Schoolhouse Mouse
Not A Single Thought Behind Those Teacher Eyes
Adapted From My Diary
February 9th, 1984
5:45 p.m.
I stayed home sick today. Terrible cold. Liz just called with a hilarious kind of a day - which actually began yesterday afternoon.
Yesterday I didn’t feel well and it didn’t help that I had several seventh graders for detention, followed by two meetings. Liz, who is my teaching partner, had to leave immediately after school. As I pressed our detainees to get to work, Tom strolled up to me and asked if he could go to his science teacher’s room to pick up two mice.
“I guess so, but your thirty minute detention does not start until you’re back.” He grinned and shot out of the room.
As usual by this time of day, all I wanted was to go home, mix a drink, and collapse.
Tom went to Mrs. Richard’s classroom, said he was serving detention with me, and could he have the two mice for his science project.
“Does Miss Bonsey know about mice?”
“Of course she does.”
“So you’re all set?” she asked, meaning did he have an aquarium, food, and water…
“Yup.”
A few minutes later, Tom, still grinning, returned to my classroom. He was holding a small white plastic pail.
“Where can I put these, Miss Bonsey?”
I glanced down at the squirmy critters and shuddered. “Can they get out of that bucket?”
“Nope.”
I didn’t want anything to interrupt detention, let alone two rambling rodents, so I handed Tom the keys to the large walk-in closet in Liz’s room and told the rest of the wayward crew to get to work.
At 3:30, I dismissed Tom and the others, and headed to Liz’s classroom for my meeting. Six colleagues, the principal, and I met for an hour just outside the closet. I never gave those mice a thought.
The same held true through my next meeting.
And four hours later, even as I lay in bed thinking about how badly that very closet needed to be cleaned, those critters never crept into my cranium.
From the get-go, Liz said, the day was off-kilter. Thanks to my absence, some boys turned into wise-guys. The sight of the good-looking, twenty-two-year-old substitute Mr. Wilson sent the girls into flirty free fall. And on top of all her other responsibilities, Liz was now a projectionist. She dimmed the lights, thread “Johnny Tremain” onto the uptake reel, and pressed play just as a dozen younger kids and their teacher unexpectedly arrived at the back door and had to sit on the floor. “Lynn invited us,” the teacher told Liz.
Which is when Tom said, “‘I have mice in the closet.”
“What?”
“Miss Bonsey said I could.”
“She what?”
Liz motioned Tom to follow her into the closet.
The white bucket was there. The white mice were not.
There were thousands of candy bars stored in that cavernous closet.
Thousands.
I kid you not.
Thousands.
And Liz and I were 100% responsible for the entire haul.
That closet teemed with textbooks, construction paper, crayons, markers, play props, a busted chair, discarded clothing —- and stacks and stacks and stacks of milk chocolate, caramel and almond bars.
Mickey and Minnie had spent the night in a candy haven of delight.
Liz and I were about to spend our nights in debtors prison.
And as you can see from Exhibit 1 below, this wasn’t the first time our fundraising efforts almost landed the two of us in boiling water.
When Liz and Tom returned to the classroom, she noticed two boys laughing and pointing at the floor. She shushed them, and then approached Mr. Wilson. “Do you think mice could escape through the cracks in the closet door?”
“Maybe,”he whispered. “Maybe.”
Liz leaned down to the teacher on the floor and softly broke the news.
“I am deathly afraid of mice,” the teacher said, Her eyes darted around the room. “Do you really think they escaped?”
As Johnny Tremain and his rebel friends chased the Redcoats, Liz left the skittish teacher in charge and she and Mr. Wilson went on the hunt for two mice. I’m sure the girls were wondering what in heck Miss Becker was doing in the closet with Mr. Wilson. I’m sure Mr. Wilson was wondering what in heck he was doing in the closet with Miss Becker. And I’m sure she was wondering how her absent teaching partner could be such an absentminded nitwit.
It took 30 minutes, but finally Liz and Mr. Wilson came out of the closet.
This is Liz’s official testimony given 41 years later via text:
“I cannot tell you how many boxes of chocolate we had to move before we could find one of the varmints. The mice, when we found them, ran around the cartons and cartons of candy bars and they could jump! We settled for capturing one at a time and we had to turn the white bucket upside down to capture them. One of us had to hold the first mouse to capture the second with a bucket.”
“We came out of the closet a little sweaty and disheveled, but we had the bucket and mice.”
Once safely out of the closet, Liz hurried to the nearest science room to get an aquarium. When this particular science teacher found out I had allowed two mice to be stored in a pail in a closet on the basis of a seventh grader’s say-so, he pretty much refused to loan us his aquarium.
Liz persisted.
“What does Bonsey know about mice?” Mr. Science said.
I don’t know what Liz said to that, but she did return with an aquarium and then she returned to the scene of the crime where she took on the heart-stopping task of inspecting each candy box for teeth marks and mice droppings.
Somehow our candy stash was unscathed, the mice were saved, our reputations were left intact, and our mugshots would never see the light of day.
Or so we thought.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
For a few years in the early 80s, Liz and I worked with our 45 middle-schoolers to raise several thousand dollars for field trips, including a week’s stay at an outdoor education center in Cape Cod. It seems unbelievable now, but our students raised most of the trip money selling candy bars.
Liz and I have re-hashed this tale hundreds of times. We still laugh all the way through it and sometimes we can’t believe we survived decades of teaching middle school.
As for the “mugshots,” all I can say is: Picture day must have been rough.