A Week in Purgatory

**see edit from 1/24 at the bottom.**

Lunch duty. It's my week for lunch duty, or as some of us around here call it, purgatory.

Lunch seems so short when you are hanging out in the teacher's lounge with your colleagues discussing the latest...well, just about anything. However, it seems SO LONG when you are overseeing 100 14-18 year olds during their only decompression time of the day. Also, there are other disadvantages. You can't sit down. I spend my entire day on my feet teaching, and then spend 20 minutes at lunch wandering (purposefully) around the gym lobby to be sure that no pretzels become projectiles and that all trash ends up in the proper receptacle. Oh yeah, and making sure that the kids that are bigger than me don't get into a fight with each other, and I can't even yell at them because I don't know their names. (I never realized until I became a teacher how much power there is in knowing someone's name. Singling them out takes away the mob mentality of "everyone else is doing it!") Also, I have to carry my lunch around with me as I meander amongst groups of students, so it makes it difficult to a) bring leftovers or b) hang on to the rest of my lunch while I eat a sandwich. The other downer for me is that lunchtime is my only time for adult conversation during the day, and kids don't talk to you. You're like the social outcast in some ways.

I feel like I'm doing penance for...something. The other kicker is that the assistant principal always thanks the teacher on lunch duty for being there at least twice during the week. It's nice to be appreciated and that he realizes the work that we are doing, but I'm sitting there thinking, "If I had a choice, I wouldn't be here!"

We have lunch duty for a week at a time twice a semester. Today I was trying to decide if I would rather have lunch duty every day for a week straight or switch on and off with another teacher for two weeks. I think I decided that I would rather do it all at once, but I'm not sure.

::edit::Today at lunch, one of my students from last semester told me I should "find a lunch group, because I look lonely and bored without anyone to talk to." Right...like a group of students would really want me to sit down and eat lunch with them...and besides, how can I keep the "downstairs group" from shoving their garbage behind the steel I-beam if I'm eating with students? (Did you know there were so many places to stick garbage?)

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the day. In freshman English, we read Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day," where a girl gets locked in the closet by her classmates during the only two hours of sun that comes every seven years on Venus. Looking to get at the idea of mob mentality, I asked my class who was responsible for the fact that she was locked in the closet. One of my students said, "Survival of the Fittest. She was the weakest and just got booted off." Well, that's one way to look at it...