for Mr. Kermit, there is a new young teacher next door. She had been teaching kindergarten and still does things like a kindergarten teacher. She has her seventh and eighth graders sitting in a sharing circle for part of each class. She has various charts with stickers showing student accomplishments. She keeps a pet lizard in the classroom. She also is the daughter and spitting image of Mr. Kermit’s former fiancée who broke their engagement because of the accusations in the cheating scandal.
Mr. Kermit has a plan, though. He turns fifty-five this year, so he can get early retirement and get on with life. It happens that the superintendent was Kermit’s principal twenty-seven years ago, and when he sees that Kermit will be eligible for retirement, he decides paying for the retirement of a cheater is a waste of taxpayers’ money, so he has taken on the role of getting Mr. Kermit fired before it is too late. The Kermit family is known for its longevity: Mr. Kermit’s father is in his eighties, and his grandfather is still alive and lively at 106. That could mean a very long pension payout.
This simply describes many, but not all, of the complications. There is the typical Korman fish out of water situation (Kiana really does not belong in the class) and lots of other incidents involving Parker’s pickup truck, a thousand Vuvuzelas that end up in the river, and much more. Readers will laugh. Readers of his No More Dead Dogs can anticipate a humorous denouement as the class begins reading Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember being told in high school that a good story usually has characters change in some way. Many changes happen here. It is a hoot how they happen.
The Superteacher Project also takes place at a middle school, in this case Brightling Middle School, somewhere in the middle of the United States about the same distance from New York, Miami, and Denver. This features the uncanny and mysterious Mr. Aidact, a new math teacher at the school, who seems to know everything about anything.
Rap lyrics, yes. German opera lyrics, the same. He catches spitballs in mid-air. He does not mind detention duty, and detentions end up becoming popular. He even coaches the perennially losing girls’ field hockey team to a winning season. Superteacher, indeed.
As is typical of Korman’s school stories, we get the story from multiple points of view. There is a girl on the field hockey team whose single mother has developed a crush on the new coach. How embarrassing is that? There are two boys who are pranksters extraordinaire. Yes, even the principal and other teachers have a chapter or two.
Nathan and Oliver, the two pranksters, have devised the ultimate prank. Some of the school rules are holdovers from when the school building was a new elementary school, so there is a prohibition against riding Big Wheels in the school. Now, most middle schoolers cannot even fit onto a Big Wheels plastic bike, but Oliver has decided that rules are made to be broken.
Field hockey referees give Mr. Aidact the nickname Eagle Eyes. He argues for his team such things as her stick did not hit the other stick, it came within 2.5 millimeters, but they never touched! The girls on the team begin to respect him because he actually teaches them field hockey strategy and sticks up for the team—even to the point of being ejected from a game.
Most alert readers will figure out this genius’s secret, which is revealed for every reader in Chapter Five. Between crazy pranks and clever perceptions, this story becomes another very funny Gordon Korman tale. He recycles one or two plot elements from previous books, but this is still an enjoyable YA read. Korman knows his audience, and he knows what is funny.
N.B. People who followed the 2010 World Cup remember vuvuzelas—the long plastic horns used by South African sports fans as noisemakers.