Book Review - The Teacher's Funeral

The Teacher’s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts by Richard Peck is a humorous fiction novel about a young boy named Russell Culver who lives with his younger brother Lloyd, older sister Tansy, and father on a small farm in Indiana in the early 1900’s. Russell, a fifteen-year-old eighth grader, enjoys the simple life of camping and fishing with his brother and best friend Charlie, and helping his dad with the daily chores of the farm. He also has a dream of going to the Dakotas to join a team of wheat harvesters and never having to return to school again. Shortly before school starts in August, Miss Myrt Arbuckle, the old and mean schoolteacher at Russell and Lloyd’s small one-room Hominy Ridge School, “hauled off and died” (pg. 3) leaving the boys with a hope that school will be cancelled. To Russell’s dismay, his bossy sister Tansy gets hired to become the new teacher of a crew of eight despite having a year of high school left. She takes on this role vigorously, letting nothing get in her way, not even privy fires or snakes. This book is a great story to use in the classroom for the middle level grades. I would love to have my students compare their favorite teachers to the teachers in this book, and how much teachers have changed since then.