3 Pedal Power

Chapter 3 Pedal Power After the assembly Mr. Granite led us to our new classroom. There were posters all over the walls with pictures of rocket ships and stars and planets. It was cool. But the weird thing was, instead of desks, the room was filled with exercise bicycles! "Why are there bikes in here?" asked this annoying girl named Emily, who is Andrea's crybaby friend. "It's part of my new P.A.L. program," said Mr. Granite. "Pedal And Learn. Instead of burning coal or oil to get electricity to run our school, we're going to pedal these exercise bikes. So we'll learn new things, save energy, and get exercise all at the same time. It's a win-win!"

We get to ride bikes in school? Cool! Bikes are fun. I have a trick bike at home. I hopped on a bike between Michael and Ryan. "In third grade we're going to learn a lot about space," Mr. Granite told us. "So start pedaling, P.A.L.s!" "I know a poem about space," I said as I started to pedal my bike. Mr. Granite said I could recite it. It goes like this: Boys go to Mars to get candy bars. Girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider. "That's not nice, Arlo!" said Andrea. "Neither is your face." As we pedaled our bikes, Mr. Granite told us lots of stuff about the planets and stars. Did you know that Venus is the hottest planet? It can get up to nine hundred

degrees there! I hope they have a lot of swimming pools on Venus. Because when I get really hot, I want to jump in a pool.

Did you know that a day on Jupiter is less than ten hours long? Did you know that astronauts are a little taller in space because there's no gravity to push their bones together? Did you know that the ancient Greeks called our galaxy the Milky Way because they thought it was made of drops of milk? Those Greeks were weird. "It takes eight minutes for the sun's light

to reach Earth," Mr. Granite told us. "So if the sun exploded right now, we would still have eight minutes to live." Emily jumped off her bike and started freaking out. "Eight minutes to live?" she yelled. "We've got to do something!" Then she went running out of the room. Emily is weird. "At night," Mr. Granite told us, "you can see over a thousand stars with your naked eye."* Everybody started giggling because Mr. Granite said the word "naked." Any time anybody says "naked," you have to giggle. That's the first rule of being a kid. "Now," Mr. Granite said, "let's learn about Uranus…." Everybody giggled again. It's hard to learn stuff when your teacher keeps saying

words like "naked" and "Uranus." After a while my legs started to feel tired. Riding a bike isn't nearly as much fun when you're just staying in one place and learning stuff. I started to pedal slower. That's when something weird happened. The lights went out. Suddenly, the class was dark. "EEEEEEEEKKKK!" screamed all the girls, as if they'd never been in the dark before. "Who turned out the lights?" Michael asked. "YOU did!" said Mr. Granite. "You need to pedal faster!" We all started pedaling faster, and the lights went back on. "Keep pedaling!" shouted Mr. Granite. I thought I was gonna die!