Strawberry Gelato & Lunch

Fresh picked strawberries from Pappy's 

We celebrated lunch on Fat Tuesday by eating homemade strawberry gelato from the berries I picked this weekend. It was delicious, but it was made better by the laughter and conversation of the teachers who don't always come by to eat lunch on a regular basis.  My friend Lee Corey always has a rule about lunch for teachers.  You take lunch with adults. You don't eat at your desk grading papers and you don't eat lunch with students.  Not everyone follows that rule, but when she was here she enforced it with a less than gentle reminder in her honest way.

That's a rule that I've chosen mostly to work by as long as I have been at my current job.  There have been times in the past three years where I've had to work through lunch.  There have also been times in my career where I've even opened my room so students could regularly eat lunch there or chosen to work through lunch. I did what I need to do at the time.

I don't regret the opportunities that I missed, but I recognize that the time I spend with colleagues in informal settings has helped me keep perspective.  At one school, I worked with an amazing ninth grade team where each person provided lunch for the week for the group, one week per month.  Talk about an entire month of food surprises and the luxury of only packing lunch for a week.  The science teacher, Steve, made an amazing creme brulee.  Dawn's secret family recipe for cooking beans is one I am still trying to figure out. My current lunch group knows that my husband makes my lunch and breakfast and I complain about that!  Everyone should be so lucky!

Current & Former Lunch Buddies

As a Type I diabetic, I could share about the health benefits of eating lunch. As a teacher, I could expound upon the meaningful conversations, the great ideas such as book fairies and the hard questions like the one continually posed, "Are you grading behavior?"that emerge at lunch. It may be short. It may be at 10:30, but it is the one part of our day that is not mandated. As few opportunities that teachers get to actually spend with the adults in their building in comparison to the time we spend teaching students or working isolation grading and planning, the conversation at lunch matters!  How do you spend your lunch?

Here is the recipe for the Valentine's Strawberry Gelato  . It is the type of recipe that a busy teacher can manage and even works with frozen packaged strawberries.