Mabel Pickett
Mabel Pickett has been teaching fourth grade at Sparkyville Elementary School for seven years, and she has always believed that patience, encouragement, and a good lesson plan can reach any child. Her current class, however, is proving to be her greatest challenge yet. There鈥檚 the bald boy who almost always wears a yellow-and-brown shirt and somehow keeps bringing his dog to school despite Mabel repeatedly telling him not to; the timid boy who sucks his thumb and refuses to go anywhere without his beloved blanket; the scrappy tomboy who seems to have a particular soft spot for the bald boy; the bespectacled girl who seems unusually fascinated by that tomboy; the ten-year-old piano prodigy whose playing is so extraordinary that Mabel sometimes wonders if she has a miniature Mozart sitting in her classroom; and the remarkably filthy boy who leaves a permanent layer of dirt wherever he sits.
Mabel has tried everything鈥攍ectures, demonstrations, colorful diagrams, classroom games, stern warnings, and even the occasional inspirational speech she carefully rehearsed the night before. Yet whenever she finishes explaining something, the children simply stare back at her with the most bewildered blank expressions imaginable. It's beginning to make Mabel question her teaching abilities. Surely something is getting through? She has even started wondering whether there's some bizarre explanation for it all鈥攑erhaps they're hard of hearing, perhaps her classroom has terrible acoustics, or perhaps, for reasons she cannot explain, everything she says somehow sounds like complete gibberish to them. Still, every morning Mabel straightens her blouse, picks up her lesson plan, and walks into Room 4B determined to try again. After all, seven years of teaching has taught her one important lesson: never give up on a difficult class.