(This post is for parents and educators.)

My post on school lunches  from a few days back discussed the problem of children throwing away lunches and essentially said the following: Many children throw away most or all of those lunches, and that wastage can’t be stopped. A few paraprofessionals and/or cafeteria workers manning a cafeteria with sometimes hundreds of kids will not be able to coax children to eat. For one thing, they are monitoring behavior, to make sure no child is being maltreated by another child during lunch. They can’t take time to push kids to finish their carrots.

(I was in the lunchroom again today and watched as the clock ran out. Many students were still nibbling, but lunch runs for one-half hour and then the trash cans are pushed through the aisles. If you brought your own lunchbox, you can stash the uneaten apple, but if you are eating a school lunch, the whole lunch will be tossed into the trash.)

Part of the problem in that cafeteria comes from the fact that adults in the cafeteria are watching problem behaviors more than they are watching food. Bullying takes place in hallways, classrooms, and just about everywhere in a school except maybe the Principal’s or social workers’ offices, but bathrooms and cafeterias are the worst. School busses have been notorious trouble spots for years. Social media opened up homes as bullying sites. ANY location where kids can communicate freely with each other with limited or no adult oversight has the potential to brew trouble.

Eduhonesty:  Is your kid complaining about the school bus ride? Do you think maybe your child may be dealing with a bully or bullies on that bus? If your child never wants to take the bus, I’d take time to find out why. Bullies can be at their meanest at the back of the bus and seats in the front are sometimes hard to come by, depending on a child’s place on the bus route.

It is wishful thinking to believe that a person can simultaneously drive a school bus and also manage forty or fifty kids, many of whom have not been taught to manage themselves. We used to do a great deal more whole child education, but manners and comportment are not on the annual state achievement test. As we push, push, push to boost those test score numbers, behavior may not get the same number of classroom minutes that it did in the past. For that matter, with or without whole child education, we have always had bullies on our busses. I remember one who slashed my purse strap with a razor blade decades ago. Many older people have their bully-on-the-bus stories.

Is your child dealing with bullying? If possible, drive your child or find a friend to carpool and share that driving. For some kids, the bus will not be a safe or friendly place. If you are an educator dealing with parents who have bullying concerns, I’d make the same recommendation: Tell mom or dad to find a way to get their kid off the bus.  A quiet bully can easily slip by unnoticed and a group of bullies can make sure that behavior goes unseen. Pack behavior can be scary and threatening, and will make a child feel extremely helpless.

I don’t blame the bus drivers, but in the end, a bus will be its own version of bullying waiting to happen for a small minority of kids. The bus driver can’t see what is happening in all those double seats, even if the bus driver had time to look, and I’d rather have that driver watching the road. Driving a bus takes full concentration.

Parents can go to the school and complain. That’s perfectly reasonable. Parents can go through official channels, and they should go through those channels. Bullies cannot be allowed to run loose on our busses. Bullying on the bus will spill over into school, too, and that bullying has to be shut down.

But I’d still get my child off the bus. I would not trust the school district to manage the matter for me. That one bus driver has too many kids and too much responsibility to be trusted to handle all the problem kids. Unless a district is willing to provide additional personnel on that bus on a regular basis, I would not trust the district to protect my child.

All social science wishes and theory aside, here is the reality: One person whose back is facing a whole busload of children cannot possibly know what is happening in the back of the bus.

So I ought to be able to rest. I ought to be able to sleep in.  But something appears to have gone wrong. I decided to join the rolls of substitute teachers. The process requires a bit of work, but I had time to fill out applications, gather transcripts, make phone calls, and get fingerprinted. Then fingerprinted again. Then fingerprinted again. Then fingerprinted two more times. Apparently, the prints of older persons can be hard to process. It’s a good thing I am so honest. I seem to be a natural for a life of crime. Those prints of mine are extremely tricky. But the FBI name check has come through and the feds will vouch for me. So I am off and running.

And I seem to be working every day I don’t specifically block off for other appointments or missions. Is this job a calling? If it’s not, what am I doing?

Today I discussed population density and technology with 4th graders. We worked on decimal points and place value. A good time was had by all, including me, although we did have to do a couple of refreshers on rules. Last week, I taught physical education to wee ones. That job’s definitely not me and I’ll pass in the future unless they plead with me for a rescue. Watching forty early elementary children run around screaming while playing a plague-outbreak-based game of freeze tag is more chaos than I can comfortably manage. I loved kindergarten. We had a great discussion on minions. Most of the kids wanted to be minions because they love bananas and candy. But then there was that one little guy who wanted a freeze ray and a shrink ray. Forget the bananas, he saw the real potential in being a little, yellow, one-eyed creature. Teaching Spanish to first and second graders was a trifle fast-paced with those 25 minute periods, but the kids seemed open to learning new words and they were IPad whizzes by second grade. I am working tomorrow too. Soon, I expect to start a maternity position for middle school Spanish.

I don’t have to do this. But I keep looking at those sub postings. I keep clicking on that accept button. If they call me, I virtually always commit unless I have a previous commitment.

Eduhonesty: This blog was created in the wake of testing madness and bureaucratic wackiness that stemmed from No Child Left Behind. I have been known to call it the Secret Blog of Gloom and Doom. But for those thinking of entering the field of teaching, well, I have to admit it can’t be all that bad. I keep happily wandering into the latest Classroom for a Day.