The Big Mistake Club, Part 7: The Quiet Hour That Wasn’t Quiet

The Big Mistake Club, Part 7: The Quiet Hour That Wasn't Quiet

The Story Begins

Ms. Benková placed a stack of worksheets on her desk and smiled at the class.

“Now we will work quietly for twenty minutes,” she said. “We will practise concentrating.”

Adam sat up so quickly that his chair gave a tiny squeak. He looked at Ela and Samo like a captain before an important expedition.

“Quiet work,” he whispered. “That means the person who makes the fewest sounds wins today.”

Ela took out her pencil and calmly placed it on her worksheet.

“Or it means we should do the worksheet,” she said.

Samo leaned forward. His curly blond hair almost fell into his eyes.

“And breathing?” he asked seriously. “Is that allowed?”

Ms. Benková heard him even from behind her desk. She seemed to hear things before they had even happened.

“Breathing is allowed, Samo,” she replied. “Just be considerate. We do not need to be statues.”

“All right,” said the boy. Then he thought for a moment. “Statues have one advantage. They do not have noses that whistle.”

Ela pushed her purple glasses a little higher on her nose.

“We will have to check that,” she whispered.

Quiet spread through the classroom. It was not completely empty. Someone moved a notebook. Outside the window, a sparrow chirped. Ms. Benková turned a page in her book. The children began to write.

But Adam imagined quiet differently. In his head, it was a great competition with an invisible trophy. So he placed his hands beside his notebook, straightened his back, and began writing with only his fingertips.

Just then, his pen rustled against the edge of the worksheet.

It was a tiny sound. So tiny that nobody would usually have noticed it. But Adam lifted his head as if a huge gong had sounded in the classroom.

Ela looked at his pen.

Samo looked at the paper.

“Paper is louder than it looks,” he breathed.

“That was only once,” Adam whispered. “Now the real quiet begins.”

Two desks away, someone shifted in their chair.

Squeeeak.

Adam froze with his pencil in the air. Samo froze too. Ela kept writing for a moment, but when she saw her two friends as stiff as garden gnomes, she put down her pencil.

“Do not move,” Adam whispered. “Chairs can smell fear.”

“Chairs cannot smell anything,” Ela said. “They are chairs.”

Samo tried to sit perfectly straight. As he did, his sleeve caught on the edge of the desk.

Shrrrk.

He froze even more.

“Sorry,” he breathed. “My sleeve decided to leave without me.”

Adam nodded seriously, as if this were important news from headquarters.

“We have to reduce the number of dangerous things. Sleeves. Chairs. Paper. Maybe elbows too.”

“And perhaps thoughts,” Ela added. “Yours are already running rather loudly.”

Samo frowned at his worksheet. Suddenly, he put a finger to his lips.

“Maybe I am making noise by breathing.”

“You are not,” said Ela.

“But Ms. Benková said to be considerate.” Samo took a breath so carefully that it looked as if he were trying to sip air through a thin straw. “I will breathe as quietly as possible.”

Adam’s eyes lit up.

“Excellent idea! A quiet breathing system!”

“It is not a system,” Ela objected. “It is a nose.”

Samo tried again to breathe quietly. This time, his nose gave a soft whistle.

Peep.

Adam copied the sound at once.

“Like this?”

“Not like that!” Samo whispered.

Ela looked at them over her glasses.

“Congratulations. You have just formed an orchestra for two whistling noses.”

Samo covered his mouth with both hands.

“If I cover it, will it be quieter?”

When Things Start to Change

“Mouths are not speakers,” Ela explained.

By then, Adam was covering his mouth too.

“Maybe we should all cover ours. Just in case.”

Ela raised an eyebrow.

“And we will look as though we are performing a strange sick ritual during maths.”

That stopped Adam for a moment. Only a moment.

“All right. New plan. We will make a rule for every sound.”

He took a small scrap of paper from his pencil case. The paper rustled.

All three of them looked at it.

Very slowly, Adam put it back.

“Rule number one,” he whispered, “no scraps of paper.”

Ela looked at the worksheet in front of them.

“That will be interesting. The task is on paper.”

“Then rule number one and a half,” Adam corrected himself. “Paper may only be used very politely.”

“What does rude paper do?” Samo asked.

“It rustles,” Adam replied.

The boy stared at his notebook with both respect and suspicion.

Later, Adam came up with another plan. “We will turn the pages at exactly the same time. One rustle instead of three.”

“If we turn three pages at once,” Ela said, “there will still be three rustles, only friendly ones.”

Samo pulled his green backpack out from under the desk. “I have a scarf. We can put the pens on it. Soft things make soft sounds.”

That actually sounded quite sensible. Adam nodded, and Ela shrugged.

A little later, all three were very carefully moving pens, pencils, an eraser and a pencil case onto Samo’s blue scarf. But carefulness had plans of its own.

Tap. Shrrrk. Clink.

Adam’s pencil hit a ruler. Ela’s pencil case slid a little to one side. Samo bumped his elbow against a rubber cover, which slowly, almost grandly, rolled off the desk.

Thud.

It was not a loud thud. Even so, the trio ducked under the desk at the same moment.

“Who was that?” Adam whispered.

“The rubber cover,” Samo answered.

“I did not ask what, but who.”

“Him,” said Samo, pointing at the cover lying near his foot.

Ela pressed her lips together so that she would not laugh out loud.

“The cover is confessing,” she said softly. “Case closed.”

A gentle cough sounded at the teacher’s desk. It was not angry. It sounded more as though Ms. Benková had knocked on the door of their small, strange world.

“Children,” she said calmly, “are you doing quiet work, or staging a secret play about a pencil case escaping?”

The three friends sat perfectly still. On the desk were a scarf, three pens, two pencils, a ruler, an open pencil case, and one lonely corner of the rubber cover, which Samo had just picked up from the floor.

Adam took a breath, quite normally this time.

“We are only fine-tuning the quiet,” he explained.

“So far, it sounds like badly assembled furniture,” Ela added.

Samo raised his hand. “Ms. Benková, can careful breathing count as a school subject?”

Ms. Benková smiled.

“It can count as breathing. And that is quite enough.” Then she came closer and added more quietly, “Quiet work does not mean that nobody ever rustles paper. It means that we give one another space to work. If you need something, you may whisper. If your eraser falls, you pick it up. You do not have to turn it into an Olympic event.”

Adam looked down at the scarf on the desk.

“I did rather turn it into an Olympic event.”

“A little,” said Ela.

Samo let his shoulders drop. They had been raised almost to his ears for several minutes.

“So I can breathe normally?”

“I strongly recommend it,” said Ms. Benková.

An Important Moment

When she returned to her desk, Adam first slowly put the scarf back into Samo’s backpack. Then he straightened his worksheet and began to write. No grand gestures, no secret rules against elbows.

Ela arranged her supplies in a neat little row.

“Less racing, more order,” she whispered.

Samo took a normal breath. Nothing happened. Nobody turned around. The paper was not frightened. The chair two desks away squeaked softly again, but this time Adam simply kept writing.

Meanwhile, the classroom settled into a peaceful rustling. Pencils scratched softly on paper. Someone whispered a question. Outside, the sparrow chirped again. It was not complete silence, but it was lovely for thinking.

At last, Ms. Benková announced the end of the work time.

“I am pleased,” she said. “You worked better than you may think.”

Then she pointed at the trio. “Big Mistake Club, your notebook is by the board. I think today deserves a new rule.”

Adam stood up at once. “We will write: Perfect silence is the highest goal of every focused person in the classroom!”

Ela picked up the pencil.

“That is too long. And it is not quite true either.”

Samo leaned over the open club notebook. “Can whispering be in it too?”

“It can,” said Ela.

After a short discussion, she wrote neatly in the notebook:

“Rule number seven: Quiet can have soft footsteps too.”

Adam read the entry and nodded happily.

“It is short. And it sounds very quiet.”

“That is exactly why I like it,” Ela said.

Samo swung his green backpack over his shoulder and took a test breath.

This time, nothing whistled.

“Excellent,” he whispered. “My nose won today too.”

And when the trio left the classroom, Ms. Benková simply smiled after them. There was still plenty of empty space beneath rule seven in the club notebook. Perhaps for the next mistake, one that would be unnecessarily cautious.