MOVE IT, MISS MACINTOSH!

Miss Macintosh does not want to go to school.

She has barely enough time to pull the covers back over her head before Principal Bellwether is at the door with the rest of the faculty. In tag-team fashion, Mrs. Sketcher (art teacher), Mrs. Burger (lunch lady), Mr. Jitters (last year’s kindergarten teacher), Mr. Comfort (school nurse), Ms. Patience (guidance counselor), Miss Melody (music teacher), and Miss Bluebird (bus driver) chivvy her through a morning routine that will be familiar to small children. Kids will get a kick out of Miss Macintosh’s childlike behaviors, such as dawdling over her cereal. In her bustling cartoon illustrations, Lands depicts Miss Macintosh as a bespectacled white woman; her fellow teachers are a diverse lot, and the stereotype-busting casting of a man as the nurse and a black man as the principal is a welcome touch. Children will notice that despite a conversation about Miss Macintosh’s untied shoes (she doesn’t know how), her red shoes appear to be tied just fine. There’s no question that portraying the teacher as nervous on the first day of school is a good joke, but this relatively straightforward presentation lacks the clever reveal, and therefore the punch, of Julie Danneberg and Judy Love’s First Day Jitters (2000).

A nicely diverse addition to the teacher-doesn’t-want-to-go-to-school shelf.