My school, like a lot of public elementary schools, hosts a Thanksgiving lunch in November. The parents are invited, tickets are sold, and the cafeteria manager goes crazy ordering extra food and hiring extra staff to handle the increased business that day. In order to accommodate the extraordinary amount of people in the cafeteria, my current school hosts two days for this event, one for the lower grades K-2, and one for the upper, and more time is allotted to eat and visit (40 minutes rather than the usual 25).
In past years, each class has been assigned an extra table or two to allow for the overflow of family members. This year, however, when the table assignment came out, we were only given two tables per class. When people started to question her table assignments, the school administrator who handles these arrangements swore up and down she had handled it like every other year and refused to change it. As a result, by the time my class arrived in the cafeteria, the table assignments had been thrown out the window, and it was a free-for-all. People were simply sitting wherever they could find a seat, which was fine for the most part, but it made it very difficult for the teachers, who were trying to keep the students together who did NOT have family members joining them for lunch. It also made it difficult for our lovely lunch room monitors when it came time to dismiss a class and have the children line up to leave the cafeteria. The monitors had no idea where the children were that they were trying to dismiss!
At this point, I need to back up just a wee bit and tell you what came before the lunch. My team lead is always the life of the party. If there is fun to be had, she will find it, and if there isn’t, she will create it herself. Last year, she decided it would be a good idea for every kindergartner to have a paper turkey vest and headband to wear for the occasion. The idea was not met with much enthusiasm at the time, partly because we didn’t want to get in trouble with our principal, whose philosophy was completely the opposite of hers (if it’s fun, it can’t be rigorous, and therefore it is not allowed), and partly because none of us wanted to track down the grocery bags and spend the hours at the last minute having to cut out hundreds of turkey parts from construction paper. So, jumping into the deep end of the pool with both feet, our fearless leader said not to worry about a thing. She would make ALL of them for the entire grade level. (I’m pretty sure she didn’t think that one through before she made the commitment.) She worked and worked and must have been up the whole night before and was STILL cutting out turkey pieces the next day after she came to school, but she presented each child with a vest and headband. Some of them didn’t have armholes or neck holes; some of them were missing eyes or other parts, but by golly, each child had one! The children were absolutely delighted (once repairs and alterations were made).
Having gone to all of that trouble, she didn’t want to throw the vests away, so she asked to keep them for the next year. That brings me to this year. With an entire year to think about it, our team leader decided that she wanted to add something to the mix. She wanted us all to teach our children a turkey song and dance to be performed (in turkey costume, of course) for the parents after they had feasted on their lunch. I wasn’t thrilled with the choice of songs, but I kept my opinions to myself and jumped on board the turkey “train” with one exception. With my ever-lingering parents, I was very reluctant to have the performance in our classrooms after the lunch. I knew that my parents would never go home. Without a clean break, I’d either have to get rude, which makes me very uncomfortable, or I’d have to endure parents in my room for the rest of the day (no joke), which is incredibly disruptive and distracting for the children. I suggested we change the performance to before lunch rather than after and explained my reasoning. Apparently I am not the only teacher with parents who have a difficult time knowing when to leave, and the others agreed wholeheartedly.
So, my team leader created the invitations, although why she thought a two-minute song needed 30 minutes to perform, I will never understand, and parents began arriving long before necessary. To make things more awkward, she had over-committed herself once again, and had not made the additional turkey vests that she had promised and were needed to replace the vests lost from the previous year through tearing and other attrition…so we had to share. Now kindergarten teachers are very good at sharing, that was not the problem. The problem was that I now had 20 minutes to fill off the top of my head, with the parents in the room, unable to perform for them yet, while we waited for the other classes to finish with the vests and pass them down to us. Then, we had to get dressed in them. (I asked the parents to help with this, which kept us all busy, which was good…a few less minutes of having them stare at us with nothing to do.)
We performed our turkey dance and song. The parents were enthralled, recording every moment of the almost-two-minute show on their phones. The kids were elated. We removed the vests carefully for next year again, and headed down to the cafeteria a little earlier than we were supposed to. My instructional assistant stayed behind to make sure all of the children unaccompanied by a family member made it out while I led the procession down the hall. She shut the door behind her when the room was cleared, but she didn’t have a key to lock it. We have a new policy of not keeping the doors locked this year, and I admit, it does make it easier for people who need to come and go from my room to do so with as little disruption as possible, which is nice.
We had an agonizing wait in line while parents kept trying to conference with me about how their child was doing. I’m not joking. By this time, I had ushered the parents toward the food ahead of me and had taken my place at the back of the line, and parents were actually giving up their place in line to come back to ask me questions and talk to me about their child’s latest accomplishments. (This is inappropriate, parents! If you want a conference, I’d be happy to set up an appointment with you, but please don’t try to talk to me about your child’s academic and social progress while standing with everyone else in the lunch line. Okay? Can we just enjoy the festivities and make small talk, please?)
By the time I finally got my lunch, I was grateful for the extra 15 minutes. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to eat. I sat with a parent and his child, one of my students, who were sitting by themselves. I had to initiate every sentence of the conversation, which is a strain to someone like me who is not an extrovert. I began to wonder if I was making the two of them as uncomfortable as they were making me, and I started to wish lunch WAS over. As it was, I didn’t get to finish my lunch, but I’m used to that.
The lunch room monitors came, blew their whistle, and called for my students to line up. They came dutifully, and I began to do my usual headcount. 1, 2, 3, … I was four short! I recounted. I was still missing four children. I scanned the cafeteria to see if I could figure out where they had chosen to sit. There was no sign of them. I counted again, hoping by some miracle that they had appeared out of nowhere. No such luck. Where WERE these kids? I didn’t want to leave the cafeteria without them. I scanned the room again in desperation, panic beginning to rise.
Just then, one of my parents came through the doorway of the cafeteria with her child. Thank goodness! There was one down, three to go. The mother came up to me and in broken English informed me that there were children and parents in my classroom. She said she had told them she didn’t think they should be in there, but only she had come back to the cafeteria. Really?! On that piece of information, I ushered my class line out into the hallway and down toward our room. Sure enough, when we got to the classroom door, there were the three children and their siblings and their parents, dragging books off the bookshelves and dumping math manipulatives out of their bins and onto the floor, having a marvelous time and making a wreck out of my room. A couple of them were the same ones whose parents allowed them to trash my room on curriculum night (remind me to tell you about that one sometime), so I wasn’t entirely surprised, but still. Are you kidding me?
A teacher’s classroom is like her second home. It is our second home. We spend about as much time there as we do our actual home. I don’t care if you are taxpayers and part of your money went to pay for many of the things in that room. It doesn’t give you the right to come in and do whatever you want. I would never come into your home and start taking things out of your cabinets and drawers and strewing them around the floor. What are you parents thinking????? This was a first for me. I have NEVER seen parents act with so little consideration as the group I have this year. So despite my best efforts, I STILL had to shoo parents out of my room at the end of lunch, although I tried to do it graciously, more graciously than they had treated me, I might point out. I also had to put my room to rights before we could continue our day. Not-so-happy Thanksgiving!