Essay Questions

Why doesn’t Hobo Bob wear socks?

Bob is a hobo that Sharie brings in for show-and-tell one day. He tells the kids about how doesn’t takes baths and how he makes Mulligan stew for meals. The questions that the students asks invariably keep coming back around to the fact that Bob doesn’t wear socks and finally he is pressed on the issue into offering an explanation. The explanation is that he doesn’t believe in wearing socks because they make you stupid. As evidence, he first points out that Albert Einstein didn’t wear socks. Eventually, however, he is forced to dig deep in his past and admit that the reason he no longer chooses to wear socks is because one day he won a spelling bee at school when he himself was a kid. And on that day, he had forgotten to wear socks. Asserting that after that epiphany he no longer wore socks, he asks the student to think about his experience and the inherent logic which his anecdote seems to clearly possess.

What is unusual about Chapter 17?

Chapter 17 is titled “What?” and is a little self-contained story about how Jenny arrives late to school, missing everything about a story except for the punch line at the end. Mrs. Rawls suggests she reads the story backwards so the beginning of the story will be a surprise. Jenny was late because she was supposed to drink prune juice for breakfast and because she hates it more than anything in the world, she kept putting off drinking it. The climax of the story has Jenny reaching the beginning of the story that she missed because she was late just as she vomits up a heaping helping of prune juice. What is unusual about the story is that only by reading story backward—starting with its ending and ending with its beginning—does it make any real sense.

What is unusual about Chapter 19?

As is well known by this point in the series, Wayside School has a class taught on the nineteenth floor by Miss Zarves except that the school has no nineteenth floor and there is no Miss Zarves. This information comprises the entirely of Chapter 19 in in the very first volume in the series. From then on, Chapter Nineteen becomes an exercise in the metaphysics of reality. This particular entry takes things to an absurd level, however, as there is not just one Chapter Nineteen but three different Chapter Nineteens. And each of them provide a little more information about the floor that doesn’t exist in the building and the classroom on that floor which doesn’t exist and the teacher named Miss Zarves who doesn’t exist. The three Chapter Nineteens combined together make for a little story-within-the-story that somehow manages to be even weirder than the strangeness surrounding them.