Why Sometimes I’d Rather Just Eat in the Bathroom

You know those high school flicks like Mean Girls or Clueless or Freaky Friday or 10 Things I Hate About You? Inevitably someone winds up on the wrong side of popularity and ends up eating lunch in the bathroom.

It’s a scene I can completely relate to. But never as a student. The only times I have felt enough on the outside to eat lunch in the bathroom is while substitute teaching. And it’s not the students who make me feel that way. It’s the teachers in the teachers’ lounge.

Look, I get it. I have also worked as a full-time teacher. Teachers are tired. We need to vent. We are frustrated with like, literally, everything to do with school from admin to students to politics. We are there because we know that students need a safe space to just learn and everything seems to be getting in the way of our goals and it’s all out of our control. The teachers’ lounge is our safe place.

The first problem is that teachers are often so caught up in their own conversations at lunch that they forget to greet or even acknowledge the new person. Let’s remember that subs are an integral part of making a school function, and at one point or another, every teacher gets sick and needs a sub. If you include us in your lunchtime, we’re much more likely to want to return and help you out.

And the bigger problem is that the conversations swirling around the invisible sub centers on negative talk about students. This alienates us further. And makes us feel really uncomfortable because we don’t know the students. Now our only impression of these kids is negative.

I know students can be troublesome. But we teachers need to be aware of our surroundings. We need to find ways to have intentional, productive, and professional conversations in the teachers’ lounge that allow some release of frustration but also seek solutions within our confines and don’t make outsiders uncomfortable. We want to build up our students and create the community that we preach in the classrooms and hallways.

And we want to walk away from lunch feeling edified and uplifted ourselves.

So how do we do that?

1. Keep each other accountable. Be an upstander. Say something to your colleagues.
2. Create a lunchroom pact as a group. Write out your conversation guidelines and put them in the middle of the table and up on the bulletin board in the teachers’ lounge.
3. Keep a book of Would-You-Rathers and Fun Questions in the lounge to keep the conversation light.
4. Create a policy for how to have professional, work-related conversations that seek solutions and don’t devolve into a gossip sesh. Post it in the room.
5. Address lunchroom etiquette as a whole staff.
6. And at the very least, say hello and create space for your subs to sit and participate in the conversation 🙂

Now, go forth and transform the conversation in your teachers’ lounge, really for everyone’s benefit.