The Unteachables by Gordan Korman gave me all the feels to start the new school year. Shoot, this would be a fantastic novel to pick up whenever. Whatever your age. Trust me.
If you like stories where a band of misfits have everything stacked up against them and face a challenge together and risk failing, this is a must read!
It’s the first day of school and our main girl Kiana is new to school. She isn’t properly registered and by an honest mistake in the front office, Kiana finds herself in SCS-8, the self-contained special eighth grade class.
The Unteachables are the dummy class. We have a couple of groups like that in my middle school in California too. We call them the Disoriented Express, but’s the same thing. Probably every school has that.
The Unteachables, Gordon Korman, 10
Rather than correcting the error, Kiana decides to see what shakes out in SCS-8. Think of this dynamic as a modern day middle school Breakfast Club. Except they aren’t there for discipline on a weekend.
The characters:
Kiana – parents are divorced, living with dad and ‘Stepmonster’ for a couple of months while mom is filming a movie
Parker – all around good kiddo, undiagnosed learning disability (from my personal experience with Blue, I’m guessing it’s dyslexia)
Mr. Kermit – disenchanted from the wonder of teaching, 30 year veteran, able to retire at the end of the school year, drinks coffee from a mug so large it’s dubbed the Toilet Bowl
I gave up on teaching anybody anything decades ago. Since then, my relationship with my classes has been one of uncomfortable roommates. We don’t much like each other, but everybody knows that if we just hold our nose and keep our mouths shut, we’ll eventually get what we want. For me, that means early retirement. For the SCS-8 students, it means being promoted to ninth grade.
The Unteachables, Gordan Korman, 18
Aldo – resident hot head
Emma – teaches next door to SCS-8
Barnstorm – resident jock, got away with academic slacking because he was an all-star
Mateo – Star Wars junkie, speaks in sci-fi languages
Rahim – amazing artist, sleeps through class a lot
Mr. Kermit has such a terrible bad-itude and brings exactly negative effort to the job. The kids in SCS-8 don’t learn a thing. They just do worksheets. All. Day. (torture) He does make an outlier move in anticipation of an assembly and the students feel he might actually care for them. Slowly they start banding together instead of nitpicking each other. Kiana puts in some solid effort. Then she starts to help Parker with his reading. And the domino effect begins.
I freaking LOVED this book. I mixed up reading the book and listening to the audiobook. I couldn’t wait to see what shook out next, and I can’t say that’s true for all middle grade books I’ve read solo or as a read-aloud with Tiny Dancer.
This book gives you hope for tweens and teens being good and helpful and insanely huggable. (Tiny Dancer, our oldest, is 10 and she’s not always showing her must darling self. #hormones) That humanity is at its core good and helpful and wants the best for one another. I cannot wait to read more of Gordon’s books!