A Teacher’s Lunch

            I have been retired from education for almost fifteen years, yet there are many things about teaching school that seem like it was yesterday.  One such sensory memory is walking into the school, early before the students arrive, and smelling a combination of floor wax, chalk dust and those delicious, fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth, stick-to-your-hips yeast rolls baking in the cafeteria kitchen.  Balm for the soul.

            The last two years I taught kindergarten; our lunch was scheduled for 10:20 a.m.  Imagine going through that cafeteria line smelling some semblance of tacos or pressed chicken patty on a day-old bun.  In reality, I had been smelling this aroma since 7:15 a.m. when I arrived at school.  The cafeteria staff was already busy at work prepping for a sumptuous day of school breakfast and lunch.

            In late August when school began, the children would not be hungry at 10:20 and would often leave half of what their mothers packed or what was on their lunch tray.  By September 15^th, we were all hungry by 10:20 a.m. and then practically starving when snack time rolled around mid-afternoon.  Somehow, we all adjusted.

            In 1978, I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, and teaching middle schoolers on Fort Hood, Texas.  Everyday I packed the same lunch.  Everyday I ate the same things:  tuna salad, cup o’noodles soup (aka sodium explosion), and a naval orange.  Oh, and I drank a TAB.  No variations.  It was the ‘70’s, what can I say?  The combination of lead from the canned tuna, sodium from the soup, and chemicals from the TAB were what kept me going!

            As a side note, this was also the year one of my middle school students brought a set of handcuffs to school and tried to cuff my ankle to his.  But that’s a story for another day.

            One year, I ate a package of peanut butter crackers and drank a Diet Coke for lunch every day, both from the school vending machine.  I’m not proud of it, but it was easy.

            The first year I was an administrator at a high school, there were three lunches scheduled to accommodate the nearly 2,500 students. I had lunch duty starting at 11:00 a.m. until 1:55 p.m.  In the beginning of the year, I would bring my lunch, but I soon tired of the soggy turkey sandwiches forgotten from the day before.  My secretary made it her mission to find us something we could eat from the cafeteria and professed that the pressed chicken patty sandwich was the most nutritious and easiest to digest on the go.  So, you guessed it, that year my lunch was chicken patty sandwich and a Diet Coke.

            As an educator, your lunch hour is never an hour.  It is often 30 minutes with the potential for many interruptions.  You learn to eat your sandwich while xeroxing papers.  You drink the same cup of coffee or bottle of water for hours.  You sometimes gulp down your lunch so fast you don’t even remember what you ate, and often you eat your lunch under the prying and sometimes teary eye of a student. 

            As a high school teacher, lunch periods were notoriously times for skirmishes, fights, and less-than-ideal behaviors, so the concept of an uninterrupted lunch seemed foreign. Students wanted to come into your classroom on their lunch period, which was your lunch period, and make up work.

            At middle school, a teacher’s lunch is never her own.  There is always a student who needs extra help or simply needs to talk.  There is always lunch duty.  There is always a meeting to go to.  There is always something else to do besides eat…always.

            And elementary teachers?  Well, they sometimes run on fumes.  Once, when I was teaching kindergarten, my students had just gone to PE, so I was going to eat my lunch in the quietness of the classroom.  I had just opened my lunch sack when I looked up to see a little face peeking in the door.

            “I fell down,” she said, and promptly took a step inside the door to show her bloody knee.

            I opened my arms and said, “Come here, let me look at it,” and she fake hobbled over to my desk.

            “I was just about to eat my lunch,” I said, “but I can wait until I find a Band-Aid for you.  Did you eat all of your lunch?” I asked.

            With tears in her eyes, she nodded yes.  “But I sure do like chips,” she said.

            I slid my baggie of Lays potato chips over to the edge of my desk and a faint smile appeared on her tear-stained face.

            I wiped off her scraped knee and placed a star covered Band-Aid over the hurt.  Tiny fingers inched open the baggie of chips while I got her a cup of water.  I sighed a little as I glanced up to the clock on the wall telling me my thirty minutes was just about up.  “Maybe I can eat my sandwich on the way home this afternoon,” I thought, and just before the bell rang, my little student looked straight up into my eyes and said, “I love you, teacher.”

            “I love you, too.”  I said.