The Berenstain Bears' Trouble at School: Brother Hits Rock Bottom and Gramps Shows Him a Wagon

My kids will start asking questions, and the questions are funny ones: why would Brother skip school? This is where I get to quietly pat myself on the back, because apparently if my kids ever get in bad trouble, hopefully at least they don't skip the bus and go MIA on me. Maybe that's just what they say while a book is open and it would be different if it was them. The Berenstain Bears marathon rolls on, and I'll say it up front: this is one of the best books in our collection.

The plot is really straightforward and really realistic. Brother gets sick, misses school as a result of it, and falls behind. That's something all kids are going to experience at some point. They're going to miss school, and they're never going to be super motivated to do any take-home work packets. Even a vacation would work basically the same way. Mama calls Dr. Grizzly, Brother gets tucked into bed, and pretty soon he's got the portable TV, his comic books, and his dinosaur collection, and except for the sniffles he's having a pretty good time. So the folder of schoolwork Sister brings home barely gets a look.

Then he gets a little unlucky. He gets slammed with a quiz on his first day back. Maybe the teacher could have said, "Brother Bear, you missed class, sit this one out, study, and take it tomorrow," but back in the '80s I'm guessing there wasn't any specialized student treatment like that going around.

Brother digs himself in deeper

It spirals on Brother very quickly from there. He hears on the bus that Cousin Freddy took his spot at forward on the soccer team, and he's so upset he forgets all about studying. Then he has to sit through extra practice watching Freddy take his place, and then Teacher Bob hands out the quiz papers. The book even uses him losing his soccer spot as the excuse for why he couldn't focus on the quiz, and maybe he would have done slightly better or figured it out otherwise, since he's good with numbers. That's also a very real thing that happens. Instead the quiz is a disaster, every problem wrong, plus a "Very poor. Must be signed by parent" written across the top.

And then we get maybe the most interesting part of the book: he's so mad he straight up doesn't get on the bus the next morning. He's totally self-defeating himself here, stacking problems on problems. Not only did he fail his test and not tell his parents (they were busy tending to Sister, who'd caught his cold), now he's going to get an unexcused absence at school on top of it. You can only imagine what Mama and Papa would do if they got a call from the school saying "hey, he's absent, where is he?" Apparently that call never comes through. Maybe they just assume he's sick, I guess, considering he's just gotten over being sick.

What we get instead is Brother at probably his lowest moment in any of these books. He's stomping through the woods with the angriest face you've ever seen from any bear, outside of maybe Too-Tall Grizzly's dad, Two-Ton, who gives us a pretty mean look in a future book (we'll get to that). He folds the quiz into a paper airplane, sails it off the top of a hill, and then spots a familiar house at the edge of the bog. That's where the healing process starts.

The Gramps way of handling it

This is where the book stands out to me. There's something unique about the relationship between grandparents and kids, generally speaking. There's going to be some level of disappointment there, but it's not the same way a parent would view the situation. As a parent, and I've been there, anger comes to mind first. I'm not saying parents are going to scream at their kids over something like this, but you'd skew more toward punishments. The grandparents can see it from that different perspective of teaching a lesson. Gramps immediately identifies the situation, that Brother got in over his head, and instead of reaming into him he walks him out into the bog and shows him the old wagon he sank a long time ago by pushing ahead instead of admitting his mistake and backing up. It's a way to connect, too. Gramps is somebody Brother probably looks up to as someone who doesn't really make mistakes, and all of a sudden he's hearing a truthful, heartfelt story from him. It's okay to make a mistake; what really matters is how you react to it and what the next step is.

As a parent, it's very clear that's the right way to go about it, and it's something I've now used multiple times with my own kids. Say they break something by not being very careful. I have a lot of those stories I can pull from in my background, so you can start with "when I was your age, I did the same thing, and maybe I didn't react to it very well, and it ended up coming back and biting me, and this is your opportunity to do better."

Then of course he goes back home, and Mama and Papa definitely aren't happy. This is another very realistic part of the book; there's just no way the parents can not be stern here. It does seem like Papa was able to restrain himself somewhat with the help of Gran's cookies, which is very much in character for him, although a little bit of screaming here or there would have been in character too. And then we get the nice happy-ending wrap-up: a second chance on the test (with Gramps having already taught division by splitting ten cookies among five bears), a second chance at soccer, happily ever after. I get why they do the tidy wrap-up. In real life, sometimes you just have to own the mistake. Maybe the bad grade is permanent and hurts your grade for that part of the year, or maybe you don't earn your spot back on the team right away, or maybe you don't at all. But kids want to connect everything together: do the right thing and good things happen for you as a result. If they'd told the same story where Brother does the right thing and bad things keep happening to him, it doesn't really reinforce doing the right thing just because it's the right thing. So I understand it, even if it is a little rosy at the end.

Getting in over your head

The moral here is said very clearly, and I think it fits a lot of situations that aren't exactly school. The feeling is: you get in over your head, you fall behind on something, it feels like insurmountable odds to get through it, and instead of taking the correct road you do some self-defeating type of behaviors. And, as they say in the book, you back up and start over on the right road. It's not an unpopular topic, but it's less popular than a lot of the typical SEL books out there, and it's a genuinely hard one for kids, because everybody's going to run into it. Admitting mistakes is hard. Finding the correct path and using the support system around you to get back on it is hard. The book covers it really well beginning to end, and honestly it's something I could lean on as a parent for how to handle these situations, let alone giving a kid the right tools.

It doesn't have to come out only when a kid is in the middle of a crisis like Brother is here, either. If there's a subject that's difficult for one of my kids at any given time, it can come out for that. Or it comes out on occasion anyway, just as a reminder that if you find yourself in this situation, it doesn't have to be the end of the world and you don't have to implode.

Brother carries the pictures

Illustration-wise, this is a very strong book by them, and Brother is the centerpiece. We get the full experience of him, from really sick to that over-enjoyment of being home sick, which I think a lot of kids feel. Kids almost want a sick day. They get to skip school, they get pampered by their parents, and you see all of that on Brother's face. The pages showing all the different fun things he gets to do during his sick day are something my kids always really like looking at. Then comes the nervousness as things go downhill, including the daydreaming look on his face as he pictures Freddy scoring goals when he should be concentrating on his quiz, right next to a panel of him looking properly concerned over the paper in front of him.

Then there's the sly look on his face as he slips away from his parents while they look after Sister, and finally the downright angry Brother pages, that V pointed over his eyes, stomping through the woods as angry as he gets. We get reactions from all the animals along the way, fleeing the scene or just watching with stunned looks on their faces. The bears are obviously anthropomorphized here, but even the background animals are more aware than normal, which I think is funny.

Gramps and Gran get that grandfatherly, grandmotherly look on their faces throughout. They're not mad; you can tell they're thinking of this as an opportunity to teach a lesson. And the dingy old wagon in the swamp is a great one, moss all over it, broken down, sunk almost out of sight. You can tell it's been there a while.

They just really went all out here. Every single page has multiple images on it, all of them detailed, and they add a lot to the story. There's no single standout image that a kid will have imprinted on their mind forever; it's just good from beginning to end, and I think it's one of their overall better works.

This is a longer one, about 11 minutes for me, but unlike some of the previous books in this marathon that padded their runtime with filler, this one fills up its 11 minutes. Everything felt important to the plot and kept things moving. This is definitely a Dad's Pick. The kids always enjoy it as well, even when it's not a lesson they need to directly deal with. It's just a nice story to listen to.