Wayside School

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Sideway Stories From Wayside School (Paperback) - May 1998

The Wayside School series is a popular series of children's books by Louis Sachar. The book tells the many stories of a school built as a tower 30 stories high, with one room per storey. (The builder said he was sorry.) Maybe that's why all kinds of funny things happen at Wayside - especially on the thirtieth floor.

Wayside School

Rooms

• 30th storey: Here is where most of the stories take place. Mrs. Jewls' class learn here.
• 29th storey: Miss Worm's class learn here.
• 19th storey: There is no 19th storey. The building was inadvertently built with floor 20 directly on top of floor 18. Miss Zarves is the teacher on the 19th storey. She does not exist.
• 15th storey: Cafeteria
• 12th storey: Teachers' lounge
• 1st storey: All the bathrooms are here, as is Mr. KIdswatter's office and the administrator's office.
• Basement: Students tend to avoid the basement.

Staff

• Mrs. Gorf: The class on the 30th storey's original teacher, who turned the kids into apples. (Sideways Stories From Wayside School)
• Mrs. Jewls: The class on the 30th storey's next teacher, who was much nicer.
• Miss Franklin: A substitute teacher, who believed everyone's name was Benjamin. (Wayside School Is Falling Down)
• Mr. Gorf: A substitute teacher, who sucked the kids' voices up his nose. (Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger)
• Mrs. Drazil: Louis' old teacher, who returns as a substitute. She seemed nice but had a mean streak. (Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger)
• Miss Wendy Nogard: another substitute. She has a third ear on the top of her head which can read minds, a power she used to make everyone else as miserable as her, until she fell in love with Louis. (Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger)
• Louis the Yard Teacher: based on the author, who once worked as a playground supervisor. Louis is kind to all the children.
• Mr. Kidswatter: the principal, who dislikes all the children.
• Miss Day: the secretary, whose name Mr. Kidswatter alsways gets wrong.
• Miss Mush: the school cook, who prepares some very unusual meals.
• Mr. Pepperadder: Miss Mush's assistant. (Sideways Arithemtic From Wayside School)
• Miss Zarves: the teacher on the 19th storey. She does not exist.
• Miss Worm: the teacher on the 29th floor. (Sideways Arithemtic From Wayside School)

The Kids on the 30th Storey

There are 30 kids on the 30th storey, who are always getting in all kinds of strange adventures.

• Allison, who was stuck on the 19th storey for a week but managed to escape. Her best friend is Rondi.
• Jason
• Jenny
• John, best friend of Joe.
• Terrence
• Maurecia
• Todd, who always gets in trouble and gets sent home early every day
• Bebe Gunn
• Ron
• Calvin
• Sharie, who wears an enormous overcoat so that she can sleep in class
• Dameon, who loves Mrs. Jewls
• Joy
• Kathy, who loves to see bad things happen
• Mac, who loves Show-and-Tell and telling long stories with no point
• Stephen
• Leslie, who has long pigtails
• Paul, who loves to pull Leslie's pigtails
• Rondi, best friend of Allison
• Myron, who went to the basement and became free
• Nancy
• Eric Fry
• Eric Bacon
• Eric Ovens
• Deedee
• D.J., a.k.a. Deej, Dojo, Dr. Jolly, Dumb Jerk. D.J. is happy all the time
• Dana
• Joe, best friend of John.
• Benjamin Nushmutt, who joins the class in Wayside School Is Falling Down. Everyone thinks his name is Mark Miller and he is afraid to correct them.
• Sue, who joins the class in (Sideways Arithemtic From Wayside School).

Other Interesting Features

The Number 30

The number 30 appears an inordinate number of times in the books:

• There are 30 storeys in Wayside School
• Mrs. Jewls' class is found on the 30th storey
• There are 30 kids in her class
• Each novel has 30 chapters
• Sideways Arithmetic and More Sideways Arithmetic have 15 chapters each, which makes 30 altogether
• Miss Zarves has taught at Wayside for 30 years

The 19th storey

The builders put the 20th storey directly on top of the 18th, meaning that the 19th storey doesn't exist. Or does it? In Wayside School Is Falling Down Allison finds that no-one can see her and ends up going into the classroom on the 19th storey. Here she is held virtual prisoner by Miss Zarves, where the students do 11 hours of busy work and memorising at a time, then have a 3-minute break, then do another 11 hours. This reduces their brains to goo and most of them forget who they are or what is was like outside Miss Zarves' classroom. She gives everyone an 'A' to keep them happy. Allison managers to escape by misbehaving, while Mark Miller is released later on. It can be best described as a place where things and people go when they get lost.

Reviews From The Critics

From Children's Literature

Sachar takes kids to that very peculiar school built with thirty classrooms on top of each other, and tells stories about the very strange teachers and students. Mrs. Gorf, who turned students into apples, came to a very bad end. She was replace by Mrs. Jewls, who has a penchant for writing kids' names under the Discipline heading on the blackboard. Within many of these stories are some gems of truth, such as the story of D.J., whose smile is contagious and who states at the end when pressed for a reason for his smiling state, "You need a reason to be sad. You don't need a reason to be happy." Others in the series are Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger and Wayside School is Falling Down

From Audiofile

Even before the first-period bell, the listener can tell from Wilson's wacky tone that something funny is going on at Wayside School. Each short story profiles a student in Wayside's silliest classroom. The narrator reads smoothly, and he delivers the full range of Sacher's humor with ease. The nerd-like, slightly whiny voices of the students make the program even more hilarious. The moral underlying every humorous anecdote stresses the importance of good values without talking down to the listener. Kids will find this program an enjoyable after-school snack for their ears.

From Louis Sachar Himself

"I returned to college, this time to the University of California at Berkeley where I majored in Economics. On campus one day, I saw the unlikely sight of an elementary school girl handing out flyers. I took one from her. It said: "Help. We need teachers aides at our school. Earn three units of credit." I thought it over and decided it was a pretty good deal. College credits, no homework, no term papers, no tests, all I had to do was help out in a second/third grade class at Hillside Elementary School.

Besides helping out in a classroom, I also became the Noontime Supervisor, or "Louis the Yard Teacher" as I was known to the kids. It became my favorite college class, and a life changing experience.

When I graduated 1n 1976 I decided to try to write a children's book, which eventually became Sideways Stories From Wayside School. All the kids at Wayside School were based on the kids I knew at Hillside.

It took me about nine months to write the book. I wrote in the evenings. In the daytime I had a job at a sweater warehouse in Connecticut. After about a year, I was fired (my enthusiasm for sweaters was insufficient), and I decided to go to law school. Sideways Stories from Wayside School was accepted by a publisher during my first week at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco."

Titles in the Series

Novels:

• Sideways Stories From Wayside School (1978)
• Wayside School Is Falling Down (1978)
• Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger (1978)

Books of mathematics and puzzles interspersed with stories from Wayside School:

• Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School (1989)
• More Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School (1989)

External Links

• Sideway Stories From Wayside School at Barnes & Nobles