The Teacher's Funeral

The Teacher’s Funeral

By Richard Peck

Recommended for grades 5-8

“If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of year for it,” says fifteen-year-old Russell Culver. School seems like a “jailhouse” to him anyway. Russell and his ten-year-old brother, Lloyd, hope that it is too late for the school board to hire someone else since school starts in a few days and teachers for their one-room school in rural Indiana are hard to come by. With the school closed, Russell would be free to follow his dream of joining a team of harvesters in the Dakotas working the new 1904 all-steel Case Agitator threshing machine.

Russell’s dreams are upended with an especially cruel twist of fate for a young boy. Not only does the school board hire a new teacher, they hire Tansy Culver, Russell’s seventeen-year-old, take-no-nonsense sister. She is determined that he will turn over a new leaf this school year by finally passing eighth grade and becoming a better role model for Lloyd. Russell suspects the worst--that Tansy just might be able to accomplish this despite all of his efforts to stop her.

The Teacher’s Funeral, by Richard Peck, humorously explores education in the one-room-schoolhouse days of rural Indiana through the eyes of a boy who must endure his bossy older sister as a teacher. Though the first third of the book moves a little slowly setting up the circumstances surrounding Tansy’s hiring, the author then switches to high gear with the antics of the school’s eight students and the efforts of their inexperienced teacher to force learning into them. Boys, especially, may enjoy reading about Russell’s life in 1904 and the pranks students used to play on their teachers.

Two copies of The Teacher’s Funeral are available in the KPL Youth Department in the Junior High Fiction section.

Reviewed by Laura Abbott

KPL Youth Department Clerk