Enjoy tales of teachers

Books help kids feel comfortable with their teachers

Date published: 9/7/2004

WHAT KIND OF TEACHER did your child have today?

Someone like Mrs. Griggs, who remains calm no matter what, and believes in public apologies for bad behavior? Or one like Miss Pointy, who disdains the educational bureaucracy and helps a lonely fifth-grader reveal what a good writer, and good person, she is? Or maybe it was someone like Miss Nelson, who is nice and sweet and kind despite a dreadful class of kids who won't settle down and behave.

Mrs. Griggs can be found in the pages of Beverly Cleary's "Ramona the Brave," in which Ramona starts first grade and promptly gets in trouble. Through a misunderstanding that could happen only to Ramona, she throws away the paper owl she's made in class and then, in anger, crumples up the owl made by a classmate. After her mother counsels her, Ramona agrees that she will apologize. But Mrs. Griggs expects her to apologize publicly, in front of the whole class, and Ramona is just not sure she can do it.

While Ramona is passionate and serious and creative, Mrs. Griggs is calm and quiet and orderly. "Ramona liked people who got excited. She would rather have a teacher angry with her than one who stood there being calm." Ramona learns a lot from Mrs. Griggs in the course of just a few months--and alert readers will recognize that Mrs. Griggs may have learned a thing or two herself.

Learning to get along with a teacher who doesn't really understand you is a good skill for kids to learn, but it's much more fun to find a teacher who appreciates who you are. In "Sahara Special," Esme Raji Codell, herself a former teacher, introduces Sahara Jones, a fifth-grader who's repeating a grade after a disastrous year in special education.

Her new teacher, Madame Poitier, known as Miss Pointy, tells the class that "boring" is a swear word and that no one in her class will fail.

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Date published: 9/7/2004