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Alan Smithee
Jan 4, 2005


A man becomes preeminent, he's expected to have enthusiasms.

Enthusiasms, enthusiasms...
https://www.ranker.com/list/full-list-of-the-magic-school-bus-episodes/reference

quote:

Meets Molly Cule

quote:

When Wanda's favourite singer, Molly Cule (Wynonna Judd), comes to town, she chooses Ms. Frizzle's class to wash her famous car. The kids clean it from top to bottom, but when Molly insists they missed a spot, they shrink down to see the molecules that make up the car. Only then can they discover how to clean it down to the very last bit. But time is running out — they'll need a molecular miracle to get the car clean before Molly's concert begins!

yo what the gently caress

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Dapper_Swindler
Feb 14, 2012

Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

molly sounds like grade A OCD rear end in a top hat.

egg_dog
Nov 12, 2005

nͬ͒̂̓̂ͪoͨ́
Fun Shoe
the magic schoolbus goes in some Poo

zone
Dec 6, 2016
Battle Sister Ms. Frizzle and her imperial tributes must survive crash landing in the Catachan jungles while waiting for rescue from the Imperial Fleet.

Hector Delgado
Sep 23, 2007

Time for shore leave!!


Hector Delgado fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Mar 26, 2023

Ralph Hurley
Aug 3, 2009

:barf::sweep::zoid:



teen witch posted:

Entering the anus of one kirk johnson

with the frizz?
no way!!!!

Time stamped:
https://youtu.be/MCidl1M7P_M?t=700

FooF
Mar 26, 2010
"Ms. Frizzle, is God real?" Ms. Frizzle's head turns 180 degrees to look at Arnold, the white gone from her eyes and replaced with an abyssal black. "I'M YOUR GOD NOW" she booms as Arnold melts into a pool of liquified flesh and bone.

"I guess Arnold gets to find out after alll!" Carlos laughs.

CARLOOOO....

Pastel Candy Snake
Sep 6, 2018

by Hand Knit
It's been weeks. The kids are exhausted. One-hundred-eight field trips back to back to back to back. Ms. Frizzle's been demanding so much more of them, too.

First, it was a trip to some Aztec ruins. Standard. Nothing unusual, save for Arnold getting stung dozens of times by some unthinkably huge Amazonian mosquitos. Even still, just another day with the Frizz, they thought. Something changed from that trip onward, though. Subtly, at first, but the kids still made notice of Ms. Frizzle's gradual descent into obsession. Into madness. She would drag them to another forgotten ruin or temple without a moment's rest between them. Each time the kids would black out at the end of the trip, only to awake inside the bus, Frizzle at the wheel. Her hair became even more wild and disheveled with each passing trip, and her jovial cavorting became a grim, determined march into each treacherous temple.

Now, completely spent and fatigued to the extreme, the kids slump in their bus seats silently as Frizzle drives to their next destination. Her hair is jet black. Her smile now a twisted scowl, and her eyes bloodshot and bulging. Liz's decayed corpse hangs from the rearview mirror like an evergreen air freshener- whatever remains of Frizzle's sense of humor became twisted along with everything else. None of the kids are sure when it happened, nor do they care to worry. At this point, it's just another mark against Frizzle's blackening soul.

The bus lurches to a stop so suddenly that the kids are shaken from their exhaustive sopor. They look around, but outside the windows is pitch black. Frizzle sits, motionless, in the driver's seat. The air becomes heavy and oppressive, a hot, malevolent wind flows through the aisle and seats of the bus.

There is a long silence echoing throughout the bus, with only the faintest crackle of embers emanating from Frizzle.

"U-um, Ms. Frizzle. Where are we?" Phoebe's voice trembles, but her question goes unanswered. A shockwave cascades from the front of the bus, sending the students flying from their seats and slamming them collectively against the emergency exit in the back. They scream as they're flung, Arnold too terrified to even quip his usual "I knew I should have stayed home today". Now, of all days, he wished he had.

The children untangle themselves from one another and gather their bearings in time to witness Ms. Frizzle floating in the middle aisle of the bus, cloaked in a red flame-like aura. Her body is nothing more than a pitch-black silhouette, only the brilliant and sinister yellow glow of her eyes casting light to contrast it. She begins chanting.

"In...hoc...vacuo...unum...erimus." Her voice is not hers. It is the sound of steel scraping against itself. A horrid sound that causes the children to wince and cover their ears.

"Hey, Frizz, wanna run that one by us again? We haven't even starting learning Latin ye-" Carlos' confidence betrays him. His glib remarks are cut short by Frizzle's chanting again.

"IN HOC VACUO UNUM ERIMUS!" The boom of her voice is deafening. The air in the bus is searing hot. Wanda screams in pain- the faux leather upholstery of the bus seats, now hot as molten iron, burning the skin on her fingertips.

"IN HOC VACUO," the bus shudders and honks. The sound of its metal framework creaking and bending is as piercing as Frizzle's chanting, "UNUM......ERIMUS!!!"

All at once, a blinding red flash engulfs the bus. The sounds of the children screaming evaporate in an instant. There is silence again amongst the dark void outside the bus. In the wake of the chaos, there is one thing: a grotesque amalgamation of the bus, the children, and Ms. Frizzle, fused into a single mass of intangible horror. Mouths and eyes protruding at random spots across what could only be called its "body."

One of the mouths gurgles, "I guess....we won't need to use the buddy system...anymore...."

The rest of the mouths screech in unison, "CAAAAAARLOOOOOS!"

Pastel Candy Snake fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Mar 27, 2023

goatface
Dec 5, 2007

I had a video of that when I was about 6.

I remember it being shit.


Grimey Drawer
Carlos loses his voice. He can't get the hang of sign language and his handwriting is too slow for effective quipping even if he could get someone to read it in time. He slowly withers and becomes sullen and unresponsive.

One day he does not show up at all. Nobody notices.

Pastel Candy Snake
Sep 6, 2018

by Hand Knit

Dapper_Swindler posted:

so because i love this. I fed it into 11lab AI. https://soundcloud.com/dapper-73299...=social_sharing

i made a voice profile that is just of the guy who reads the 40k novels.

Amazing

laserghost
Feb 12, 2014

trust me, I'm a cat.

https://twitter.com/beetlemoses/status/1633868507271028744?s=20

Dapper_Swindler
Feb 14, 2012

Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Pastel Candy Snake posted:

It's been weeks. The kids are exhausted. One-hundred-eight field trips back to back to back to back. Ms. Frizzle's been demanding so much more of them, too.

First, it was a trip to some Aztec ruins. Standard. Nothing unusual, save for Arnold getting stung dozens of times by some unthinkably huge Amazonian mosquitos. Even still, just another day with the Frizz, they thought. Something changed from that trip onward, though. Subtly, at first, but the kids still made notice of Ms. Frizzle's gradual descent into obsession. Into madness. She would drag them to another forgotten ruin or temple without a moment's rest between them. Each time the kids would black out at the end of the trip, only to awake inside the bus, Frizzle at the wheel. Her hair became even more wild and disheveled with each passing trip, and her jovial cavorting became a grim, determined march into each treacherous temple.

Now, completely spent and fatigued to the extreme, the kids slump in their bus seats silently as Frizzle drives to their next destination. Her hair is jet black. Her smile now a twisted scowl, and her eyes bloodshot and bulging. Liz's decayed corpse hangs from the rearview mirror like an evergreen air freshener- whatever remains of Frizzle's sense of humor became twisted along with everything else. None of the kids are sure when it happened, nor do they care to worry. At this point, it's just another mark against Frizzle's blackening soul.

The bus lurches to a stop so suddenly that the kids are shaken from their exhaustive sopor. They look around, but outside the windows is pitch black. Frizzle sits, motionless, in the driver's seat. The air becomes heavy and oppressive, a hot, malevolent wind flows through the aisle and seats of the bus.

There is a long silence echoing throughout the bus, with only the faintest crackle of embers emanating from Frizzle.

"U-um, Ms. Frizzle. Where are we?" Phoebe's voice trembles, but her question goes unanswered. A shockwave cascades from the front of the bus, sending the students flying from their seats and slamming them collectively against the emergency exit in the back. They scream as they're flung, Arnold too terrified to even quip his usual "I knew I should have stayed home today". Now, of all days, he wished he had.

The children untangle themselves from one another and gather their bearings in time to witness Ms. Frizzle floating in the middle aisle of the bus, cloaked in a red flame-like aura. Her body is nothing more than a pitch-black silhouette, only the brilliant and sinister yellow glow of her eyes casting light to contrast it. She begins chanting.

"In...hoc...vacuo...unum...erimus." Her voice is not hers. It is the sound of steel scraping against itself. A horrid sound that causes the children to wince and cover their ears.

"Hey, Frizz, wanna run that one by us again? We haven't even starting learning Latin ye-" Carlos' confidence betrays him. His glib remarks are cut short by Frizzle's chanting again.

"IN HOC VACUO UNUM ERIMUS!" The boom of her voice is deafening. The air in the bus is searing hot. Wanda screams in pain- the faux leather upholstery of the bus seats, now hot as molten iron, burning the skin on her fingertips.

"IN HOC VACUO," the bus shudders and honks. The sound of its metal framework creaking and bending is as piercing as Frizzle's chanting, "UNUM......ERIMUS!!!"

All at once, a blinding red flash engulfs the bus. The sounds of the children screaming evaporate in an instant. There is silence again amongst the dark void outside the bus. In the wake of the chaos, there is one thing: a grotesque amalgamation of the bus, the children, and Ms. Frizzle, fused into a single mass of intangible horror. Mouths and eyes protruding at random spots across what could only be called its "body."

One of the mouths gurgles, "I guess....we won't need to use the buddy system...anymore...."

The rest of the mouths screech in unison, "CAAAAAARLOOOOOS!"

https://soundcloud.com/dapper-73299...=social_sharing

Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Mar 27, 2023

Pastel Candy Snake
Sep 6, 2018

by Hand Knit

I have no idea if it was intentional, but the audio fry in some parts is perfect lmfao thank you for this

Dapper_Swindler
Feb 14, 2012

Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Pastel Candy Snake posted:

I have no idea if it was intentional, but the audio fry in some parts is perfect lmfao thank you for this

it wasnt. the first draft was way worse. i am almost out of character limit for a while. so i may take a break outside shorter ones.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!
Ms Frizzle? Miss Frizzle? Mz Frissle?

Ms. Frizzle felt right, she thought to herself. Her mind had become so full over the centuries that in a daydream she felt as if decades could pass without even realizing.

Frizzle. It was Frizzle.

It's been so long since she and the bus became bound to one another, so many students, so many schools, so many 'people'.

The schoolbus manifested into the reality as a red sun beat down on on its yellow paint. From hollowed out burrows in the ground, a series of evolved wormlike creatures oozed out of the mud and spoke in a tone she could somehow both hear and understand.

Her own thoughts were no longer capable of creativite thought. Instead, her completely filled mind had become more insect like than her newest students, instinctual and responding to stimulus. In scant moments between eons, where her mind was most clear and free, she wondered if she even could leave this world for truly alien civilizations. Piecing together the torn up pages in her mind, she could almost imagine something out there greater than herself, something that could repair this thing in her mind that felt broken...

"HellooOOO, class," she sang to her students. She once again recited words that no longer meant anything to her. One by one, the worms crawled into the bus and they were off.

It's 1998, and the bus of worm children pull up next to another school bus. Pausing from her loud speech, the driver of the other bus goes silent and turns to face Ms. Frizzle and the bus of worm children.

"Ms. Frizzle," the worm school driver reflexively states as neither question nor introduction, but sensing a vague familiarity of the moment and with the woman who shared her face on that other bus with... Human children?

Human children. There had been human children once, hadn't there?

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012

bad time for me to say I’ve rated this thread a 5, right?

goddamn PBS with that freak poo poo on at 10 am. eat your heart out, spice channel.

Buce
Dec 23, 2005

lucent hive, risen by the traveler?!

Das Boo
Jun 9, 2011

There was a GHOST here.
It's gone now.
Miss Frizzle sends Arnold to the back of the bus with the dead kids.

zone
Dec 6, 2016

Somehow, I never pictured The Friz would rock the Doomguy getup so well.

Das Boo
Jun 9, 2011

There was a GHOST here.
It's gone now.
Wait, I drew this topic for a Twitter thing once.

zone
Dec 6, 2016

Das Boo posted:

Wait, I drew this topic for a Twitter thing once.



You're pretty good!

Das Boo
Jun 9, 2011

There was a GHOST here.
It's gone now.
Thank ya kindly! :tipshat:

The kids find a mummified body in the wheel well and it turns out Miss Frizzle has been Arnold in a wig this whole time.

Alan Smithee
Jan 4, 2005


A man becomes preeminent, he's expected to have enthusiasms.

Enthusiasms, enthusiasms...
"Mother by Danzig? More like Danwig"

"CAAARRRLLLLOOOOS"

followed by a hearty chuckle

samcarsten
Sep 13, 2022

by vyelkin

JediTalentAgent posted:

Ms Frizzle? Miss Frizzle? Mz Frissle?

Ms. Frizzle felt right, she thought to herself. Her mind had become so full over the centuries that in a daydream she felt as if decades could pass without even realizing.

Frizzle. It was Frizzle.

It's been so long since she and the bus became bound to one another, so many students, so many schools, so many 'people'.

The schoolbus manifested into the reality as a red sun beat down on on its yellow paint. From hollowed out burrows in the ground, a series of evolved wormlike creatures oozed out of the mud and spoke in a tone she could somehow both hear and understand.

Her own thoughts were no longer capable of creativite thought. Instead, her completely filled mind had become more insect like than her newest students, instinctual and responding to stimulus. In scant moments between eons, where her mind was most clear and free, she wondered if she even could leave this world for truly alien civilizations. Piecing together the torn up pages in her mind, she could almost imagine something out there greater than herself, something that could repair this thing in her mind that felt broken...

"HellooOOO, class," she sang to her students. She once again recited words that no longer meant anything to her. One by one, the worms crawled into the bus and they were off.

It's 1998, and the bus of worm children pull up next to another school bus. Pausing from her loud speech, the driver of the other bus goes silent and turns to face Ms. Frizzle and the bus of worm children.

"Ms. Frizzle," the worm school driver reflexively states as neither question nor introduction, but sensing a vague familiarity of the moment and with the woman who shared her face on that other bus with... Human children?

Human children. There had been human children once, hadn't there?

is this a reference or original? because i want more.

Buttchocks
Oct 21, 2020

No, I like my hat, thanks.
I am Frizzle the White. I shall now bonk all of you on the head with my staff.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!
"I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it..."
"You can't have it!"


The lyrics of an old song from The Who played on the bus's radio..

Valerie didn't weep as she avoided any further contact with the infant, while school bus merely continued to fume in park. It said nothing, but Valerie knew what it was thinking.

"I know. Your magic. You're magic..." she said, bitterly. "I kept my word. I gave birth to it, but I said nothing about keeping it around after!"

Valerie took a small basket to a porch with a sign on the door that read, "Perlstein", knocked on the door and ran back to the bus. She didn't even care to wait to see if anyone would even answer the door, she and the bus just left.

She felt the bus start to tend towards the interstate offramp, and put her hands on the steering wheel.

"No..." she muttered. "I'm at the wheel from now on. From now on, I'm driving you."

There was silence.

"I'm. Driving. You." she intoned more seriously, gripping the wheel with force strong enough to melt her fingerprints into it. "Say it."

The bus broke and gave into her.

Valerie giggled, then laughed. She started singing along with The Who song from the tape deck, her voice becoming more and more absurd, almost mocking.

"No, no more of that. I think maybe you should go 'unleaded' for a while. I don't think you can be trusted after all this." she said to seemingly no one. "In fact, I think maybe I should just keep my name. MS. Frizzle sounds so much better than Mrs. Bus, doesn't it?"

---

The Perlsteins never told their son of how he was adopted. They family decided to keep it a secret for their own reasons. Still, despite being healthy, smart, and social to varying degrees, there was something very off about him in ways that always made his parents uneasy.

Where had the eyeglasses come from? Why did he have so many yellow shirts? No one ever recalled getting those for him.

The two most absurd thing was perhaps the extremes of the most normal and abnormal for a kid his age.

He had a fear of a teacher. It was normal for a kid his age to find a controlling adult figure with massive amounts of power to be scary, but she wasn't that. This Frizzle lady wasn't some strict headmaster type, but some goofy aging hippie. He'd never had such an anxiety-filled relationship with any teacher until Ms. Frizzle.

The second thing was a fear of field trips. What kid was afraid of field trips? Every kid loves missing out on a day of school to go to a farm or a zoo or something like that.

"Maybe Arnold just has a fear of her because being one of the few redheads in school made him sort of unique for a long time," his mother suggested, seeking out any possible reason. "Maybe he thinks she's stealing his defining trait or something like that. Maybe, maybe he's figured out he's adopted and he sees her as another redhead old enough to be his mom, or maybe he sees her as some kind of threat to us being his parents. They spend a lot of time together outside of the school, with her taking that class on all those field trips all the time. Maybe that's something he's thinking that's the same as when we take him on vacation in the Summer, in a way, right?"

"I don't know," Arnold's dad stared out the window, wanting to finish the conversation before Arnold got home. He'd recalled a moment where he...

No, that wasn't right. It couldn't be.

Arnold's father was about to tell his wife about something strange he thought he'd imagined to himself and never thought to mention. The night that they'd found Arnold on their porch, he swore he heard a bus driving off. That was impossible though, wasn't it?

They were in the suburbs. The only buses that...

Arnold's father blood ran cold.

The only buses that come out to the suburbs are the school buses.

Pastel Candy Snake
Sep 6, 2018

by Hand Knit
The bus eats itself

Professor Shark
May 22, 2012

JediTalentAgent posted:

"I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it..."
"You can't have it!"


The lyrics of an old song from The Who played on the bus's radio..

Valerie didn't weep as she avoided any further contact with the infant, while school bus merely continued to fume in park. It said nothing, but Valerie knew what it was thinking.

"I know. Your magic. You're magic..." she said, bitterly. "I kept my word. I gave birth to it, but I said nothing about keeping it around after!"

Valerie took a small basket to a porch with a sign on the door that read, "Perlstein", knocked on the door and ran back to the bus. She didn't even care to wait to see if anyone would even answer the door, she and the bus just left.

She felt the bus start to tend towards the interstate offramp, and put her hands on the steering wheel.

"No..." she muttered. "I'm at the wheel from now on. From now on, I'm driving you."

There was silence.

"I'm. Driving. You." she intoned more seriously, gripping the wheel with force strong enough to melt her fingerprints into it. "Say it."

The bus broke and gave into her.

Valerie giggled, then laughed. She started singing along with The Who song from the tape deck, her voice becoming more and more absurd, almost mocking.

"No, no more of that. I think maybe you should go 'unleaded' for a while. I don't think you can be trusted after all this." she said to seemingly no one. "In fact, I think maybe I should just keep my name. MS. Frizzle sounds so much better than Mrs. Bus, doesn't it?"

---

The Perlsteins never told their son of how he was adopted. They family decided to keep it a secret for their own reasons. Still, despite being healthy, smart, and social to varying degrees, there was something very off about him in ways that always made his parents uneasy.

Where had the eyeglasses come from? Why did he have so many yellow shirts? No one ever recalled getting those for him.

The two most absurd thing was perhaps the extremes of the most normal and abnormal for a kid his age.

He had a fear of a teacher. It was normal for a kid his age to find a controlling adult figure with massive amounts of power to be scary, but she wasn't that. This Frizzle lady wasn't some strict headmaster type, but some goofy aging hippie. He'd never had such an anxiety-filled relationship with any teacher until Ms. Frizzle.

The second thing was a fear of field trips. What kid was afraid of field trips? Every kid loves missing out on a day of school to go to a farm or a zoo or something like that.

"Maybe Arnold just has a fear of her because being one of the few redheads in school made him sort of unique for a long time," his mother suggested, seeking out any possible reason. "Maybe he thinks she's stealing his defining trait or something like that. Maybe, maybe he's figured out he's adopted and he sees her as another redhead old enough to be his mom, or maybe he sees her as some kind of threat to us being his parents. They spend a lot of time together outside of the school, with her taking that class on all those field trips all the time. Maybe that's something he's thinking that's the same as when we take him on vacation in the Summer, in a way, right?"

"I don't know," Arnold's dad stared out the window, wanting to finish the conversation before Arnold got home. He'd recalled a moment where he...

No, that wasn't right. It couldn't be.

Arnold's father was about to tell his wife about something strange he thought he'd imagined to himself and never thought to mention. The night that they'd found Arnold on their porch, he swore he heard a bus driving off. That was impossible though, wasn't it?

They were in the suburbs. The only buses that...

Arnold's father blood ran cold.

The only buses that come out to the suburbs are the school buses.

Huh

Professor Shark
May 22, 2012

In a good way

Das Boo
Jun 9, 2011

There was a GHOST here.
It's gone now.

Pastel Candy Snake posted:

The bus eats itself

The Schoolbus Centipede

Buttchocks
Oct 21, 2020

No, I like my hat, thanks.
it was a SCSI bus this whole time!

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loAOqd6Yn0s

Drone_Fragger
May 9, 2007


The real question here is if the school bus is alive and sentient, can it feel pain and does it know of its situation. Does it like being a slave to a schoolteacher and demeaning used to ferry kids around?

Das Boo
Jun 9, 2011

There was a GHOST here.
It's gone now.
It seems it has sentience, but not agency. Though if you give it agency, you get the subtle horror of catbus: I am a parasite within a much larger entity, powerless to know its mind or where it will take me.

Drone_Fragger
May 9, 2007


Das Boo posted:

It seems it has sentience, but not agency. Though if you give it agency, you get the subtle horror of catbus: I am a parasite within a much larger entity, powerless to know its mind or where it will take me.

The bus has a mouth, yet must not scream, because this would imply it has a choice on if it can choose to scream or not. Its ability to scream is dictated entirely by mrs frizzle hitting the "bus scream" button. Horrifying.

zone
Dec 6, 2016

Drone_Fragger posted:

The bus has a mouth, yet must not scream, because this would imply it has a choice on if it can choose to scream or not. Its ability to scream is dictated entirely by mrs frizzle hitting the "bus scream" button. Horrifying.

The bus's horn gets used and instead of tooting you get screaming
e: very Addams family like, now that I think of it

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!
(Edited transcript of the NBC Dateline episode "The Flat", hosted by Keith Morrison)

The city of Walkerville, Rhode Island is your typical upper-middle class American suburban community. In the 60s and 70s it had went from a small little town one might have missed that they even drove through into a large bedroom community, comprised mostly of highly paid employees who worked at the many companies in surrounding area.

Families, for a large part, made up this population boom. People fleeing the cities to raise their kids somewhere with the benefits of a small town but easy access to the lifestyles they'd grown accustomed to.

You could see that in the schools. In 1960, the school district had reported a total of barely 300 students. By 1970, that number had increased to 800.

It's in the 70s that our story perhaps really begins. It's the year 1970 that he school district had invested in a new fleet of school buses for this growing student population. It had begun work with renovating and expanding its existing schools, and embarked on the start of a new educational platform with the town's oldest school.

Walkerville Elementary, where a large portion of our story takes place, started as a simple wood school house back in the 1800s, just after the Civil War. It was so small that in 1926, the building was even physically loaded on a truck and moved to another part of the town, where it sat for the next several years, eventually to be hidden and eclipsed by the new, more modern, Walkerville School that started construction a few years earlier. Walkerville School in the 70s had changed from a servicing up to grade 12 to only being a K-8 school to accommodate the growing student population.

Angie Hudson was a student back then. Born Angie Smith, her story isn't that much different than the rest of her classmates at the time. Dad worked for Kodak. Mom volunteered, kept house, taught piano to pass the time to make a little 'mad money'.

Angie went through 12 years of Walkerville schools, went to college, got a degree in business. Eventually, she got married herself, to a man named John Hudson. Had a little girl named Dorothy. Unlike her own mother, Angie kept a professional job, but otherwise history repeated itself.

quote:

MORRISON: So, why raise your own family in Walkerville?

HUDSON: In the 70s, I guess Walkerville Elementary was something of a progressive school in some aspects. As an adult, I'd realized I'd done very well for myself in life, academically and professionally and socially, so when my husband and I were planning on setting down with a family, I was insistent on Walkerville. It made sense, at the time.

MORRISON: You say at the time. Did something change your opinion on that?

HUDSON: Yeah, I suppose. I think we didn't notice it until a few years after our daughter Dorothy was accepted into the accelerated program the district offered.

Walkerville High-Aptitude Student Program, or WHASP. It was a new teaching method for highly talented K-8 students, organized by a series of standardized tests that would identify the gifted among the student population. The "wasps", as they were known, were afforded a much different academic curriculum compared to their peers. Less focus on 'book learning', greater focus on alternative teaching and learning methods. Hands on, self-guided learning, and field trips.

Lots and lots and lots of field trips.

Ah, but remember the school buses the school bought in 1970? Those start coming back into the picture around the mid-90s, and with them, a woman named Valerie Frizzle...

Valerie Frizzle and Angie Hudson couldn't be more similar... or more different.

Journalist Fred Bookman works for the Walkerville World News, the local newspaper. He's one of the first journalists who covered this story, and is co-author of the book, "Wheels on the Bus: The Walkerville Nightmare".

quote:

MORRISON: Tell me about Valerie Frizzle, what you think about her.

BOOKMAN: She's polarizing. She's either charming or exhausting. But the school seemed to love her, the students loved her.

MORRISON: You describe her as free-spirited in one description of your book. Would you say that word describes her fairly well?

BOOKMAN: One of the words, yes.

Free-spirited? Frizzle was quite different from the school marm of old. She, like Angie Hudson, had grown up in a similar setting, around the same time, just in some California rather than Rhode Island. Their paths after school couldn't be more different, however.

Valerie Frizzle vanished for a few years after high school, eventually resurfacing at 22, getting a certificate from a trade school in California in "Care Services". No one really knew what that entailed, but after that, her education and work history was sporadic.

Then she arrived in Walkerville in the late 80s.

quote:

BOOKMAN: At the time, a study had shown that school buses with an additional adult chaperone produced more socially well-adjusted kids. So, Walkerville, being on the cutting edge of this, started to hire people to be monitors on the bus, to engage and watch over the kids so the driver could focus on the road. This is years before the 'school bus monitor' programs we have now started rolling out.

MORRISON: Is this where Frizzle enters the Walkerville school scene?

BOOKMAN: Yes, but the district didn't see much benefit to this program and after a few years and started reassigning people.


Frizzle was offered a job as a back-up bus driver, got work in the school administration department as a clerk, she even bought one of those old 1970s buses from the school, but no one knew why at the time. Then something else happened.

quote:

BOOKMAN: She applied to be a teacher.

MORRISON: A teacher? That's quite a career move from bus monitor to part-time bus driver to teacher. Quite a success story.

BOOKMAN: If she was actually a teacher.

1992 was a very busy year for the Walkerville school system. if it wasn't also the year they began to computerize all their record, they were also facing a teacher shortage, staffing the new WHASP classes, and were presented with another new research study... This one on the value of putting additional staff not on buses, but in classrooms, as 'teaching assistants', which prompted the school district to allow non-traditional educators to be placed in classrooms. Frizzle applied for one of the jobs.

quote:

BOOKMAN: It's unclear how this happened, as there are conflicting theories, but Frizzle's certificate in care services got transcribed as a degree in care services in the school district's employment database. This in turn got later changed to a degree in child care studies, and then later to a degree in child care education, then finally child education.

MORRISON: So, with that, when she applied for the teaching assistant position...

BOOKMAN: The school offered her the WHASP program as teacher.

MORRISON: Which she accepted?

BOOKMAN: Which she accepted.

Ah, the WHASP program... The same program that Dorothy Hudson had been accepted into, wasn't it?

So, even if Frizzle didn't have any academic credentials or experience with this kind of teaching in mind, certainly the school would have given her some sort of lesson plan, right? They wouldn't just trust an unproven teacher to develop an entire academic coursework on their own, would they?

Actually, they did.

This was part of the WHASP's stated goals: Non-traditional learning for gifted students, leaving the lesson planning up to the teachers to maximize their development and growth.

Frizzle apparently got to work on her lesson plans, which consisted of field trips. Lots and lots and lots of field trips. According to school records, students in Frizzle's classes for the last 30 years averaged close to 60 field trips a year. What did the parents think of this?

quote:

HUDSON: We didn't think anything was wrong with it. We just assumed it was the new normal of how gifted kids would be taught. They were already doing better than their peers, so keeping them in a classroom was slowing them down instead of speeding them up.

MORRISON: Did anyone have problems with it?

HUDSON: No, not at the time. In fact, every parent I spoke to said the same thing. Every parent said their kids had never been more excited to go to school, they were getting straight As without even trying.

MORRISON: You earlier said your opinion changed a few years after your daughter was in the program. In what way?

HUDSON: The, um, standardized testing they'd used a few years earlier, they'd redo every few years. After 3 years in the Frizzle program, she tested at a 1st grade level for Math and English.

MORRISON: What grade was she going into at that time?

HUDSON: 5th.

MORRISON: What was she testing at before?

HUDSON: At the end of the first grade, she was testing at the 3rd grade level.

MORRISON: So, 3 years with Frizzle and she lost aptitude in Math and English? But she was getting straight As, right? Well, that doesn't seem like that should be happening, does it?

HUDSON: No. So, going by the testing, they took her out of WHASP and put her in a normal classroom setting for her 5th grade year.

MORRISON: How did she handle it?

HUDSON: Not well. She, she was so far behind all the other kids, which didn't make sense to me. She couldn't stand going to school. She was barely passing. By the middle of the year my husband and I was driving her after school to a private tutoring center in the city, which helped a bit, but that was before we knew about the other problems...


COMING UP: The investigation on the Walkerville Elementary continues with a shocking new revelation.

quote:

BOOKMAN: That's why I said this was a nightmare for these parents!

funeral home DJ
Apr 21, 2003


Pillbug
The planets alignment causes the shrunken magic school bus to lose its magic ability as the children were exploring Carlos’s intestinal tract. The bus rapidly returns to its normal size, covering the walls of Carlos’s room with a fine pink mist.

The children are sworn to secrecy.

goatface
Dec 5, 2007

I had a video of that when I was about 6.

I remember it being shit.


Grimey Drawer
The bus is shrunk down and becomes cylindrical, and is then used as a bullet in a police pistol so the children can experience what it is like to be part of the systemic brutality of the militarised police state.

The lesson hits especially close to home when they're shot into Carlos' uncle when he is found driving an expensive car in a white neighbourhood.

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goatface
Dec 5, 2007

I had a video of that when I was about 6.

I remember it being shit.


Grimey Drawer
I feel like we're picking on Carlos, but gently caress if I can remember any of those other kids.

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