Up the Down Staircase

Miss Barrett has put in a suggestion box in her classroom and she was reading them one day and they said things like... "Don't call the roll so early- Late bird" and "Don't think you'll get off so easy just because you speak nice and you don't seem scarred of us, last term we had a man teacher and we make him cry.- yr. Enemy". These were some of my favorites even though the author thought of some really funny ones. The book is so strange, there is a chapter called “From Miss Barrett's wastebasket". It has a lot of weird writings in it, like memos from the principle, letters she wanted to send but didn't, and papers that children wrote but messed up on and threw away. The best one is a picture of a grave stone and flowers, the caption states "In memory of those who died waiting for the Bell." The story is so strange but very well written it's about the public school system and how it works. Miss Barrett is a determined teacher that doesn't give up and is willing to help her students unlike most of the teachers in the New York high school. In this school most of the kids in Miss Barrett’s English class don’t want to read, write, or even speak. The one’s they do talk are always out of turn. Most of them aren’t very smart and they can’t even spell and they are sophomores. The classes just don’t learn and the ones that try to learn can’t or they are already too smart for the class. This school needs a wakeup call in its system, the students don’t know anything and it needs to be changed is basically what the book is saying.