The Big Mistake Club, part 12: The Biggest Mistake of the Year

At nine in the morning, coloured paper rustled around the classroom. Sunshine came through the windows, and decorations for the School Day already hung in the corridor. Adam pushed up the sleeves of his red hoodie, as if he planned to build the whole exhibition instead of setting up one table.

“We open at half past nine,” said Ms Benková. “The School Day ends at two this afternoon. Your display should show what you have learned this year.”

“We’ve learned a lot,” Ela said.

“Especially about mistakes,” added Samo. He put his green backpack beside his chair.

There were three numbered spaces on a sturdy table. Each had a label stand at the back and an empty box marked out at the front. Ms Benková gave them a closed, empty snack box, a new drawing of the class plant, and a paper map with paths on it. The real plant stayed on the windowsill.

Beside these, she put pencils, paper tape, three blank cards, a larger card, and a shallow tray.

“First, a list,” suggested Ela. She adjusted her purple glasses and wrote on their planning sheet: “Empty box — SNACK. Drawing of the class plant — CLASS PLANT. Paper map — MAP.”

Together, the friends checked all three objects. The drawing had long green leaves, the map had paths, and the box really was empty.

Samo took out the club notebook. The blue title, The Big Mistake Club, leaned a little to one side on its cover. Below it was an old ink stain, with a drawing of a pencil in the corner.

“This has to be in the display too. It’s been with us from the start.”

Together, they put a paper mat in the middle of the table for the notebook.

“I have a plan! We’ll put everything out quickly, and then… then we’ll be finished,” declared Adam.

He put the map in space one, the box in space two, and the notebook in space three. Then he placed the drawing on top, so only a little of the notebook showed.

Meanwhile, Ela handed over the labels, and Samo slid them into the stands: SNACK at one, CLASS PLANT at two, and MAP at three. All three friends stepped back, but each looked at a different part of the table.

“It looks very special,” said Adam.

The empty mat in the middle did not look special at all.

A moment later, the boy leaned towards space one.

“Wait. The map belongs with the map label.”

He lifted the paper with the paths and swapped it with the drawing in space three. He left the labels where they were. Now the map lay under MAP, but it also covered the club notebook completely.

“I swapped one and three!” he announced happily.

Ela was holding down the planning sheet because its edge kept curling up.

“One and three?” she repeated, without seeing his hands.

“Exactly. Now the map is right.”

A box of tape on the table blocked the girl’s view of the objects. But she had heard the numbers, so she understood Adam’s words in her own way.

“Oh, he swapped the labels,” Ela murmured. “Those were meant to follow the list.”

Before checking the objects, she swapped the back labels at one and three. Then she moved the tape box aside and finally looked at the whole table.

Just then, Samo came back. He had been arranging the blank cards on the tray.

“Here we have a map,” he read, pointing at the drawn leaves. “Here’s the class plant.” His finger pointed at the box. “And here’s a snack.”

He stopped beside the paper map.

“This snack has a lot of turns.”

Adam opened his mouth, but Ela spoke first.

“I swapped the labels back.”

“I swapped the objects!”

For a moment, the only sound was the clock above the board.

“So we were fixing different things,” said Ela. “I didn’t check first.”

Samo looked from space one to space three.

“And where does our notebook belong? Because it isn’t in the middle.”

Now they all noticed the empty mat. They checked the whole table and its edges, but nobody moved anything else. The notebook was nowhere to be seen.

“We could cover it all up before we open,” suggested Adam. “And then quickly…”

He looked at the wrong labels and the map pretending to be a snack.

“No. The quick part of my plan doesn’t seem to work.”

“At least the visitors aren’t here yet,” said Ela. Voices came from the corridor, but the door was still closed.

Only a few minutes remained before opening time.

The girl placed the planning sheet in front of them and pointed along its lines with a pencil.

“Let’s check everything in order. One: a drawing of the plant, but MAP at the back.”

Samo nodded, and Ela wrote down the wrong pair.

“Two: the box and CLASS PLANT. Three: the map and SNACK.”

“Three spaces, three mistakes,” counted Adam. Then his eyes lit up. “I have a plan! This time, I’ll explain it first. What if the visitors had to find them?”

“And the objects could stay where they are,” added Ela.

“But the notebook must find its place,” said Samo.

He remembered that the drawing had been in space three before. Carefully, he lifted the map. Under it, he spotted the crooked blue title.

“Here it is! The map covered our whole club.”

He pulled out the notebook, returned the map to space three, and put the notebook on the middle mat, cover facing up. Finally, even the ink stain could be seen.

Next, they wrote three answer cards together: CLASS PLANT, SNACK, and MAP. They put them on the tray in that order. The boxes at the front stayed empty.

On the larger card, they wrote the instructions: “Find three wrong labels. Do not move the objects or the labels at the back. Put one answer card in each front box, in order: 1, 2, 3. Match the card to the object, not to the wrong label.”

Ela read the instructions aloud. At each sentence, Samo pointed to the right part of the game. Adam taped the card to the front edge of the table.

“Ms Benková, could you check this for us?” they called.

Their teacher gently checked that the table was steady. She looked at the label stands and made sure the path was clear. She helped slide Samo’s backpack under his chair.

“Now people can come and go easily,” she said. “We’ll open at half past nine, as promised.”

Their classmates were still waiting outside the door. The three friends stood beside their finished game. For the first time, their hands were not full of papers being moved about.

When the clock showed half past nine, Ms Benková invited the first small group inside.

“Welcome to our exhibition of mistakes!” Adam began. “The labels at the back are wrong. First, they got mixed up by accident. Now we’ve made them into a game.”

The classmates read the instructions. One boy was already reaching for the drawing. After reading the next sentence, he pulled his hand back and took a card from the tray instead.

“Leaves, a plant pot… this must be CLASS PLANT,” he said. He put the answer in the front box at number one.

Another classmate chose SNACK for number two, and the third player added MAP at number three. Nobody moved the objects or the labels at the back.

Ela checked all the answers against the planning sheet.

“They’re right. But Adam has one more question.”

“How did you work it out?” he asked.

The children pointed to the drawn leaves, the closed box, and the paths on the paper.

“A map shows you which way to go,” explained the player at number three. “It isn’t a snack.”

“Even if ours has wandered over to the snack twice already,” added Samo.

Their laughter brought another group over. Ms Benková let them come to the table after the first group left. Adam returned the cards to the tray, and the game began again.

Between visits, the three friends showed everyone the notebook’s cover. Their classmates remembered the runaway snack, the class plant, the three socks, and the talent show. When they remembered the quiet sounds, someone whispered so loudly that everyone smiled again.

All that time, the notebook stayed on its own mat. Samo watched over it while Ela checked the answers and Adam listened to the players’ new explanations.

At two in the afternoon, Ms Benková announced the end of the School Day. The last visitors waved goodbye, and the classroom slowly grew quiet.

As they packed up, Adam collected the labels in the tray.

“Ela, without your list, we wouldn’t have known if anything was right.”

“And Samo found the notebook,” said Ela as she peeled off the instructions.

“And you thought of the game,” the youngest boy told Adam. “Otherwise, we’d probably still be swapping one and three.”

For a moment, they smiled at each other across the empty table.

“This could be a new rule,” suggested Ela.

Together, they chose the exact words. Then she wrote them in the next free space: “Rule: First we agree, then we move things. A map is not a snack, even when it’s beside a snack box.”

All three read the rule and nodded. Samo closed the notebook and put it in his green backpack.

Adam picked up the map and stopped.

“With the display papers?”

“With the display papers,” the other two confirmed.

They packed the snack box separately, still closed and empty. Then Ms Benková walked them to the door. Daylight shone through the windows, and the real class plant stayed on the windowsill.

At the doorway, Samo looked back at the tidy table.

“The snack didn’t run away anywhere today.”

“No,” replied Ela. “Today, only the map went travelling.”