Shut Your Pie Hole

Pardon my absence, I’ve been distracted by the current round of idiocy flaring up at my children’s elementary school.

The principal has decided that our young children need to be quiet during lunch. To achieve this bizarre goal she is using the cafeteria sound system, deplorable music and three workers to impose silence on our little guys. The children all hate it and I’ve already been in contact with the bureaucrat responsible for this flakey policy.

Since she remained adamantly unconvinced of my contrary arguments to her visionary idea of a Carthusian lunch room, I spent an hour dining with my children today to get the true flavor of her latest experiment in modern educational child management techniques. I have not spent a more surreal hour since I dropped acid in a rain soaked pine forest back around 1978.

Children would be happily chattering away at normal levels, then new age, Enya lite music emanating from the stage speakers would assault the senses. The lunch workers would hold their arms overhead, fingers shaped in a V of peace, followed by a loud round of sibilant shushing. As the children ceased speaking, the ladies would stalk the aisles, telling the few brave whispering souls to be quiet and these women weren’t being polite about the demand. Two of the harridans looked unkept and hungover, their faces etched in perpetual scowls as they fussed our small children into unnatural silence. One woman had the unmitigated gall to physically move the boy seated next to my son further down the bench. He had been cozied up to my Tom, enjoying a whispered conversation with us, she didn’t have the balls to shush me, but you should have seen the humiliation on his sweet face. The bitch ruined his day.

I had one laugh out loud moment when the second round of music ended and the entire lunchroom erupted in cheers! Of course they were immediately told cheering wouldn’t be tolerated and if they did it again the music would be played for longer periods. Killjoys.

I stayed for lunch with my older son, it was rather disturbing that the music played almost the whole of his thirty minute break – we didn’t get a real chance to visit. Perhaps the principal doesn’t want parents sharing the occasional school lunch with their children anymore, because I found it damn near impossible to have a normal conversation under her cone of silence.

It was weird watching these nice, sheltered kids keep a caged eye out for the monitors. Thirty minutes of lunch had turned into a subversive act, pitting the normalcy of seven year olds against an unnatural rule. I saw dozens of small, open faces take on the slyness of craft or morph into blandness as the keepers made their rounds. That’s not right, what in the hell are they teaching in this environment, the art of deception?

I found it telling that the principal was informed of my presence and came scurrying down the aisle to make nice shortly after I arrived. I have a small reputation of issuing disagreeable opinions weighing contrary to prevailing administrative thought. It’s not a pleasant role, I’d rather not give the head office another thought, but with this sort of blinding insanity regularly rearing it’s demented head, I feel compelled to weigh in with a bit of ornery sensibility.

Our cafeteria holds two hundred kids at a time, seven hundred of them file through this two-story, cinder block room five days a week. The vast majority are well mannered and respectful, these aren’t rowdy, misbehaved children. No doubt that it can be loud in the lunch room, sounds echo, but the administration needs to either accept that normal children need to be allowed to act normal during one of their brief breaks in a seven hour instructional day or they should spend some of the substantial PTA funds they raise every year on sound deadening insulation to alleviate the staff’s complaints.

School isn’t about creating an atmosphere conducive to the administration, teachers or lunchroom monitor’s comfort. It is about educating our children and trusting that those in charge appreciate the solid fact that these short people we entrust to their care nine months out of the year aren’t actually smaller versions of themselves. I find it beyond irritating that these folks seem to forget that they work for me. These educators are my employees and I have never taken kindly to any of my expensive nine to fivers treating the customers badly. My children are the customers this time around and that is the last place you want test my gracious patience.