Wayside School is Falling Down

Mrs. Jewls is the teacher on the 30th floor of Wayside School, and the stories in the collection mainly focus on her classroom. Her name is a reference to the real-life Mrs. Jukes, a teacher at Hillside Elementary School in Berkeley, California. As the children repeatedly note, Mrs. Jewls is the nicest teacher at Wayside. She allows them to express their individuality and supports their eccentric behavior in almost every story. For example, she permits the students’ quirky outfits on picture day, tolerates Mac’s repeated interruptions, allows Myron to sit on the floor and opt out of lessons and activities, and makes room for odd personal choices, such as Sharie’s decision to invite Bob to class for show-and-tell. Mrs. Jewls is also consistently supportive of her students as people. For example, she calls Bebe’s mother to express her concern that Bebe is being treated badly by her brother at home, and she makes it a point to reassure several students when they come to her with various worries.

Like most of the characters at Wayside School, however, Mrs. Jewls also has her eccentricities. Although she clearly cares about teaching, her lesson plans are strange and somewhat random, and her behavior is also sometimes arbitrary or selfish, as when she repeatedly burdens Todd with unfair punishments or lets her “mean” sideshow. These characteristics are meant to advance the text’s exploration of The Importance of Embracing Life’s Absurdities, The Yearning for Freedom, and the emphasis on Celebrating Individuality and Nonconformity.

Benjamin Nushmutt is a new student in Mrs. Jewls’s class who is introduced in the story “Mark Miller.” For most of the text, Mrs. Jewls and his classmates believe that Benjamin’s name is Mark Miller. Benjamin’s politeness and lack of self-confidence prevent him from correcting the error when it first occurs, and he spends most of the rest of the book trying to find the right moment to announce his real identity. Benjamin’s character arc is spread over “Mark Miller,” “Music,” “The Substitute,” and “The Lost Ear” and depicts his growing self-confidence and determination.

In “Mark Miller” and “Music,” Benjamin worries that people might like him better as Mark Miller and he believes that “Mark” is better at making friends, schoolwork, music, and so on than “Benjamin” is. He worries that “Benjamin Nushmutt” is a strange name, and he likes the sound of “Mark Miller” better. The music that drowns out his first attempted confession in “Music” demonstrates that beliefs like these make him ineffectual at asserting his true self. Still, he does try again, in “The Substitute.” This time, his message is heard clearly, indicating some progress, but he is still not taken seriously. It is only near the end of the collection, in “The Lost Ear,” that he can finally summon the force of will to be heard and believed. In this story, Benjamin is finally reassured that his eccentricities fit in at Wayside School, and he feels proud to be a part of a place “where nobody [is] strange because nobody [is] normal” (207). The importance of Benjamin’s decision to embrace his individuality is emphasized when the real Mark Miller is finally released from the purgatory of Mrs. Zarves’s classroom.

Allison is the only character who remains central to the narrative for more than one story. Her adventures are conveyed in a three-story sequence that consists of “A Bad Case of the Sillies,” “A Wonderful Teacher,” and “Forever Is Never.” She begins “A Bad Case of the Sillies” as a student in Mrs. Jewls’s class, spends most of the three stories as an unwillingly imprisoned student in Mrs. Zarves’s class, and returns to Mrs. Jewls’s class by the end of the third story. Like Benjamin, Allison is a dynamic character who learns an important lesson from her adventures.

Allison likes the emptiness of the stairs before the other students arrive; she does not much care for her classmates or the chaos of Wayside School. The narrative implies that her sense of alienation causes her to vanish from the “real” world of Mrs. Jewls’s class and enter the “unreal” world of Mrs. Zarves’s class on the nonexistent 19th floor. In this liminal space, Allison meets a new set of students who express complete contentment with the order and predictability of Mrs. Zarves’s class. The consistent rewards of high grades and praise and the comfort of regimented routines are enough to lull them into complacency. At times, Allison nearly succumbs to this spell; she struggles to remember her real life and loses awareness of any objective beyond completing the busy work that Mrs. Zarves assigns. However, Allison discovers that she desperately misses her classmates in Mrs. Jewls’s class and finds herself The Yearning for Freedom. Now that she finally understands The Importance of Embracing Life’s Absurdities, she emulates her classmates’ more disobedient behaviors to escape from Mrs. Zarves’s classroom. When she is finally back in Mrs. Jewls’s classroom, she has a new appreciation for her classmates’ antics.