By: Gordon Korman
Rate: Very good
The students of Room 117 at Greenwich Middle, dubbed “The Unteachables”, are a group of misfits, oddballs, and troublesome kids. They all have their own, severe, problems. For instance, there’s Aldo with anger issues, Parker who can’t read, and Elaine (rhymes with pain) who’s as sturdy as a tree and known as school bully.
The Unteachables hate school, and they don’t pay attention. Instead, they ignore their work, hang around, and make teachers explode with exasperation, exhaustion, and dejection.
But then they get Mr. Zachary Kermit as their teacher this year, who seems to care less about school even more than the Unteachables. He doesn’t give out any instructions and probably doesn’t even know what his students’ names are.
The reason Mr. Ribbet here is like a ghost? Well, he used to be an optimistic, positive, and talented teacher during his early years. But an unscrupulous cheating wrongdoing shattered his career. Now, he’s just looking forward to that day when he can sign up for early retirement.
The Unteachables never realized they would get a teacher that payed so less attention to teaching. Mr. Kermit doesn’t know that these crazy, weird, and different kids will change his life and career–forever.
As another classic Gordon Korman novel, The Unteachables brings us into a world of kids who don’t fit in with others. All other students are either terrified by them, or they mock them. We also meet someone who seems like the life and the purpose of living has gone out of him, and he is nothing but a dead person, a zombie, in an alive man’s body.
The book transfers between the perspectives of many different Unteachables, and of course, Zachary Kermit himself.
I took pleasure in reading this book, for once again like Restart, Slacker, and Level 13, this Korman book about middle schoolers makes me keep reading and reading, and I suck it up all at once.
The plot makes your heart catch at your throat every second as you follow Mr. Kermit and the Unteachables around the school and in the classroom. At the same time, Korman puts great humor into his books, such as Mr. Kermit’s absurd but hilarious loathing and hate toward vuvuzelas.
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