Free Miss Daisy Is Crazy! by Dan Gutman Page A

four crayons, you’ll have sixteen crayons. See?” Then she counted the crayons from one to sixteen.

    Miss Daisy looked at the crayons on Andrea’s desk. She had a puzzled look on her face.
    “I’m not sure I understand,” she said.
    “Can somebody else explain it to me?” Michael Robinson, this kid wearing a red T-shirt with a dirt bike on it, explained four times four again, using pencils. He had sixteen pencils on his desk, in four rows of four pencils. Miss Daisy still had a look on her face like she didn’t understand.
    “What would happen if you subtracted half of the pencils?” she asked.
    Michael took away two of the rows of pencils and put them in his pencil box.
    “Then you would have eight pencils!” we all said.
    Andrea Young added, “Half of sixteen is eight.”
    Miss Daisy wrinkled up her forehead until it was almost like an accordion. She still didn’t get it!
    She started counting the pencils on Michael’s desk out loud and using her fingers. She got it all wrong. We gathered around Michael’s desk and tried to explain to Miss Daisy how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers using the pencils.
    Nothing worked. Miss Daisy had to be the dumbest teacher in the history of the world! No matter how many times we tried to explain, she kept shaking her head.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It will take me a while to understand arithmetic. Maybe you can explain it to me more tomorrow.
    For now we have to clean off our desks because Principal Klutz is going to come in and talk to us.”
    I know all about principals. My friend Billy from around the corner, who was in second grade last year, told me that the principal is like the king of the school. He runs everything.
    Billy says that if you break the rules, you have to go to the principal’s office, which is in a dungeon down in the basement. Kids in the dungeon get locked up and are forced to listen to their parents’ old CDs for hours. It must be horrible.
    Miss Daisy told us to be on our best behavior so Principal Klutz would see how mature we were. Finally he walked into our room.
    “Welcome to the second grade,” he said cheerfully. “I’m sure we are all going to have a wonderful year together.” Principal Klutz said a lot of stuff about the rules of the school. We’re not allowed to run in the halls, and we’re not allowed to chew gum. Stuff like that.
    But I wasn’t listening very closely because I kept staring at his head. He had no hair at all! I mean none! His head looked like a giant egg.
    When Principal Klutz was all done telling us the rules of the school, he asked if anybody had any questions about what he had said.
    “Did all your hair fall out of your head,” I asked, “or did you cut it off?” Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny. Miss Daisy looked at me with a mean face.
    “Actually, it was both,” Principal Klutz replied with a chuckle. “Almost all of my hair fell out on its own, so I decided to shave the rest of it off.”

    “That’s the saddest story I ever heard!” said this girl named Emily, and she burst into tears.
    “Don’t feel bad,” Principal Klutz said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
    “How?” sniffled Emily.
    “Well, at least my brain didn’t fall out of my head!”
    We all laughed, even Emily. Principal Klutz was a pretty funny guy, for a principal.
    “Any other questions?”
    “Do you have a dungeon down in the basement where you put the bad kids?” I asked.
    “Actually, the dungeon is on the third floor,” Principal Klutz replied.
    Nobody laughed this time. He quickly told us that he was just making a joke and that he didn’t even have a dungeon at all.
    Principal Klutz must have felt bad that we didn’t think his joke was funny, because he invited us all up to the front of the room to touch his bald head.
    We did, and that made everybody feel a lot better.

    Principal Klutz seemed nice, but a lot of people seem nice when you