Spirit Week

This year student council members came around to ask teachers if we wanted spirit week to be this week, with the pre-planned reopening of the church on the Feast of Saint Luke and St. Luke-a-Thon (our walkathon) or next week, the traditional week before Halloween. The downside of having spirit week this week was that it loads up an already loaded week with more stuff. The downside of next week was that fifth grade will be gone on their annual outdoor environmental education trip to Camp Seymour.

As a former fifth grade teacher who took the October trip to Camp Seymour 10 of the 11 years I taught that grade level, I voted for this week. I figured my colleagues would want to spread out the crazy, and my vote to NOT other the fifth grade - a grade that usually gets othered in a preK-8 school because fifth graders are not primary students, but neither are they middle school students - would not carry the day. But I was mistaken. My colleagues overwhelmingly voted for this week. Whether it was to keep the crazy contained to one week, or because other teachers also do not want the fifth grade on the outside of the fun, I'm not sure. But I am glad the fifth grade got to participate in all the fun.

A rundown of the week's themes:

Monday: Hawaiian/Beach theme

Tuesday: St. Luke-a-Thon - dress in this year's school theme (growing together in faith) or as something that represents St. Luke. My class went with the school theme. They decorated t-shirts with leaves, vines, and flowers, and I was a garden gnome. My partner teacher was a tree, and his class dressed a tree fruit.

Wednesday: First all school mass in the newly renovated church - dress in your best uniform. The new church was beautiful and the middle school choir was amazing. But the smoke from wildfires became pretty thick by Wednesday so we had to shut our windows and keep our students inside. Indoor recess is rare in my school - we send students out almost no matter how hard the rain falls. But unhealthy air made it... well, unhealthy, to send kids outside.

Thursday: Decade Day - dress in clothing representative of your favorite decade of yesteryear. It was so hot and stuffy in the building I couldn't keep my groovy headband on for long. But many students really got into this day, with accurate details like leg warmers, crimped hair, or solid grunge eyeliner. It was very fun to see the creativity and enthusiasm throughout the building.

Friday: Color Games - classes are each assigned a different color and staff are asked to wear St. Luke spirit wear. Eighth graders got "brilliant blue" as their color. Representatives from each class participated in games reminiscent of high school pep rallies. The eighth graders did not win the Color Games but we held our own in several rounds. We had our larger kids get snared up in some of the obstacles in the relay race and the smallest class size, which put us at a disadvantage for the tug of war (though we did win our first round).

The best part of Friday was that the weather finally shifted. With a light drizzle in the morning, the air quality had returned to a level that allowed us to open windows and send kids out to recess! But with two weeks of breathing in air that was at best "unhealthy for sensitive groups" many of us are still feeling the effects of inhaling all that smoke.

Friday also ended with our school hosting a middle school dance for our region. Our dance was the third one of the school year, and this is the first year since schools were shut down in March of 2020 that dances resumed. The gym was PACKED with seventh and eighth graders, who showed up early and left late. We were slammed checking students in from fifteen minutes before the dance technically started until about a half hour after the official start time. Seasoned dance chaperones said in pre-COVID years dances saw half to a third of the crowd we got last night.

After the chaos of checking student IDs and taking money and permission slips from young teenagers slowed to a more manageable trickle, I wandered through the crowds of kids in the gym picking up litter, telling them to stop giving piggyback rides, reminding them our no cell phone use policy during the dance, and having short, yelled over the music, conversations with students I know and my fellow chaperones. At the end of the dance I helped run interference between kids and cars in the parking lot and hung out with the last kid to get picked up from another school while he waited for his dad to arrive. He said he had a great time at the dance and even thanked me for waiting with him when his dad arrived.

It was a crazy long week. Our mass in the newly remodeled church feels like it was weeks ago. This week was fun, but I am looking forward to a calmer week next week (with outdoor recess every day)!