Full spoilers for the entire book below. Proceed with caution.
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Title: The Unteachables
Author: Gordon Korman
Publication Date: January 8, 2019
Publisher: Harper Collins
Narrated By: Sarah Beth Goer Oliver Wyman, Josh Hurley, Tristan Morris, Christopher Gebauer, Sean Welsh Brown, Pete Larkin, Fred Berman, Jennifer Nittoso
Recording time: 6 hrs
THE PLOT
via supersummary:
Told in shifting perspectives, the book primarily follows student Kiana Roubini and teacher Zachary Kermit, with intermittent chapters from other characters. Kiana is only supposed to be in Greenwich for a few months while her mom shoots a movie. She never registers at the school and is put into Mr. Kermit’s class by mistake. Mr. Kermit’s only goal in life is to finish this school year so he can claim his early retirement.
Dr. Thaddeus, the superintendent of Greenwich’s schools, will do anything in his power to keep Mr. Kermit from reaching retirement and collecting a pension from the school. He assigns Mr. Kermit the infamous “unteachables” class. Mr. Kermit plans to ignore the kids for the entire year, but Kiana’s go-getter attitude and the influence of another teacher make Mr. Kermit and the difficult students start to change.
Throughout the book, various students in Mr. Kermit’s class offer their perspectives on how much they dislike school. Meanwhile, Mr. Kermit remains stuck in the past, haunted by the cheating scandal that destroyed his career 27 years ago. Despite his surly mood, Mr. Kermit stands up for the kids in his class, which no teacher has done for them before. To repay him, they steal the vuvuzela noisemakers for the school’s spirit week because they know he hates them and dump them in the river. When an article appears in the newspaper describing the incident and linking it to the cheating scandal, the student responsible for the scandal (now a successful businessman) takes it upon himself to help Mr. Kermit’s class.
Mr. Kermit wants to hate his former student, but he finds it difficult to stay mad at someone the Unteachables like so much. Watching his students become interested in learning makes Mr. Kermit realize he needs to do right by them and actually teach. As both students and teacher find their places in the classroom, Dr. Thaddeus discovers a rule in the district handbook that would allow him to fire Mr. Kermit if the kids do poorly on a science aptitude exam. The kids do well, but since Kiana was never registered, her score (highest in the class) doesn’t count, which drops the class’s grade low enough for Dr. Thaddeus to fire Mr. Kermit.
Determined to keep their teacher, the kids enter the science fair. The students with the winning project get ten points added to their science exams, which would be enough to boost their scores. Despite their amazing project, they finish second, but an article in the newspaper calls out Dr. Thaddeus for firing one of Greenwich’s best teachers. With protests on the horizon, Dr. Thaddeus revokes Mr. Kermit’s termination notice. Rather than retire, Mr. Kermit signs on to teach the following year. His students are overjoyed, and the book ends with Kiana deciding to stay in Greenwich with her friends.
My Review
The Unteachables is a well-written middle-grade book that shares a lot of valuable life lessons – namely that individual appearances, and the labels that sometimes become attached to them, can be deceiving. It also makes a compelling case that given the right team around them, people can overcome all kinds of obstacles. The most impressive part of this is that Korman manages to tell this story without it feeling too heavy-handed or preachy. A lot of the credit for that is his ability to flesh out each character with a youthful sense of humor and heart. I don’t really see any reason why the book’s intended audience wouldn’t enjoy and profit from Gordan Korman’s novel.
I will admit, though, that the novel did not entirely resonate with me and my life experience. When I was in middle school – the age of the kids from this story – the reality of each of the kids in and/or on their way to my school’s alternative center (a real life version of “The Unteachables”) was a little different than the one presented here. In the book, all of the kids still feel emotionally younger, relatively wholesome, and much more innocent than the reality from an actual 8th grader who is being pushed along and neglected by his school. The kids in the book were all good-hearted and easily won over by their teacher. Most of them didn’t have any real problems or personal darkness other than just not being adequately noticed and cared for. When I think back to my own life at that age, I heard about and personally witnessed classmates with some really heavy emotional and behavioral problems. Part of me wonders regarding this book – if it were read by what an “Unteachable” in real life – whether the story might feel like it excludes them. I understand that it’s a tricky balance to talk about troubled kids, but not to include so much of the reality of what that means that it ceases to be age appropriate reading for real life kids. And yet that’s the problem, isn’t it? In real life, the kids who are “Unteachable” are going through things that shouldn’t be happening to kids.
For that reason, tonally, I believe that this book is more of a late elementary school book than it is a late middle school book.
That caveat out of the way, though, I did really enjoy the book and thought it was a lot of fun. The writing shifted really smoothly from one character POV to another, and the blend really told the story of this small community very well, with characters feeling more fleshed out than page count / audio time should have permitted. The audiobook handled the POV changes by changing narrators with each shift. This was a very helpful cue in letting me know to pay attention closely to who the new focus is. It made the whole thing very easy to follow.
On the whole, I enjoyed The Unteachables and I definitely recommend either the paper or audiobook as an early middle grade book. It’s well-written, funny, full of heart, and it delivers a great message to the reader about the value of teamwork and caring.
