âTo what do we owe the pleasure of your company now ?â
(Thatâs grown-up talk for âWhat are you doing here?â)
âI did have to go,â Mrs. Lilly replied. âAnd I went. Now Iâm back.â
âIâm glad a tree didnât fall on you,â I told her.
âBut I thought you were going to come back another day ,â said Mr. Granite. âWeâre starting our math lesson now.â
âMath, eh?â Mrs. Lilly said. âWell, if we print up a newspaper with ten pages in it and there are five articles on each page, how many articles can we fit into the newspaper?â
Some kids raised their hands. Mrs. Lilly called on Little Miss I-Know-Everything, of course.
âFifty!â said Andrea. âBecause five tens make fifty.â
âCorrect!â said Mrs. Lilly. âSee, we just did a math lesson. Now letâs write some of those articles for our newspaper.â
âYay!â we all shouted.
âI give up,â said Mr. Granite. âIf you need me, Iâll be in the teachersâ lounge.â
He went to the teachersâ lounge, which is a secret room where the teachers go to have hot tub parties.
Mrs. Lilly took off her trench coat, and we all gathered around her on the floor.
âWhat should we write about?â asked Emily.
âWrite about what you know,â said Mrs. Lilly. âYou know a lot about your school. How about we make a school newspaper? We can call it⦠The Ella Mentry Sentry . You can all write articles for it.â
âYay!â everybody yelled.
Little Miss Annoying was all excited, and she was waving her hand around like it was on fire.
âI already wrote something at home,â Andrea announced, pulling some papers out of her desk. âMaybe we can use it in our newspaper.â
Ugh. Could she possibly be more boring? Only Andrea would write an article for a newspaper before she even knew we were going to make a newspaper. She held up her dumb article so we could all see it. The first page said:
I LOVE ELLA MENTRY SCHOOL
By Brenda Myers
âWhoâs Brenda Myers?â asked Alexia.
âThatâs my pen name,â said Andrea.
âYou name your pens?â I said. âThatâs weird.â
Andrea rolled her eyes and then she read her article out loud. It was all about how our school was built in 1961, and it was named after a teacher named Ella Mentry. Then it went on to talk about a bunch of other really boring stuff, like the history of the school. I thought I was gonna die from boredom.
When the torture was over, Andrea looked up at Mrs. Lilly and waited for her to say how wonderful that dumb article was. What a brownnoser! But thatâs when the most amazing thing in the history of the world happened.
Mrs. Lilly dropped Andreaâs article into the garbage can!
âThat was terrible,â she said.
âOh, snap!â said Ryan.
Well, Andrea looked like she was going to explode ! I donât think a grown-up ever said anything like that to her. Ha-ha! Nah-nah-nah boo-boo on Andrea! In her face! It was the greatest moment of my life.
â The Ella Mentry Sentry needs to reach out and grab the readerâs eyeballs,â Mrs. Lilly told us.
âOuch!â I said. âI donât want anybody touching my eyeballs.â
âWhat I mean is that newspapers have to compete with the internet, TV, and video games,â Mrs. Lilly told us. âOur paper needs to have exciting stories.â
âI thought your article was wonderful, Andrea,â whispered Emily, who loves everything Andrea does.
âBut our school is really boring,â said Michael. âI donât think we can make an exciting newspaper that will grab peopleâs eyeballs.â
âNothing interesting ever happens here,â said Ryan.
âYeah,â said Neil the nude kid, âthis school is boring. We donât have any good stories to
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