The Boy with His Head in the Clouds

The Boy with His Head in the Clouds is the first-half of the seventh episode Season 6. It first aired on November 5th, 2001, with More!. It was written by Peter K. Hirsch, and the storyboard was done by Robert Yap.

Summary
George has trouble reading and does not want anyone to think he is dumb. He takes Binky to be his mentor to teach him to be tough so no one will tease him, but realizes he was not cut out for being tough. He finds out that he has dyslexia and works his way around it.

Plot
The episode starts off with Arthur talking about how it would be cool if you could go inside of somebody's mind to see what they were thinking. First he imagines that he goes in Mr. Ratburn's mind, where all things that are fun have to have the fun removed. He then imagines that he goes into George's mind, and his mind can't find the meaning of a simple word.

---THE BOY WITH HIS HEAD IN THE CLOUDS---

Mr. Ratburn announces to the class that they will have a quiz. While Mr. Ratburn was reading the word problem, George dazes off and imagines that he is sitting on clouds with two crows. Mr. Ratburn interrupts his daydream by saying "Well George, I'm still waiting for an answer." He answers "1" because that was the number on Binky's shirt. Mr. Ratburn said that was correct, and asked him to tell the class how he got that answer. He said he just guessed. Mr. Ratburn tells them to read a history chapter. George gets home and he is interested in it, but he has trouble reading it. Almost all of the words come out as gibberish. He gets help from his father, who doesn't yet know he has dyslexia. He then goes to the Treehouse, but they are playing a trivia game. When it comes to be George's turn, everything he reads sounds like gibberish. He gets mad when Buster asks him "George, can you read?"

George goes back to his house and talks to Wally (himself.) He decides that he will try to be like Binky. He goes to Binky and asks him how to become tough. Binky attempts to teach him insults, pushing, and making rude noises. He fails at all of these things because he's "too nice."

The next day at school Mr. Ratburn asked George if he had ever been tested for dyslexia, because Mr. Ratburn had a hard time reading his paper. He gets worried about it, but Mr. Ratburn tells him that it is not dangerous. Mr. Haney also has dyslexia (he can't tell his left from his right, a common sign of it.)

The next scene shows George's dyslexia timeline. He goes to a speech pathologist, Mr. Haney helps him read a book about Da Vinci, Mr. Haney takes him to a dyslexia museum, and George does woodworking with his father.

The gang is worried about George being sent to a special school. George did not make his report because of his dyslexia. Instead, he built a flying machine. It does not fly, but it flaps its wings. George has a daydream, and imagines he flies the machine. He gets an A on the project. Trivia

Goofs

 * Binky was wearing a red shirt in the first scene.

Comments

 * I know what you mean. I expected it to be more like #40301 - "Buster's Breathless. George's difficulty should have been caught a lot earlier than 3rd grade but it's not not real surprising that it wasn't. I think that a lot of the problem was that nothing was really resolved. George had a problem. Arthur and Francine probably still think George really can't read and just got out of writing a report which was unfair. They showed George having special classes with the speech therapist and employing some other strategies but none of it was explained or how they would help him, and there really was no real clear demonstration of how Dyslexia effected George, how things worked/didn't work for him or even a good description of what Dyslexia is. I would definently do that episode completely differently. It was supposed to be educational and it wasn't, it wasn't entertaining either. It was just a very unrewarding episode.