Mrs. Belch-Hick

Teaches: English Major Accomplishment: Second place at The World Toe-Curling Championships Loves: Cats

She’s a bit weird, and has a cat called Dog. Dog himself is a bit weird, and likes to sleep upside-down on the ceiling.

Mrs. Belch-Hick is very snobby about literature. She believes children’s picture books should not have pictures in them. The weird thing is, even though she features in the Total Mayhem books herself, she is really rude about them. In fact she goes out of her way to recommend people NOT to read them.

Why is it that Mrs. Belch-Hick is so anti-books?

It’s all because of a Disturbing Incident years ago.

Bettina Belch-Hick’s father, Bertrandolph Belch-Hick, was a famous book piler. This is the activity in which you see how many books you can place in a pile without it falling over.

In fact, he won the Book Piling Championships seven years in a row. Little Bettina really looked up to her dad and soon enough she was building piles of books herself. And she was good. Real good.

But what she was even better at, was elbow right-angling. In fact, she was one of the most talented elbow right-anglers around, and when she was just seventeen she won silver at The World Elbow Right-Angling Championships. As you well know, elbow right-angling is the sport in which you have to create a perfect corner with your elbow. She can actually do it with both elbows at the same them – that’s how talented she is!

She was an ambitious young lady and decided that the following year, she was going to go for a Double, i.e. win two different world championships in one year – a feat unaccomplished at the time.

And it just so happened that the World World Elbow Right-Angling Championships were just a week after the World Book-Piling Championships.

Bettina trained really hard and was in prime condition by the time the competition came. She knew she could do it.

She sailed through the first rounds, easily defeating Glen & Glenda Ponsonwick (the famous book-piling twins).

She decisively defeated Seminola Richardson (a multiple World Champion) in the semi-finals.

In the final she was up against Moira Udderfelt, the previous year’s winner.

But Bettina was overconfident, and disaster struck. She had gone in for a Triple Full Alphabetical Encyclopedia move, when the pile tumbled. Bettina was lucky to escape with her life.

But her left arm did not escape so lightly. It got broken in the fall and she was in a cast for a month. Not only had she lost the Book-Balancing championship, but her attempt at the World World Elbow Right-Angling title was over.

And from that day on she’s had mainly horrible things to say about books.

Nobody knows how she got the job at Swedhump Elementary.

Also, nobody knows why she named her cat Dog.