Miss Daisy Is Crazy!

was twelve inches long.
    “Hey, my foot is a foot!” Mrs. Cooney exclaimed.
    “Aren’t all feet feet?” I asked.
    “Some feet are less than a foot, and some feet are more than a foot,” she replied. “But my foot is exactly a foot.”

    I had no idea what she was talking about.
    Mrs. Cooney wrapped the measuring tape around her forehead and announced, “Look!

    My head is almost two feet in circumference!”
    I knew that circumference was the distance all the way around a circle and diameter was the distance through the middle of a circle.
    “What’s the diameter of your head, Mrs. Cooney?” I asked. Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny.
    “That would be hard to measure. But isn’t measuring things fun?” Mrs. Cooney asked. “I wonder how much the scale weighs.”
    Mrs. Cooney started to measure and weigh more things, but Miss Daisy said we had to go back to class.
     

At the end of the day, Miss Daisy sat on the floor and we all sat around her. She told us to talk about what we want to be when we grow up.
    “I want to be a veterinarian,” said Andrea Young.
    “Does anyone know what the word veterinarian means?” asked Miss Daisy.
    “That’s somebody who doesn’t eat meat,” said Michael Robinson.
    “It is not!” I said. “That’s a vegetarian. A veterinarian is somebody who fought in a war.”
    “That’s a veteran,” Miss Daisy said.
    “Andrea, would you like to tell the class what a veterinarian does?”
    “A veterinarian is an animal doctor.” That Andrea Young thinks she knows everything. But for once, I knew she was wrong.
    “Animals can’t be doctors,” I said.
    Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny. Miss Daisy said a veterinarian is a doctor who takes care of animals. That made a lot more sense than that dumb thing Andrea said.
    Emily was next and she said she wanted to grow up and become a nurse in a hospital.
    “Why do you want to do that?” I asked.
    “People come into hospitals all sick and injured, their arms falling off, their guts hanging out. . . .”
    “A.J.!” Miss Daisy said in her serious voice.
    Emily got all upset and ran out of the room crying.
    “What did I say?” I asked.
    “What do you want to be when you grow up, A.J.?” Miss Daisy asked.
    “I’m going to be a famous football player,” I said.
    “Really? And why did you choose that field?”
    “Because I love football,” I said, “and if I was a football player, I wouldn’t have to read or write or do arithmetic or go to school. My friend Billy told me that football players are really dumb.”

    “Your friend told you that?” said Miss Daisy.
    “Yeah, Billy is really smart. He also told me that if you dig a hole deep enough, you can dig all the way to China. And if you fall into that hole, you’d fall all the way through the Earth and pop right out the other side. And you’d be moving so fast that you’d shoot all the way into outer space.”
    Michael Robinson said that sounded cool. He decided that instead of becom-ing a firefighter, he wanted to become one of those hole-digging astronauts.
    Emily came back into the room with a tissue. Everybody else went around in a circle saying what they wanted to be.
    This girl named Lindsay said she wanted to be a singer. Ryan said he wanted to be a businessman like his dad.
    Andrea Young said that if she couldn’t be a veterinarian, she wanted to be a teacher like Miss Daisy. Then she gave Miss Daisy a big smile.
    I hate her.

     

The next day, Miss Daisy brought in a box with ribbons on it and told us she had a surprise.
    “What’s in the box?” we pleaded.
    “It’s a secret.”
    “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?”
    “Well, okay,” she said, opening the box.

    “It’s bonbons!”
    Miss Daisy said she thought we might be able to use them for arithmetic problems so we could learn together. She put the bonbons on the table in the front of the room. There must have been twenty or thirty of them. “Can somebody think up an arithmetic problem using bonbons?” she asked. “Andrea?”
    “If you had three bonbons in a box,” said Andrea as she put three bonbons into her pencil box, “and you had three boxes just like that, how many bonbons would you have all together?” Miss Daisy looked at Andrea’s pencil box for a long time, counting in her head and on her fingers. Any dummy would know that three boxes with three bonbons in each box would equal nine bonbons. Three times