WEST HARTFORD -- A stillness settled on Matthew Dicks' third-grade classroom Monday morning when the 34-year-old teacher announced he had bad news.

"We are about to start a unit on the sun, moon and Earth. I think it's a waste of time, but I have to teach it," Dicks told his students at Wolcott elementary. "We spend all this money exploring space, but here on Earth, people are starving."

The third-graders said nothing. After two months in this class, they'd learned to watch their teacher carefully when he makes these kinds of proclamations. Anything could happen.

It's this kind of unpredictably that has earned Dicks - who is West Hartford's teacher of the year for 2005-06 - what Wolcott parent Kathy Goldman describes as "a cult following" among the school community.

"In the beginning we did not like him," said Goldman, whose son Zack was in Dicks' class last year. "I told him: `I do not want you.' It makes me mad that I am a groupie now."

Goldman is so enthusiastic about Dicks' teaching that she struggles to find words to describe it. But how can you explain why you love a teacher who called your child "Big Foot," and his best friend "Big Ears?"

"His real gift is that he makes every child want to go to school," Goldman said. "I do not know how he does it by insulting them."

Dicks himself admits that he's called to the principal's office several times a year for a quiet reprimand. "I am very much a risk taker and I get in trouble a lot," he said.

As a teenager attending high school in Rhode Island, Dicks once served 87 detentions in a row, he said.

He earned his teaching certificate and college degree while working full time at a Hartford-area McDonald's restaurant. Dicks first went to Manchester Community College, then St. Joseph College and then Trinity.

Plato Karafelis, principal of Wolcott, said he is never worried that his energetic, often brilliant employee will go too far. Dicks takes only calculated risks, Karafelis said.

He has his students put on a full-scale Shakespearean production every year that requires the third-graders to memorize pages of old English. He puts goggles on a child and encourages classmates to crumple up their practice math papers and fling them at him.

On Monday, Dicks spent the first hour of his science unit teaching students about innovations that the space program has brought to everyday life - such as freeze-dried banana chips that some kids enjoyed and others found disgusting, and satellite weather forecasts that everyone thought was cool.

The creativity of Dicks' teaching style emerged when he picked up a large, white cardboard box and carried it to the front of the room. "What's in the box," the class wanted to know. "Is it books?"

"No, it had books in it, but I took them out," the teacher replied. "There might be nothing in the box, so we should not bother to find out. It could be candy. It could be rocks."

"What is it?" the class roared.

"I have some terrible news, my friends," Dicks replied. "We're not going to find out what's in the box until we finish the unit in four or five weeks."

"Aww," the kids groaned. As they stared at the box, now high on a shelf, the students were gripped by the same insatiable curiosity that drives humans to the frontiers of knowledge and exploration.

"Now you are feeling what astronauts feel," Dicks told the class. "Tell me, is it worth going into space to find out what is there? Even if it turns out to be nothing?"

"Yes!" the kids yelled, looking longingly at the box, which for now must remain a mystery.