I decided I would raise mice two years ago, not ordinary mice of course, but fancy mice. These are $2.99 a piece, rather than the $.99 snake food that resides in the back storage room. Fancy mice have color, mostly black and gray. And they have sleek soft fur.
Within three weeks my two original mice had grown to seven on the day that I observed five tiny pink blobs squirming beneath their mother. The numbers continued to grow. I expected the numbers to grow. Mice have no incest taboo. What I didn't anticipate were all of the striking parallels I would see between raising mice and teaching high school students.
Mice seem to eat just about anything that is placed in front of them provided that it is loaded with processed sugar salt or starch. I used as throw out the steamed rice that came with Chinese food deliveries, but then I decided to give it to the mice. A slightly molded corn toward tortilla could be greedily consumed regardless of how recently mice had enjoyed a regular meal of “mouse food.”
My high school students have feeding patterns remarkably similar to pet mice, if one could discern an actual pattern in random incessant eating. Lecturing my students on how crumbs attract roaches is a pointless exercise. They hide their cookies and hostess cupcakes in their backpacks. When I turn to face the wall in order to write something on the board, I immediately hear the sound of crackling cellophane wrappers like static electricity jumping throughout the room. I fear that if the vending machines were ever removed from campus, ambulances would need to be summoned to haul off the teenagers experiencing chemical withdrawal from the Dorito chips and corn nuts.
Curious playful fidgety, both pet mice and adolescent human beings have particular members of their peer groups with whom they are compatible and others whom they would kill if given the opportunity. When I think about it, this also applies to many faculty members of my high school.
There are days when they seem to be filled with fecal matter and ready to deposit it anywhere - the mice literally, high school students in a figurative sense, of course.
Pet mice are hypersexual, producing offspring at inopportune times. My high school students must continually be reminded to tone down the sexually graphic quality of their “fictional” writing samples. The word, fictional, is being used loosely here. The best way to awaken teenage students after a lunch of chili cheese fries and frijoles is to incorporate a passing sexual innuendo into classroom instructions. It works like an injection of adrenaline.
High school students and pet mice have similar attention spans. The duration seems to be about the same for both creatures, in either case my entrance into a room is followed by dozens of little eyes directed toward me for several seconds before they are hopelessly distracted by the instinct to socialize with their peers, or by objects in their immediate environment that amuse them. High school students, unfortunately, do not have tails that can be grabbed hold of and used as tools to coerce concentration or prevent self-destruction.
I'll never forget the day that I isolated one litter of mice from their mother after they began to eat solid food. In the past, I had prepared baby mice for this shock, by placing them with their mother in a separate tub and removing the mother days later. This time, I didn't do it. The youngsters went into a panic. After I watched them hop up alongside the wall of the tub, I placed the mouse tub into the bathtub, as a precaution. Sure enough, the next morning one of the adolescent mice had escaped the confines of the mouse tub and sat dumbfounded a few inches away. It had accomplished what it sought-after in its fury of rodent angst. It was doubtless hungry, thirsty, cold and confused, even as it resisted my attempts to put it back into the place were its needs could be met. The metaphors swept over my brain that morning. It seems to me that often the best way to care for teenage students is to stand in the way and thwart their own penchants for self-destruction.
It would seem that I've been at least an adequate thwarter of self-destruction, at least for pet mice. I no longer keep pet mice, but while I did, the baby mice survived in my bathroom or were safely delivered to the pet store. Naturally, I don't have anywhere near the same kind of control over high school students, but even as a passive observer, it is so much harder to measure teenage survival rates. They can self-destruct in such subtle quiet, gradual ways. Curious playful mice would be such easy prey for predators in a jungle. Los Angeles is a human jungle. Human predators are more tenacious I think that anything you'll see in a National Geographic TV special.
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