“Math?” asked Miss Daisy. “I hate math! Why do you need to know math? That’s why we have calculators.”

“But we want to learn something,” said Andrea.

“Learning things is boring,” said Miss Daisy. “Let’s just talk. What do you want to talk about?”

“Can we talk about skateboards?” I suggested. Skateboards are cool.

“Yeah,” said Alexia. “Let’s talk about skateboards.”

“Great!” said Miss Daisy. “I love skateboarding. Hey, there’s something I don’t understand about skateboards. Maybe you kids can help me.”

“Sure,” I said. “I know everything there is to know about skateboards.”

“I have these five friends,” Miss Daisy told me, “and I bought each of them a skateboard as a present. But the skateboards didn’t come with wheels on them. So I have to buy wheels for all my friends. But I don’t know how many wheels I need to buy. It’s a big problem.”

Hmmm, that was a tough one. I had to think about it.

Alexia went over and got a box of glue sticks from the back of the room.

“Let’s say each one of these glue sticks is a wheel,” Alexia told Miss Daisy. “A skateboard has four wheels on it, right?”

“I think so,” said Miss Daisy. “I’m not sure.”

Man, she is dumb!

Alexia took four glue sticks out of the box and put them on her desk.

“And you got skateboards for five of your friends, right?” Alexia asked.

“Exactly.”

Alexia took four more glue sticks out of the box and put them on the desk. Those were supposed to be wheels for the second skateboard. Then she did it again for the third skateboard. Then she did it again for the fourth skateboard. Then she did it again for the fifth skateboard. Then we all counted up the glue sticks.

“Four . . . eight . . . twelve . . . sixteen . . . twenty,” we all counted.

“You need to get twenty wheels for those skateboards,” said Alexia.

“Four times five is twenty,” added Andrea.

“That makes sense,” said Ryan.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I shouted. “This whole thing sounds a lot like you’re giving us a math lesson!”

“No, no, don’t be silly!” said Miss Daisy. “We’re just talking about skateboards. But I still don’t understand why I need that many wheels. Can somebody else explain it to me?”

Neil got a bunch of erasers and put them on the floor in groups of four to show how Miss Daisy would need twenty wheels for the five skateboards. We spent a million hundred minutes trying to explain it to her. In the end, she still didn’t get it.

I think Miss Daisy might be the dumbest substitute teacher in the history of the world.

4. Sound It Out

After a while we gave up trying to explain to Miss Daisy why she needed twenty wheels for her skateboards. I’m telling you, that lady is hopeless.