My Teacher Flunked the Planet

Bruce Coville's My Teacher Flunked the Planet is a funny, thoughtful alien story for 8 year olds in which three kids get three weeks to talk the aliens out of blowing up the Earth.

What happens

Peter Thompson tells the story. He and his friends Susan and Duncan already know that some of their teachers have been aliens in disguise. Now the aliens' Interplanetary Council is deciding what to do about us humans.

They've got four plans. Plan A is to leave us alone and hope we wreck things ourselves. Plan D is D for destruction. Guess which one they're leaning towards?

So the three of them are sent back to Earth with two aliens, Broxholm and Kreeblim, to put together a report on the planet. It's their last chance to change the Council's mind.

There's a lot of brilliant weirdness along the way. A watchdog alien called Big Julie is so enormous he fills a whole room, and the first thing Peter sees is an eyeball taller than he is. Duncan gets a pet slug called a poot, made by pulling Kreeblim's poot in half (it says "Poot!" a lot). And Kreeblim serves a tasty snack on a clifftop, then tells them what it grows on.

Duncan is the one to watch. He used to be the class bully, until an alien made him a genius. Now he's the one who asks the questions nobody else thinks of, and Peter has to get used to liking him.

Under the jokes it's asking a big question. What do human beings look like from the outside? Kreeblim warns the kids that the tour will show them some things that aren't pretty. It's the planet's real problems, not monsters.

This book follows on from the earlier My Teacher books, and Peter's opening pages catch a new reader up. It's probably more fun if they've met Susan, Peter and Duncan already, though.

Aliens who are gross, kind and a little bit worrying all at once? Your reader will be very happy here.

What to read next

If they'd like Bruce Coville with a magical creature instead of an alien, Diary of a Mad Brownie is told by a 150-year-old brownie, not quite a foot tall, who has to leave Scotland for a family he's bound to by an old curse.