The Teacher Whose Head Became a Saucepan

An unconventional teacher upsets the applecart in a school set in traditional ways. Mrs Vasso is more concerned with opening her pupils' minds, making them feel emotionally secure and  supporting their right to express themselves than she is with their amassing sterile knowledge. She wants her pupils to become the happiest, most creative and most responsible children in the school and leads them along a joyful and humorous path to knowledge by offering them learning like a sweet one cannot get enough of. However, the conservative and narrow-minded headmaster, the embodiment of the “system”, has other plans. He is not convinced that imagination goes hand in hand with opening children's eyes and that the programme laid down by the ministry will leave them at the best short-sighted. He orders Mrs Vasso to change her progressive ways of teaching, and faced with the threat of dismissal she is forced to compromise. In the boring atmosphere the “new” teaching method creates, Mrs Vasso's 26 pupils become little devils. The creative liveliness of her classes is transformed into noisy chaos, with rubbers flying like bullets, paper darts engaged in air fights and other ingenious unruliness. In trying to stave off the dullness and sterility of the new regime the children make Mrs Vasso's life impossible. Like every boring teacher she repeatedly protests about their behaviour and warns them they are turning her head into a saucepan (i.e. a pressure cooker ready to explode). And then one day it really happens: their teacher's lovely head becomes a big soot-blackened saucepan. Her pupils decide to change their behaviour completely in the hope of returning their beloved Mrs Vasso to the way she was. Twenty-six now perfectly-behaved children try various devices to achieve their goal. After the failure of Operation Hypnosis and Operation Onion they decide to teach themselves, using their teacher's old delightful methods, and by the end of the book they have succeeded in restoring her head to its former shape, after it goes through transformations into a series of successively smaller cooking pots.