The English teacher in the eighth grade held a, kind of a championship tea and the tea that she did was something that was an honors thing. And so the kids had — they got dressed up, and they read poetry, and they had tea, and they had treats, and they had all kinds of food and everything else. But you had to be invited, and you had to have certain grades. And I taught — she taught mostly honors kids, but she did have some that weren’t. And I taught all the kids. And some of those kids, when they passed out the Tea invitations, would be so crushed. And so finally, I realized that this was — some of these kids were never going to, they were never going to achieve the A and the A+ gradings they needed to go to this tea and every year we had this, you know, kids got all dressed up and everything else.
And so, after the first year, when I got all these very crestfallen and angry kids in my class being mad because they had to go to class and these other kids got to do all this other stuff, and go get dressed up and have their pastries and all this. I decided, after talking to the principal, that I was going to just quietly do what was referred to as the ‘Untea.’ And I took the name of course, from the ‘Unbirthday’ from Alice in Wonderland. And the kids would be called out of one of the classes and they’d all go to the Tea and then after they left and the other kids would kind of look and I never told the, the kids I said, “This is the one thing you have to do. This is a secret. You cannot let anybody know that this happens. But it’s okay. It will be all right.” And so, then I’d pull out the cookies and the — some kind of drink, punch of some sort. And we would have not tea, not a fancy tea, but we would just have the ‘Untea’ and I would let the kids sit any place they wanted and I would let them sit any way they wanted and I would let them — and then we would do, we would talk about other things and do different things and it was always kind of — it was always kind of fun. And I felt like that was a championship thing.
Those kids appreciated, I think, the ‘Untea’ in a lot of ways more than the kids that actually went. One of the kids said to me, one time, she says, “Why do you do this?” And I said, “Because you guys didn’t do anything.” I said, “It’s not that you didn’t — a lot of you, it’s not that you didn’t do your homework, it’s not that you didn’t do” I said, “You’re doing the best you can. You just have to have more work on this, and this is just ridiculous that you can’t have a day where you get to do something different. So we’re going to do something different.” It worked. I did that for several years.
She never — the other teacher, bragged about the Tea and everybody nodded and everything else. And the principal always would say to me the day before the Tea, “Are the cookies okay? Do you have cookies?” You know, “Do you need anything?” He would always say that because he knew I did it. He said, “I can’t sanction what you’re doing and I think it’s wonderful.” And I went, “Yeah, it’s one of those things that just has to get done.” So that was my champion belt, pulling it off, so that nobody knew that it actually happened. The kids were very good about keeping it a secret. They never told anybody.