Sometimes when the plane goes into its nose dive, there’s no magic lever that will prevent the coming crash. I wanted to put this idea out there today because … well, because reality is real and we are enamored of stories of the kids who come from behind to succeed. Some kids do manage to clamber and claw their way back up to join the pack of grade-level classmates.

So… potentially useful advice:

Parents:

1. Get a tutor as soon as that dive begins. If you can’t afford a tutor, lean on the school district for extra help. Consider bartering goods or services in return for tutoring. Or be the tutor. I will observe that some kids work better for outsiders than parents, and as children grow older, an outsider may be necessary because not everyone remembers — or even took — that second algebra class.
2. Find books or software to tackle detected learning deficiencies. Here is a place to start: https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/reading-websites/
3. Limit screen time not directly addressing any academic losses. Screen time can become a black hole, sucking away social connections, stealing sleep, and exacerbating anxiety, stress and depression. Emotional states may have EVERYTHING to do with an academic dive.
4. If you are concerned about ADHD or other medical conditions, go in search of a formal diagnosis. This search is rarely simple, frequently demanding multiple attempts. But schools often require a diagnosis and medical input before providing accommodations, whether informally or in the form of an IEP or 504 plan. That diagnosis will help target therapy and any related medication regime.
5. AND PLEASE, PLEASE don’t plan to pull out of an academic plunge “LATER.”

“Later” never comes for so many kids. One reason the achievement gap has proved so intractable is we don’t acknowledge this truth often enough: In numbers, if Jenny only learned 80 days of last year’s 160-day curriculum (I chopped off 20 days to account for days lost to testing), then to catch up she has to learn 240 days of knowledge in her next 160-day year. How does that happen? An extra 80 days of learning on top of a full year’s curriculum represents a soaring, academic mountain to climb, especially if Jenny has special learning challenges such as ADHD or depression. That climb can happen, but seldom without numerous outside interventions — such as evening and week-end tutoring, long sessions with remedial software, or targeted therapy and/or medication.

US test scores amply document that many of our Jennies NEVER recover once the plane starts going down.

Teachers:

I know you are swamped with work, bureaucratic excesses, and an avalanche of meetings, making it hard to leap onto more documentation. But Jenny or Joshua’s learning deficiencies must be documented. Because despite our love of comeback stories, comebacks don’t always happen. In fact —

Whatever our students’ challenges, once they fall far enough behind, the hours required to make a full academic recovery may not exist. This is especially true for students who have fallen behind in reading, since reading is a source of learning as well as a result of learning. An IEP or 504 plan can be part of a rescue but, like all saves, the rescue has to come in time.

Eduhonesty: In the movies, the damaged plane rarely explodes into an expanding ball of wind-blown flames and debris. In the learning landscape, though, crashes are happening everywhere right now. That’s what our far-too-numerous testing days are telling us.

I’d like to reach parents more than teachers today. If Jenny is getting lost, Jenny needs immediate help. Don’t blame her teacher. Her teacher is probably teaching as fast and as furiously as she can. But she has a room full of kids with individual needs and only so many minutes in one day.* A curriculum that works for most kids will hardly ever work for all kids, and I suspect that teacher is trying to strike the best balance she can with the materials she has been given.

Besides, blame will not help Jenny; it may do the exact opposite. Blame can become an excuse not to try. To share a quote from a student that has resonated with me for years: “Don’t expect me to do much. I have low self-esteem.” Kids will take excuses and run with them.

If Jenny has fallen behind, she requires extra hours of instruction outside the classroom. Today’s curricula NEVER leave enough time for remediation. We pack, pack, pack in new learning targets. The problem of remediation time has been worsening. But that’s a macro problem. The microproblem is Jenny’s confusion, and one by one, we can help our individual Jennies.

Hi, fellow teachers, especially the newbies! The start of the year craziness is underway.

I unlocked lockers yesterday, lots of them, as I walked through a school filled with confused, new sixth graders. A few I failed to unlock and someone with a key stepped in. Lock combinations can be tricky. Remembering which lock to try them on also seems tricky for a few. I stepped into a funny dispute over which locker belonged to which student.

I listened to many announcements and picked out the ones I thought mattered most to emphasize. The open house matters more than the upcoming pep rally. We’ll get to the rally, but parents must receive ample warning for that open house, especially since many parents work swing shift in less-affluent areas. They need notice to change a shift or take an evening off work.

I promptly got buried in papers. The physicals and concussion warning forms are being turned in so kids can participate in sports. Other forms are trickling in as well.

Homework and classwork had to be sorted and will have to be graded. Motivationally-centered artwork is being prepared for walls. Stick to it, the work emphasizes, keep going toward your dreams. “You can do it!” Students design bold posters on this theme– maybe because they are a little afraid that they cannot do “it.” A great deal of semi-familiar and even unfamiliar material has begun coming at them fast, leaving sixth graders and others juggling as they try to keep up with the sudden shift away from the lazy days of summer.

Eduhonesty: I can get lost in papers. Many kids are certainly lost in papers. They will be more lost in those Chromebooks if limits don’t get reinforced immediately and regularly. Students WANT to get lost in the Chromebooks. They are itching and twitching to find the games and fun activities now at their fingertips thanks to yesterday’s tech roll-out.

A suggestion for fellow teachers?

Make a list, a handwritten set of items on a piece of paper about what matters most right now. I’d put students who appear to need extra help at the top of that list so they don’t get lost in the paperwork, meetings, more meetings and other bureaucratic thieves of time. Then tape that list in a private place where you will be able to see and update it regularly. I prefer paper to devices for this. Computer files and phone notes tend to get lost in the sheer bombardment of new bytes at the start of the school year.

Then find or make a date for wings with friends and coworkers– or nachos or tempura or whatever you prefer. You might have to be the first one to say, “Buffalo Wild Wings on Friday?” Everyone is swamped at the start of the new school year. If no one else is planning time for fun, teacher-reader, just tell yourself one more time: 

The old research on why boys are much less likely to read recreationally than girls: what is the current status of that research? Did we completely drop the topic because of COVID?

What is the status of checking for lead in our school water fountains?

With school security eating a much bigger piece of the pie than in the past, how are districts allocating funds without harming instruction? That number is no doubt hard to nail down, since it includes both personnel and equipment, and is funded by all sorts of grants as well as district allocations. Still, the number is unquestionably up at a time when COVID protection measures have also eaten chunks out of school budgets. How are school districts coping with these huge, new financial burdens?

It’s hard to get information, too. There’s simply too much information. And who is checking our many sources? The first thing that came up multiple times when I was looking for the cost of school safety measures:

“One ballooning school expenditure is the vast amount of money allocated to school safety. US schools now spend an estimated $2.7 billion.

That would seem clear but it is according to one source — a source that seems mostly to want to sell charter schools. (School Security Is Now a $3 Billion Dollar Annual Industry. Is There a Better Way to Protect Kids? – Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)) The idea is that if you feel unsafe, then you could go to another school. FEE seems an appropriate name for the organization selling this charter school idea.

Don’t you just love all the helpful, objective sources out on the internet? I am unclear how charter schools are inherently safer than traditional neighborhood schools. Our school shootings are not happening only in “bad” schools. The young shooter who took a rifle to the Highland Park parade went to schools with solid test scores and excellent funding — although he was home-schooled for a while I understand. Middle class schools regularly experience shootings in these times. Truth: People repeat what one website says and then the new sites become part of search engine results until we may all be saying $2.7 billion without the slightest idea as to whether or not that number is valid or its source reliable.

Eduhonesty: I’m wandering today, but I do want to get one observation out to readers: All those issues that were raising flags in 2019? Many of them are still here, and the fact that they have been supplanted does not mean they have been solved.

We shouldn’t just move on to the new issues of our time while leaving the boys who don’t read and the broken or even toxic water fountains behind.

Social media posts are peppered with teachers’ comments about disengaged students this past year. We frequently blame remote learning and COVID protocols, two obvious targets, but I must observe that frustrated posts about student apathy predate COVID. COVID makes an easy answer; that does not make COVID a correct or complete answer.

I’d like to put out an alternative for consideration: SEARCH ENGINES. Cell phones are ubiquitous in high school and are becoming so in middle schools. Fears of school violence contribute to the proliferation of phones. Parents are afraid to be out of contact.

But what is the effect of having Alexa or Siri always at your fingertips? The phones obligingly answer any and all questions. I can find out in seconds when Queen Victoria reigned in England. I can find out the size of the Philadelphia police department and get a list of all Spike Lee movies. An obliging source will tell me most cats have between 6 and 8 nipples, and it’s uncommon for cats to have more. I can find the chemical formula for formaldehyde, shown in pictures if I choose.

When I was young, students often memorized facts, filing away “truths” from various disciplines. Having no Google, we engaged with new material in real-time. The price of ignoring teachers’ explanations was high. A unit test was certainly coming, and we didn’t have a back-up learning option other than reading a textbook, going to the library, or finding a teacher who would repeat what we had missed. Back-up options were untrustworthy, too. Sometimes that test was based almost entirely on lecture that barely touched the content of the book.

Here’s a rough description of today’s problem: Xavier tunes out the day’s discussion on the Industrial Revolution because he wants to text Laura. Or he has any of a number of alternative interests that have nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution. Xavier knows he can catch up later. If he doesn’t, it’s likely his school requires his teacher to give him a retake when he fails the upcoming test. Depending on the topic, he may be certain a good Wikipedia article or two is all he will require to stay afloat.

Experienced teachers know that we always had those kids who tuned out the teacher; I’m sure those kids were once sitting in one-room schoolhouses on the prairie. In my school days, these were the kids who blew off their lessons and then crammed the night before the test, burning through textbook pages and friends’ notes. “Can I borrow your notes?” they asked, sometimes before suggesting a study date.

Cramming has simply gotten light years easier. “Hey, Siri. Tell me when Richard Nixon was President?” “Hey, Siri, get me information on Stephen Hawking.” “Hey, Siri…”

Here’s where the scenario goes sideways for the whole classroom. In the past, Xavier might have listened with a sense that listening now could make for the most efficient use of his time later. And when Xavier actively listened, he became curious. He became engaged. He wanted to fill in the holes in his understanding. He asked questions. When he asked questions, he inspired others to raise their hands. Sarah might add a new question to the discussion, and soon questions would be popping out all over the room, becoming part of the automatic flow of that classroom. That’s maybe the greatest fun of teaching: Inspiring and answering student questions — inspiring the fun of learning.

But cramming itself has gotten so much easier that I believe we are sometimes witnessing what happens when students decide to put off learning new content today because they are certain they can pick up that content tomorrow. They don’t engage in real-time. (Or maybe they never intend to engage at all, but that’s another issue.) They only half-listen in class, doing the school equivalent of distracted driving. They are present enough to notice red lights and make turns in proper places, but mostly… they are drifting. Maybe it seems more important to learn when Laura’s parents will be home than to understand the Industrial Revolution.

Eduhonesty: What happens when there’s never a sense of urgency about learning because Siri or Alexa is always there? That’s a topic I might choose to research if I were selecting a research area today. The ultimate study buddy may be no buddy — nobody — at all.

But Siri is so convenient. How do we manage this problem? I honestly have no answer yet; I wanted to write this post, however, to identify and put a face to the problem. Our distracted drivers are driving off the road all over this country, leaving their classrooms behind. We have to help them find their way back to the engagement and enthusiasm they lost.

P.S. Whether for academics or distractions, research into use of search engines also must take into account that we are talking about children and adolescents. Kids are not little adults. Some typical middle school questions: How do I become one of the richest gamers in the world? How can I make millions in cryptocurrency? What is a cryptocurrency? Can you mate a horse with an elephant? Is it dangerous to drop your TV in the bathtub? Here’s a favorite: If I eat myself, will I get twice as big or disappear completely? If you put this last question into a search engine you will get pages of answers, most of them sarcastic or crazy, but a number with a genuine scientific bent. I don’t know the origin of the question, but it honestly sounds like something one of my students might ask. The what-if-I-eat-myself question was even posed on Quora.

“Hey Siri” is a marvelous shortcut when seeking new knowledge, but concerned adults have to make sure that an overarching plan — a curriculum — is at least sometimes guiding Siri’s choice of direction.

I

Twice in my teaching life, I lost it. I completely lost control. I screamed in those classes, a little woman in a towering rage. Maybe I even cursed, though I can’t remember that, but cursing was probably at the bottom of the list of student concerns at that moment. I’m sure people heard me down the hall and on the floor below. I silenced all my students.

In the first case, some students apologized to me later, but they did not owe me an apology. No one should scream at kids for lack of homework compliance. I took a sledgehammer to the wasp on the wall that day. Across the years, I will always regret that one class.

I give myself a partial pass on the second event. I was addressing a specific instance of racism that had taken me by surprise, and I suspect casual racism never again felt casual to the student responsible. Letting my students know that racism fell outside of any category of acceptable behavior — well, that’s not so bad, although my loss of control remains in my memory. I briefly hammered that kid, and that was far from my best response. I lost a huge, teachable moment.

But here’s the thing: I am actually an exceptionally patient woman. On the patience scale, I give myself at least an “8” and maybe a “9” or “10.” You can push so many of my buttons before I get angry. When I do get angry, I may raise my voice, but I won’t throw the plaster apple on my desk. I won’t overturn desks.

Reader, try a few YouTube searches on topics like “teacher throws desk” or “teacher hits student.” Those videos are out there. So are videos of students attacking teachers. Another sobering search as we discuss arming teachers: “teacher committed suicide.” Sources claim there are 3.2 million teachers in the United States. Even if only a fraction of a fraction of 1% of those teachers have the potential to throw a desk, those teachers are out there, scattered all across our country. Some are even veterans with PTSD.

And then there’s the issue of the student who steals a gun. Theft is a common category on school referral forms. I spent hours once trying to help a teacher recover the new cell phone her husband had bought her, all without success. My strongest memories from that day: 1) My administration blaming the teacher for having had her phone upon her desk; 2) Watching as students who clearly had seen what happened chose to say nothing.

Eduhonesty: We have to pull in the guns. Adding more guns can and will increase the loss of life. And we have to stop talking about mental health care as a solution.

I live in a state where one of the biggest medical networks SHUT DOWN talk therapy a few months back because there were no available therapists. I’m sure a person could bump the line by threatening to kill themselves or someone else, but the idea that increased mental health care will somehow address the problem of school shootings — that idea crosses the line from disingenuous into manipulation and pure evil. Because the politicians calling for increased mental health care are not that stupid. They KNOW that preventative care is not out there. In many locations, crisis care is barely available. They know that preventative care would not stop the shootings, even if that care were available — even if those angry loners somehow sought therapy instead of revenge on their grandmothers.

Sometimes desperate educational leaders simply go too fast. As Lily Tomlin said, “For faster relief, try slowing down.”

What happens when you are trying to fix six impossible things before breakfast, while writing standards and lesson objectives on the board, and helping students with mask anxiety while other students are blissfully throwing their masks-optional face coverings into the waste basket? What happens while you run, run, run to get everything done?

Things get lost. Big things. Little things. Long-term and short-term things. Items on the list that matter simply disappear. It’s math really. If you have 14 hours of things to do and only 5 hours available, then 9 hours will remain undone. And if every day is about the same, the negative numbers will simply pile up. Nothing else is possible.

5 School hours for active learning (which does not include lunch, gym, recess if applicable, positive behavioral interventions, and other weird, random interruptions) take away 14 hours of useful, academic things to do = -9 hours of goals accomplished.

Eduhonesty: If kids have fallen behind, picking up the pace is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do. Lost kids deserve a chance to catch up — and that requires slowing down until they understand the content they missed. In math especially, switching to hyperdrive produces black holes and flattened kids who are spewing out weird numbers to try to make their teacher happy, if they are doing any work at all. And we shouldn’t be giving first graders four-syllable or maybe even three-syllable words on spelling tests. Yes, a number of kids can spell those words. But the fact that we get away with those spelling lists sometimes does not justify those lists.

And now for another post that has nothing to do with standardized testing. In pockets throughout the US, data demands keep triumphing over common sense as standardized tests and test preparation pre-empt instructional time. (Yada, yada, yada.) I’ll keep writing the occasional test post, until I get some indication that those classroom instructional hours are being returned to students — many of whom desperately need them.

But this is another post, meant for both parents and teachers. For a quick breakdown of ADHD facts, see Common Characteristics of ADHD – Santa Monica College (smc.edu). Santa Monica’s list is incomplete, but an excellent start in breaking down this topic. This post is not exactly about ADHD and accommodations either, though, despite the fact I’m overdue at spending more time on this increasingly important topic.

I just want to share a shower thought with readers: As an ADHD person myself, I believe I understand an important fact that often gets skipped in social media posts and other articles about ADHD management: The trial-and-error process of medicating children with ADHD is not nearly the “to-medicate-or-not-to-medicate choice” parents and teachers sometimes seem to believe. By middle school, that choice is no longer entirely in adult hands. Here is what supervising adults are up against:

ADHD Amber or Anthony can easily self-medicate throughout much of America, probably almost all of America. How many houses stock liquor? And even before weed was legal, I guarantee my middle-school students were finding supplies. Some red eyes might have been the result of playing Fortnite all night, but others came with faint odors wafting off hoodies and hair, whiffs that explained Amber or Anthony’s mostly agreeable, if slightly blank or disruptive, classroom behavior.

“How old is the oldest tree in the world?”

“We can look that up later, Anthony. For now, we should be focusing on today’s math.”

Here’s the thing about Anthony: He may not be able to Total Recall his way to Mars, but he can for sure blunt his way to the easy chair in a friend’s basement. I tried to control my own kids’ viewing habits and I was partially successful. However, I could not control friends’ houses. And once we hand those kids their phones, all bets are off in categories across the board.

So the choice is actually between medicating, not medicating and self-medicating. The first time that child with generalized anxiety disorder — often concomitant with ADHD — inhales THC or downs a homemade cocktail, the question of medication may go sideways in mere minutes. Gloriously unafraid, having fun with friends, friends who are having fun themselves watching nervous Amber relax — Amber may have set both feet firmly on a path of substance abuse.

I don’t want to oversimplify this issue. I believe genetic components, personal ambitions, family dynamics and background, actual physical location, degree of anxiety or depression, and other factors weigh heavily in what happens next. I also believe that starting set points can sometimes be critical. How is Anthony doing in school? Does Amber have friends, family or a therapist to help her process her feelings?

Eduhonesty: My thought in the shower was a simple one. Those unmedicated kids who are not managing to navigate daily life somewhat comfortably will frequently medicate themselves. It’s so easy to find those “medications,” so easy to take that edge off, at least once out of elementary school.

Teachers are sometimes accused of pushing for medication in order to make classroom control easier. Parents are sometimes attacked for choosing medication, told they “just need good, firm discipline.” (Or spanking, or no red dyes, or less screen time, or the right vitamins etc.) Too often, outsiders don’t understand that those screens HAVE been limited in houses where nutrition is being carefully monitored and books on child-rearing are piling up on shelves.

All families are unique. Decisions like medication require the voices of trained medical professionals who are receiving robust information from families and schools.

Parents: If your school has suggested that Amber or Anthony might require medication, please listen. Teachers can recognize those kids who are outliers, the kids whose inability to sit and listen is interfering with learning. Falling behind is never trivial; somewhere up the line, a student can reach a point of no return — the point where no math tutor can fill in enough gaps to make success in high school algebra possible, at least on the first try. Academic failures eat away at self-confidence, no matter how many positive messages and participation trophies a child receives.

Parents and schools can control nutrition and medication in elementary-age children. At the doorway to adolescence, though, that control slips away. Middle school kids toss their healthy school lunches in the trash and share a friend’s bag of bright red Takis instead. They stash their bong at a friend’s house, the house with the comfy basement and parent(s) who work the swing shift. They perfect strategies not to be caught. Quote from a high school boy of my acquaintance: “The man who invented Visine should have got a Nobel Prize.”

I wrote this post simply to lay out a truth that can get lost: A too-scared, too-scattered kid is more likely to self-medicate than live out middle school and high school in confusion and fear.

P.S. I’ve done fine in life and so has my ADHD child. I hope this post doesn’t come across as ominous because ADHD has many positive aspects. Hyper people can be amazingly productive once they get to work on their personal passions. And many kids will avoid intoxicants even when they are anxious. Still, what I wrote above deserves consideration. I got all “A”s in my French, Latin and Spanish classes in my senior year of high school, but, damn, I was higher than that proverbial kite some days. The smoke must have been wafting off of me. My very Latinesque teachers just smiled and let me slide by. The world forgives “A” students easily and I think no one wanted to cause me trouble. I honestly don’t know why so many people let me pass, but they did, and it turns out I am not an addictive personality. The problem is: you don’t know if you can slough the monkey off your back until you try. Not everyone is lucky.

I was too young for the war of the sixties and seventies, and also too female, but not too young to understand what was happening. I knew older boyfriends and brothers were slogging through jungles while I did my French and Spanish homework. After a few years, I would know people who had seen the Tet Offensive and Operation Rolling Thunder. I spent a year with a boyfriend who had stories of Vietnam from back behind the front lines, a guy who had been in “intelligence.” Intelligence duties apparently included trying to figure out how to file — or lose — the report from soldiers who had placed an explosive rocket up a water buffalo’s rectum, blowing the poor creature into random chunks.

In December of 1969, the US government instituted a lottery system for drafting men into the army, the first such lottery held since World War II. Three-hundred-sixty-six balls* were placed in a large lotto-like, glass container, each ball labeled with a birthdate, to determine the order in which men between 18 and 26 years old would be called into active military service. This system still exists, waiting to be put back into practice: (See Lottery | Selective Service System : Selective Service System (sss.gov) for details.)

The lottery system sounds “fair,” in the sense that it’s based on luck. But the Viet Nam draft was never fair. During my high school years, my school’s high poverty rate and low college enrollment rate made my male classmates prime draft targets. College offered a student deferment, but many boys in then south Tacoma did not come from college families. They had never had college in their plans — though some changed those plans to include further schooling, while others fled to Canada. Draft discussions ate up time in hallways, lunchrooms, and afterhours gatherings. Draft, draft, draft and the luck of an early or late birthdate dominated conversations during key periods of the war.

Eduhonesty: Flip to 2022. The discussions are just beginning, a low drone so far. Young men in high school are googling draft information. Young women are reassured that women are not included in any possible draft — though some are aware that a law intended to add them to the draft only recently failed to be passed. The courts have also suggested a gender-based draft may no longer pass muster. (Can women be drafted for war? (the-sun.com))

It’s early yet, but as we keep moving to support Ukraine, this topic is likely to gain momentum. I don’t recommend bringing it up. That will legitimize a still nascent fear that most likely will come to nothing. And our kids are so worried. The last few years have ensured a high level of anxiety in already-jittery students.

But I would prepare my “this is why you should not be worried” speech, my “we are a long way from boots on the ground” and “the current army should be able to meet any military needs without instituting another draft” speech. Because the topic has been edging into timeliness for weeks now. In these convoluted times, we owe our kids the benefit of a reassuring adult perspective. These kids grew up with Lone Survivor, Fury, JoJo Rabbit, Dunkirk, and Hacksaw Ridge, after all, not to mention decades of older war movies.

I do suggest we wait for them to bring that topic out into the open. We can create the very fear we are trying to assuage. I don’t believe atomic bomb duck and cover drills of the fifties and sixties made students safer, but they certainly made them much more frightened of nuclear annihilation. As we cowered below our desks with our heads on our knees, waiting for the roof to fall, at least some of us believed that roof might actually fall.

I suggest the draft as one topic we ought to hash out in our minds before it enters our classrooms. Hugs from the Blue Room, Ms. J

*February 29th is the reason why the year does not match the number of balls.

Let me start by saying a “20-minute lunch” is not a real thing. Millions of US students experience that so-called 20-minute lunch daily but calling their experience “lunch” is like calling the January 6th incursion into the capitol building “confusion over opening time.” A lunch of 20 minutes — the CDC calls for this — can be expected to be less than 20 minutes. Yes, many schools allocate a full half-hour, but books must get to lockers, students must get across schools, many people have to go to the bathroom all at once, and then everyone has to navigate that long, snaky line.

See Why Teens Are So Miserable (& How We Can Help) (zdoggmd.com). Zubin Damania is a hospitalist, known on YouTube as ZDoggMD. Aside from his negativity on masks in schools, he nails a number of issues squarely on the head in this video, addressing rising levels of teen sadness, anxiety, and mental health. Our children are becoming more alone, though often more alone with a phone, he observes. Where are the in-person social connections?

Eduhonesty: I’d like to flag something. That 20-minute mastication period does NOT qualify as an in-person social opportunity. Once recess has disappeared, our middle school and high school students lose their venues for social interaction, unless they seize that opportunity in class — as a regrettable but understandable number do. In elementary schools, those recess times keep shrinking too.

Having shared my lunch period with students, I know that bolting down a piece of pizza and and a mug of coffee doesn’t leave time for any real conversation. I still have to throw away my green beans,* after all, and probably take something to the main office. And my kids still have to throw away their milk cartons and green beans, and then go to lockers to retrieve afternoon class materials, fitting in a bathroom break along the way. Not all kids can get out of that bathroom in two minutes, especially girls.

I am writing this post to suggest we share with parents and others a truth escaping many people: Lunch sounds like a break, a chance to talk with friends. However, depending on the school and even the location of a kid’s locker or number of bathroom stalls, that “break” may be PURE FICTION. Like a daily planning period that keeps getting pre-empted for meetings, only some of which result in planning, lunch for many of America’s students does not offer the oasis of friendship its name implies.

To liberally paraphrase an old quote from the 1988 Dan Quayle vice-presidential debate: I knew lunch. Lunch was a friend of mine. Reader, these are not lunches. 

Hugs, to my readers. A small blog post that’s a drop of water in a larger, toxic ocean that is sweeping our kids to lonely places, lost in a crowd, often with phones to isolate them further.

*Feel free to look up the sodium target 2 in schools — (USDA’s Final Rule on Milk, Whole Grains, and Sodium in School Meals – EveryCRSReport.com) I don’t want my post to spiral off-topic so I will keep this short. You can get away with barely — or not — salting beans when they are fresh, but after beans have cooked nonstop for hours, only butter or at least salt will rescue them.