What I learned at lunch

It’s been a crazy time at my house lately. When school started up in August, we lost three days to furloughs. That set me back a bit – I need those days in the classroom! I also found out that instead of teaching one gifted class and three traditional classes as I initially expected, I am teaching three gifted classes and only one traditional class. This was an exciting surprise, and I rearranged my plans just a bit.

In September, we lost two days of school to rain! Okay, not really, it was flooding. We had so much rain that many roads were flooded making bus routes unsafe to traverse. While we were out of school, we had an addition to our family – a golden retriever puppy for my husband’s birthday! Devon’s been lovely, but as neither of us have ever had a dog before, it has taken some getting used to!

Devon prancing with a leaf.
Devon prancing with a leaf.

All that to say hopefully I will have a free moment every now and then to update.

That brings me to what I learned at lunch. On Fridays we have advisement with our students. Each teacher has an advisement group. Advisement time is centered around the lunch hour. With my students, we go to lunch first and the go back and do our advisement “lesson”. However, the entire point of advisement is more about building relationships with students then it is about completing the predesigned lesson plans.

Yesterday, I decided to try something different. When only two students had taken a seat at our lunch table, I sat down next to them. As the other students made their way to the table from the cafeteria line, they began to fill in around me. They were excited to have me sit with them at lunch. They told me jokes, asked riddles, shared stories; it was a really fun time.

When we got up to leave, the table was absolutely spotless. They are usually pretty good about picking up after themselves, but there might be one or two things that are left behind. Not yesterday. It was spotless. I was so proud of them.

Yesterday I learned that spending time with my students during that unstructured time of lunch can be fun, and it really helps to build relationships with them. I may even eat with them every Friday.

By Janelle

Space geek, science nerd extraordinaire. That's me! Want to know more, visit the About page.

3 comments

  1. I teach 6th grade and my team decided just this week that we were going to forego the teachers’ table on a regular basis so we could sit with our kids. It’s amazing how much the kids like it.

Leave a Reply to Matt Guthrie Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: