For the past several years at my school, we've had two hours of classes in the morning followed by a 13-minute break, followed by two more hours of classes, and then lunch.
Four years ago I wrote about Tea Club, which started with just a few of us and grew into a grand event each Wednesday. We eventually had an entire shelf with different flavors of tea on it, and we would rush to the lounge at break time on Wednesday to dig into whatever snackie the designated person brought. It was a major social event, and I was proud to have started it and kept it running.
This year, for a few reasons, we've had to cut that break down to only 10 minutes. This had a huge effect on tea club. It may not seem like much--after all, it's only 3 minutes--but that decrease from 13 to 10 minutes made it all but impossible to have a cup of tea, a snack, and some conversation. We had just enough time to get to the lounge, get our tea and treat, and head back to our rooms.
My first attempt at a remedy was to suggest moving tea club to lunchtime. The problem there, though, is that lots of people use the lounge at lunch, it's a different "atmosphere" at lunch. Additionally, plenty of people are in the lounge at lunch who wouldn't participate, and it seemed, uh, odd to have our group in there doing our thing when we usually do something entirely different with different people at lunch--and those same people were just a few feet away from us at the other end of the table.
So I suggested ditching tea club and having Dessert Club--someone would volunteer to bring a snackie for all of us for lunchtime on Friday. It would be a nice way to end the week.
Only a couple of us brought things. Last week there was nothing. No one wanted to sign up (or "commit"). Today I took down the almost-empty sign-up sheet.
It wasn't really about the treats. It never was. The treats were just the magnet for the socializing and the camaraderie.
I'm sorry it's gone. I hope something else "special" takes its place.
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