YMMV / Wayside School

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The students on the 19th story like Mark Miller and Ray Gunn: are they there because they don't exist (i.e. Mark is just Benjamin's mistaken identity, while Bebe just made Ray up), or did they formerly live in the real world, only to get stuck on the 19th story like Allison did?
• Bizarro Episode:
  • Even by the standards of the books themselves, the Miss Zarves chapters are usually quite out there, particularly the 19th "chapters" in Falling Down, where Allison finds herself trapped in her classroom.
  • Chapter 14 from Sideways Stories is about Sammy, a new kid in Mrs. Jewls' class. Sammy comes in wearing lots of raincoats which stink up the classroom more and more as each get taken off. Once the final raincoat is removed, it turns out that Sammy is actually a dead rat in disguise.
• Broken Base: The Adam McCauley illustrations: some don't like them, some don't mind them, and some actually prefer them. Either way, he didn't get to illustrate Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom.
• First Installment Wins: While the later books are well-loved, the first is considered the most memorable.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Wayside School lacking a 19th story is likely a play on the common practice of excluding the 13th floor in multi-story buildings.
  • Wayside School is Falling Down states that Albert Einstein didn't wear socks with the implication that socks make you less smart. It seems like an example of the books' nonsensical humor but Einstein did prefer not to wear socks.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Calvin's chapter of the first book claims that "...there will never be a nineteenth story," only for future books to set some chapters there.
  • Paul and Leslie are implied to have some form of a relationship potential down the line. Then an episode of Kitchen Nightmares features a couple named Paul and Leslie running a restaurant with each other.
• Jerkass Woobie: Miss Nogard. Seeing as she gave up on all love and joy, can you blame her? In her introduction story, the way her heart was utterly shattered was outright tragic. She's more a victim if anything. She makes a Heel–Face Turn thanks to Mrs. Jewls' newborn daughter and Louis showing her The Power of Love.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • In Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, Mr. Gorf uses his third nostril to steal the kids' voices. He crosses it by using Rondi's voice to tell her mother how much she hates her. He does the same to Joe's mother and would have called Leslie's as well had Miss Mush not interfered.
  • Ms. Nogard almost crosses it when she contemplates throwing Mrs. Jewls' newborn daughter out a window. Keep in mind that they're thirty stories high. Thank God she listened to the baby's thoughts before she could do the act.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the first story of the first book, we're introduced to a teacher named Mrs. Gorf, who's able to turn children into apples and does so over the most minor offenses. She ends up turning the entire class into apples; even the missing kids' parents have no idea what happened to them and the students are afraid of telling Louis or another teacher. Louis assumes Mrs. Gorf must be a great teacher because of all those apples on her desk. Finally, the apples mount an attack, pin down the teacher, and demand to be changed back. At the end of the story, she accidentally turns herself into an apple via a mirror. Louis, the playground monitor comes in and, unaware of its true nature, eats it.
  • The scene where a sleeping Sharie falls out of the classroom window, causing Kathy to scream after tattling on Sharie napping. Everyone can only watch in horror as Louis runs like hell to catch her before she splatters onto the playground. It's a good thing Sharie is Made of Iron, and she wakes up grumpily chiding Louis for waking her.
  • Everything about "Sammy", who is revealed to be a dead rat in disguise. No, don't think about it too hard. Mrs. Jewls keeps telling him politely to take off his coat. He refuses and calls her a "windbag". She writes his name on the DISCIPLINE board, not only checking and circling it but also adding a triangle after taking off his multiple coats, which diminish his height. Sammy starts smelling horrible and giving an Evil Laugh. The kids can't figure out if the smell or the laugh is worse.
  • Mrs. Gorf tries to return on Halloween to terrorize the kids. Mrs. Jewls, when she hears what happened to the lady, tells her to Get Out!. That does nothing to Mrs. Gorf's ghost; Stephen hugging her does.
  • From Wayside School is Falling Down, Paul nearly falling out of the window of the thirtieth story. He's dangling for dear life from a brick and asks Leslie to not leave him as she tries to offer her hand, with no time to get help. Leslie is too little to reach him despite her best efforts, and his fingers are slipping. She saves his life by telling him to grab her pigtails while she leans back. This works, while putting her in a lot of pain. As they're catching their breath, Paul says sincerely that one day he will return the favor. Leslie says Think Nothing of It, just don't pull her hair again.
  • The Mushroom Surprise when it's revealed to be a Love Potion. Louis eating it is one thing because he's an adult; Ron ordering it is quite another. Ron kisses Rondi while under its influence, and is implied to have kissed Mrs. Jewls. For that reason, Mrs. Jewls makes Miss Mush throw away the rest of the Mushroom Surpirise and promise to never make it again.
  • One entire chapter of Falling Down is dedicated to Mrs. Jewls's students saying that Mrs. Gorf has been appearing randomly around the school. Deedee screams in terror when seeing her on the monkey bars. Louis doesn't believe it, telling the kids the fear is all in their heads. He completely understands, going Oh, Crap! when thinking his Sadist Teacher had returned. Then when Louis convinces Deedee the monkey bars aren't haunted, he fails to see the second set of larger footprints next to hers.
  • Allison accidentally ends up in Miss Zarves' class on the 19th floor. It is common knowledge among the students of Wayside that the building doesn't have a 19th floor, and that Miss Zarves doesn't exist. Among the students are a thirty-two-year-old woman named Virginia, a boy Allison's own age named Mark Miller, and a small boy named Ray (implied to have been created by Bebe claiming she had a little brother with the same name). All the students do all day is "alphabetize" numbers and memorize the dictionary, and they're never allowed to leave or rest (save for a two-minute break every eleven hours), with Miss Zarves cheerfully giving everyone an "A" no matter what they do. It's outright stated that being in Miss Zarves's class reduces the students' minds to mush: they lose all memories of their previous lives and become mindlessly happy drones. Allison eventually realizes that this is the point—Miss Zarves's curriculum is designed to distract people with mindless busywork so they can't focus on anything important or escape, and the good grades are incentive to not complain. To hammer the point home, we have this conversation between Mark and Allison, severely implying that Miss Zarves's class is Hell itself:
    Mark: Maybe we died. Maybe we died and went to—
    Allison: This isn't Heaven!
    Mark: ...that wasn't what I was going to say.
  • Heck, the fact that Mark Miller is there and mistaken for a kid named Benjamin Nushmutt. He got trapped there because the real Benjamin in Mrs. Jewls's class is too nervous to tell everyone he's not the Mark Miller they have heard about through the grapevine. Mark is only freed when Benjamin tells the truth, and Miss Zarves asked him to deliver a missing ear. It's the ear from Mac's story.
  • "Another Story About Potatoes" has Joe trying Miss Mush's potato salad because he forgot his lunch. In an attempt to make it more interesting, he mixes mustard and ketchup into it and starts shaping the potatoes into a face. John, who brought his lunch, joins him, and they work at it. Both go Oh, Crap!, however, on realizing they made Mrs. Gorf by accident. Mrs. Gorf then comes to life and starts wiggling her ears. They wolf her down fast, and later say it was a close call.
  • Mac's last story in Falling Down is horrifying. He talks about how he heard about a barber accidentally cutting off a hippie's ear because the man had long hair. The man then asked the barber to repeat what he said because due to his ear getting cut off, he wasn't able to hear the barber telling him that. The hospital then lost the ear as they were about to sew it back on and were scrambling to find it.
  • In Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, we have Mr. Gorf, who turns out to be Mrs. Gorf's son out for vengeance. He does this by sucking away the kids' ability to speak through the third nostril on his nose, allowing him to perfectly copy their voices, then individually calling their mothers with those voices and shouting mean, hateful things toward them. Mr. Gorf explicitly says that he's doing this to ensure that the kids will lose their mothers just like he lost his, and the kids can't do anything but silently sob as they're Forced to Watch him ruin their lives. Thankfully, Mrs. Mush pulls a Big Damn Heroes moment to save them.
  • In Little Stranger, Mrs. Drazil seems to be a kind teacher, but she holds grudges against her problem students and never stops hounding them, even when they grow up. Her pursuit of Jane Smith seemingly ends with their deaths.
  • Toward the end of Little Stranger, Mrs. Nogard seriously considers throwing Mrs. Jewls's newborn baby out the thirtieth-story window because the happy emotions the infant inspires hurt her.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: How some readers reacted to Adam McCauley's illustrations for reprints of the first three books, which looked more abstract than those used from the 1970s through the '90s. He never illustrated Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom, published after Tim Heitz replaced McCauley.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In Falling Down, Myron gets total freedom but has to give up safety in exchange. While the rest of the book contains numerous parts where Myron just gets to do what he wants instead of having to take the tests or lessons the other kids do, we never get to learn what kind of safety he gave up, as nothing bad ever happens to him.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Some readers developed one of Mac and Nancy, who become less shy and more self-assured after trading their birth names for ones that they feel better suit their respective genders.
• Values Dissonance: Mrs. Jewls comes off as a less sympathetic teacher in the 21st century, though the books were written in the 1970s and 80s. She thinks that taping everyone's mouths is a great way to keep them quiet after seeing how well it works on Jason— masking tape which is easily removable, but still Nightmare Fuel in the day and age where restraints used on special needs kids have led to suffocation and death — and considers it a fair punishment to send kids home early on the kindergarten bus. Besides the obvious of Getting Suspended Is Awesome, it essentially means she's not doing her job as a teacher. Not to mention that when the mean Mrs. Jewls takes over, she commits several offenses that would be firing-worthy if the kids decided to rat her out. She nearly hits Todd with a yardstick so hard that it breaks, and comes close to dousing Leslie's head in pickle brine just because Leslie was confused about the lesson. All Mrs. Jewls does is punish herself by sending herself home on the kindergarten bus.
• The Woobie:
  • Miss Zarves in Gets a Little Stranger, in which she is upset over being unnoticed by the rest of the school despite loving her job and students.
  • Allison definitely needed a hug when everyone stopped noticing her, until she got to the nineteenth story.
  • Todd. He gets sent home early every day, even when he's not doing anything wrong. He's more horribly unlucky than he is a troublemaker.