Ms. Frizzle: A Witch Gone Rogue?
The Muggle world has recently been rocked with shocking news: Ms. Frizzle, thought to be a fictional teacher, is actually an American witch who is on the run from the Magical Congress of the United States of America (MACUSA). MuggleNet has gained exclusive information from an anonymous source about the witch’s childhood and adult life up to this point.
Valerie Frizzle was born to intellectual and creative No-Maj parents in an American city. The first few years of her educational life were spent in a normal public school, but she felt stifled by the strict rules and rote memorization enforced there. Her parents took her out of school and began homeschooling her at the age of eight. Their homeschooling style was based entirely on field trips and hands-on learning experiences, and it was from her parents that Frizzle learned her famous phrase “Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!”
At the age of 11, Frizzle’s family was shocked but delighted by her acceptance into Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Frizzle was sorted into Thunderbird House where she immediately proved herself to be a star student. Within her first few months at Ilvermorny, however, she was already getting in trouble for being “too experimental.” As her powers grew, this complaint was repeated more urgently by teachers and administration. Frizzle excelled in Transfiguration, but she did not stick to the coursework, instead creating spells of her own that took experiments of human transfiguration to the extreme. Frizzle and her pet lizard (who never left her side) became a staple in detention. Further disciplinary action was not taken, however, because the professors of Ilvermorny were fond of the brilliant girl.
In her final year at Ilvermorny, Frizzle became involved in a scandal that was impossible for the school to keep under wraps. Having finally come of age, Frizzle spent her summer experimenting with her transfiguration skills on all sorts of No-Maj objects, including an old school bus she found in an abandoned lot. Convinced that the new technology she was creating was the perfect way to transport students from around the country to Ilvermorny, Frizzle and all her friends arrived at school that year by flying the bus she had found and transfigured to be the size of a bumblebee. The school and student body went wild, and the news of this grand entrance even reached to the highest bodies of MACUSA. The American wizarding world, which had been operating under Rappaport’s Law for over a century, was highly suspicious of anything to do with No-Majs, and their version of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office was far stricter than the muggle-loving Arthur Weasley’s. The entirety of MACUSA was calling for Frizzle to be thrown in jail, and the Head of Ilvermorny had to fight tooth and nail to reduce the punishment to a simple expulsion. Frizzle’s wand was snapped, and she was sent back to the No-Maj world, never to interact with witches or wizards again.
After her expulsion from the magical world, it appears that Frizzle attended No-Maj college and got her teaching license. Once she started teaching science in a public elementary school, however, she quickly felt stifled by the same book learning and rote memorization that she had experienced in her early years at school. She desperately wanted her students to interact with the mysteries and joys of the scientific world firsthand, but the school didn’t have the necessary funds to provide for field trips. So Frizzle decided to take matters into her own (magical) hands.
Frizzle, although incredibly talented as a witch, was deeply proud of her No-Maj background. She believed that the wizarding world was blind and prejudiced, and it was ultimately causing harm to both groups by being so strict about wizard/No-Maj relations. Both groups, she thought, could learn from each other, and she was determined to make sure they would. So taking her trusty school bus out of its garage, she decided to teach science in a way that her students would never forget.
Over the decades of Frizzle’s teaching career, she used her unparalleled magical skills to bring her students from outer space to inside the human body, from volcanoes to earthquakes, from deserts to the ocean floor. She even developed a Time-Turner strong enough to return to the time of the dinosaurs. Nobody, from MACUSA to the public school board, ever realized what Frizzle was doing in her classroom because who would believe a child who told such crazy tales? Although Frizzle’s “field trips” were certainly risky, she believed that children could not learn unless they made mistakes, and under her watchful and capable eye, no student ever got injured.
A few years after Frizzle retired from being a teacher, her former student Dorothy Ann started writing children’s books based on the copious notes she had taken during her time in Frizzle’s classroom. The books took the No-Maj world by storm, and hundreds of young No-Maj children learned science from the magical tales. MACUSA started to become suspicious, but as hard as they tried to find Frizzle, they never could. Nobody knows whether Frizzle and her bus are hiding on the moon or with the dinosaurs, but No-Maj children everywhere thank her for her fearless conviction and skill that brought magic and wonder into their lives.
