Rotten School 08 – The Teacher from Heck

R. L. Stine's The Teacher from Heck is a rowdy boarding-school comedy for 7 year olds about a boy whose cleverest prank gets his whole class a terrifying new teacher.

What happens

Bernie Bridges thinks he's the king of Rotten House. He has a friend who carries his backpack, a bulldog called Gassy and a scheme for everything (most of them involve someone else doing the work).

The trouble starts with the Water War. Rotten House and Nyce House have been soaking each other for days with squirting watches, squirting pencils and a laptop that fires water at whoever touches the keys. Then a giant water balloon meant for spoiled Sherman Oaks lands on the wrong person. Their teacher, Mrs Heinie.

She quits on the spot.

Mr Skruloose takes her place. He's about eight feet tall, he used to teach at the toughest military schools in the country and he snaps a wooden yardstick over his knee just to make a point. There's no blinking in his class. No sneezing either. And the homework takes four hours a night, seven nights a week.

So Bernie gets plotting. Can he charm Skruloose with a peanut-butter pie? (You can probably guess how that goes.) Can he win him over by marching everyone around like soldiers? Every plan seems to make things worse, and that's exactly the fun of it.

Bernie tells the whole thing himself and he's brilliant company. He's completely sure he's a genius. He'll happily admit he only did two of his ten push-ups because nobody was looking. Your reader will see each scheme going wrong long before he does.

The jokes are very silly and a little bit rude. There's a bulldog who squirts water out of his bottom, and at one point Sherman gets blasted clean out of his clothes in front of half the school. If that sounds like the kind of thing that gets giggles in your house, this will go down a storm!

It's American (dorms, fourth grade, a football field), but nothing a young reader will trip over.

What to read next

If Bernie becomes a favourite, go back to The Big Blueberry Barf-Off, where you meet him, Belzer and the rest of Rotten House for the first time.