Wayside School/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• Wayside School is very weird, so if it gets a "a little stranger" for the third book, that's nothing new. Until I realized that one of the many euphemisms for "pregnant" is "expecting a 'little stranger'," and Mrs. Jewls has a baby in this book. The school got a Little Stranger. -- Tsunoba (assuming I ever sign up, and also assuming that name isn't being used when I do.)
• The day when Mrs. Jewls sends herself home early is the only day when Todd doesn't get sent home early.
• "A Package For Mrs. Jewls" begins with Louis cleaning up a mess someone made on the playground with pencils and papers. After Mrs. Jewls demonstrates gravity with the computer, she tells Louis that it made a more effective teaching tool than pencils and paper did. This very subtly suggests that she made the mess on the playground.

Fridge Logic

• Tons of it, mostly for laughs. For example, if it was supposed to be one story high, why did they build stairs?
• Also, the two elevators in the third book (which could only be used once each, thanks to Kidswatter's brilliant idea of installing one that only goes up and one that only goes down). What would have happened had somebody pushed the button for the nineteenth story? Or the basement?
  • Presumably there was no button for the nineteenth story because it doesn't exist, and the basement stairs were used rarely enough that they didn't need it to go there. Or maybe the school implodes.
• In the math book, it's stated that Miss Mush can cook extraordinarily well. However, the more people that she cooks for, the worse it tastes. She cooks for the entire school, therefore it tastes awful. Only one person in the entire series ever dares eat her food. So... why doesn't she cook for fewer people so the food will actually be edible? That way, she wouldn't be wasting several dozen pounds of food on a daily basis.
  • This is actually a bit of Fridge Brilliance, if Miss Mush cooked a little bit of good food, everyone would hear that it was good and they'd want her to make more but once she made enough for everyone who now wants it, it no longer tastes good.
• In the second book, one of the characters has this when they wonder since there's no 19th floor, wouldn't her classroom really just be on the 29th floor?
  • And for her Fridge Logic, she is rewarded with being stuck on the 19th floor
• The first math book reveals that there are over 4000 students in the school, which means each story (not all of which are even classrooms) has to hold more than a hundred people. Also, when the school temporarily closes due to a cow infestation and the students are relocated, "no two students were sent to the same school." One has to wonder how far some students has to travel, if they were sent to over 4000 different schools.