All You Need to Know About Snack Time

My grade has the last lunch of the day this year, so it really becomes important for the students (and the teacher) to have a morning snack. Without it, some of us are going a solid five or six hours with no nourishment before lunch, and we can’t have a room full of empty tummies because empty brains will inevitably follow. But think about the kind of mess one kid can make when she or he sits down to eat, then multiply that by twenty-five to thirty times, and welcome to the middle of my morning. (FYI: Now that I’m teaching 3rd grade again, I'm becoming much more comfortable using all forms of the word “tummy” than I would have been even a month ago.)

In a perfect world the kids would sit down at their desks, eat their snacks in five minutes, throw away any trash they have left and be ready to get back to work. I promise it never happens this way. During my years in the classroom, I’ve seen enough snack incidents to turn nearly anyone into a compulsive neat freak. We end up with at least one fruit snack wrapper on the floor beside the trash can on most days, because some kids don’t have that magic three-point shot touch they think they do, and they show very little interest in chasing down their rebounds. By the time snack is finished, the classroom floor has become a minefield of Goldfish crackers and cereal nuggets waiting to be crushed into flavored dust by the first foot to accidentally find them. I know that if the syrup from a single-serving plastic fruit cup isn’t wiped up immediately with both wet and dry paper towels, the next sheet of paper to touch that desktop will become fused to it at the molecular level. More than once I’ve seen a student cleaning out their desk and finding a forgotten (and blessedly sealed) plastic container that never quite had all of the ranch dressing rinsed out of it, discovering an impromptu science project had commenced since it was last seen. Which is to say nothing of the kid who one day found eleven forks in her desk. I don’t mean plastic picnicware here, I mean actual take-them-out-of-the-kitchen-drawer metal forks. Eleven of them. It made me wonder how long her family had been living off finger food and cereal.

Let’s also talk about the stink. I don’t know at what point in the past ten years snack food companies decided they needed to offer so many “Flamin’ Hot” options, but kids LOVE them. The few I’ve ever tried taste very wrong, and the smell that lingers in the room afterward is even worse. It’s an artificial stench so foul it wouldn’t surprise me if it had been engineered to offend anyone older than sixteen. It’s so bad that one day a kid brought in a bag of sliced red peppers which, while still strong-smelling, were refreshingly natural by comparison.

Don’t even get me started about birthday treats and class parties. Regarding those, I’ll leave you with three snapshot visuals to consider: Cupcakes buried in sprinkles with frosting that turns tongues different colors. Lollipop sticks sucked and chewed on until liquified. Root beer puddles. It’s always the root beer....

Even though dealing with the mess drives me crazy, I enjoy a lot of our incidental snack time moments and how they reveal little things about my students I wouldn’t otherwise learn. One morning this week one of the kids stepped out to his locker at snack time and returned moments later carrying the first Honeycrisp apple I’ve seen this season. If you don’t know Honeycrisps, they can get pretty big, and this one had. He walked in with it carried in both hands like a trophy.

“That...is the biggest apple...I have ever seen...in my life!” I exclaimed when I saw it, causing every other head in the room to turn his direction, making him smile even wider. “That apple is bigger than your head!" I continued. "There is no way you’ll ever eat the whole thing!”

To reply, all this quiet, unassuming little guy did was look at me with raised eyebrows as if to say, “You think? Okay. Just sit back and watch.” Sure enough, he powered that thing down to a thick core, but easily ate enough to count it as finished.

Thankfully that core made it into the trash can.

The Pencil Collection

About twenty years ago I decided to start collecting pencils. It seemed like an appropriate enough hobby for two reasons: 1) Teachers encounter a lot of pencils on a typical work day, and there was a wide variety of designs out there. 2) Pencils seemed very much like a writer kind of thing to collect. If I was out traveling or passing through any kind of store or touristy gift shop that kept a small display of souvenir pencils by the cash register, I’d pick one up. If I had friends of family going on vacation, I’d ask them to keep an eye out. The collection began growing exponentially as my students became more aware of it and took an interest, sometimes gifting me with new pencils upon returning from vacations, sometimes just handing them over if they got one as some kind of a prize, and even a few times taking the time to come up with original designs made of everything from Play-Doh dots to sparkly ribbons to multi-colored Sharpie scribbles.

It’s been a few years since I last counted them, but I know the collection now numbers well over 500. Digging through it is a historical study not unlike reading the rings from the cross section of a tree: There are two encouraging me to participate in the census, identical except for having dates a decade apart. I found one in buried in there this summer promoting a website that doesn’t exist anymore. I have some reminding me what a big scary deal people made Y2K out to be, or that the St. Louis Rams once played in Los Angeles.

I have pencils printed to advertise every imaginable business, tourist attraction, organization, or cause. I couldn't honestly guess how many different languages or countries are represented. I’ll admit I don’t remember where most of them came from, but many are still notable for different reasons. Some with unique novelty toppers tend to stand out: The double-decker London bus, the Stratosphere hotel, the Scooby Doo snow globe, the Koosh ball. There are a lot I have personal connections to, like the one my parents bought me in Thailand, several from my school, one that expresses the value of pi out to sixty digits, and one from the school where I did my student teaching which was closed several years ago. There’s one encased in a plastic tube that allegedly smells like root beer; I can neither confirm nor deny the validity of this because I’ve never broken the seal. I’ve never been to New York City, but based on my pencil collection I suspect souvenirs are probably easy to find there.

Several of them bring back memories from many directions, but even with all of the history and connections I have in that pile, it’s easy to pick out a favorite: It’s a pale yellow pencil with the words “dry clean only” printed on one side and “100% wool” printed on the other, with a fuzzy, chubby sheep for a topper. My sister Erin gave it to me. Sheep were kind of her thing.

While I was writing this, it occurred to me there was actually a third reason I had started the collection: Back about that time the Internet was really just catching on in the mainstream, and it seemed possible that someday the good old ubiquitous wood & graphite pencil we all grew up with could very possibly go the way of the inkwell and quill or chalk and slate in a paperless society. Now in a world with more schools bringing in dozens if not hundreds of iPads for their students, and the advent of devices like the Apple Watch, such a thing seems all the more possible. Usually I love living in a time my younger self would have considered science fiction. But all the same, I hope we don’t work our way out of using pencils anytime soon.

Everything You Need to Know About Teaching 3rd Grade

I’m on the verge of completing the first week of my second third grade tenure (see what I did there, with the counting?), and I think it’s safe to say I’m already a huge expert on all of this once again. To be fair, a lot of it I already knew. But it’s been several, several years since the last time I could call myself a third grade teacher -- we’re talking Clinton presidency -- so a lot of this is stuff I needed to be reminded about. If you’ve never taught 3rd grade before, here’s pretty much all you need to know:

*Crayons, markers, and colored pencils are everything. The simple act of coloring is purely hypnotic for them; coloring with markers borders on the transcendent. The typical third grader is ready to deconstruct their entire personal infrastructure if it means finding the exact crayon they’re searching for. If there is ever an apocalypse and only third graders survive it, I have no doubt that crayons and markers will immediately be recognized as international currency.

*The directions presented by the teacher are generally viewed as casual suggestions. Speaking from the teacher perspective, if you want directions to be followed, you need to a) get the attention of everyone in the class, b) say your directions, c) rephrase them a minimum of seven different ways, and d) simply accept there will be several instances in the subsequent thirty minutes when you will be asked to repeat everything you just finished saying.

*Every joke you make is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard, because they haven’t been around very long and they only know about seven jokes.

*It’s been close to a decade since I’ve been able to read aloud to my class, and I have missed it dearly. Turns out I am still absolutely AMAZING at it. Seriously. I could sell tickets, and they’d be scalped for three times their face value in the bathrooms.

*When you call on third graders in class, some of them will craft their answers as lengthy, almost literary, prose. They are probably the ones you don’t want to call on too frequently, but they will always have their hands in the air.

*Third graders shed teeth like trees drop leaves in late autumn. I had two kids in the health office for this before lunch on the first day.

*Each one of those tiny people -- the goofy ones, the shy ones, the quiet smilers, the needy huggers, the entire cross section of humanity that walks through that doorway in the morning? Each of them represents the absolute center of someone else’s emotional existence. And they all deserve to be treated as such.