I was thinking about my first week of teaching in Alpine School District. I had no idea what I was doing. I had been an English major and spent one semester student teaching in a Jr. High thinking I wanted to be an English teacher. Eisenhower Jr. High made me rethink that idea, and after sort of waffling about whether I wanted to teach or not, took a job kind of last minute teaching 3rd grade. You can do anything for ten months right?
That first day of school lunch time arrived and the kids asked me where the lunch bucket was. In my mind, I picture some patched-knee Dickensian character sadly holding a lunch pail. No such thing as a ‘lunch bucket’ existed where I went to school.
They were so matter-of-fact about it, I began to believe in the existence of modern day lunch buckets. “What’s it for?”
And they tell me, “It’s to put our lunches in.”
“Well, can’t you just carry them?”
Eight-year old suspicion crept into their eyes as they began, on this first day of school, to question the competence of this adult who was supposed to be in charge of things. “It’s for when we go out to play, so we don’t have to carry them around at recess.”
A vague memory of a pink Precious Moments lunchbox with a foot-shaped hole in it flashed back with a twinge of pain. We should have had a lunch bucket, I thought, instead of just leaving our lunchboxes by that door like we we did . . .
“So, you’re telling me, I need to go buy like a big bucket for you to all put your lunches in.” Nods all around. And I realized, that they knew everything. This was, after all, their world, not mine. So over the course of the year, when I needed to know things about the school, I asked the resident experts of some 3 years. I think sometimes they thought I was asking sort of rhetorically, that it was something that surely Miss Berry knew already, she was just checking to make sure we kids knew.
“And what’s the procedure for walking in the halls?”
“And what’s the policy on the swings at recess?”
“Are snowballs allowed at this school?”
And in this way the children of Snow Springs Elementary taught Miss Berry how school worked.