longer recesses and pizza every day!

     When Yani was in 5th grade, she ran for president of the class. She prepared a great little speech. In it she made no promises other than to try her best to represent her grade, the student elders of little Harwinton Consolidated School. But in fellow candidate Buster McBuster's (not his real name, though maybe it should be) speech, he said, "When I'm class president, we're going to have longer recesses! When I'm class president, we're gonna have pizza and ice cream at every lunch!" Lots of the 10-year-old voters stood and cheered. Buster won handily, never to be heard from again.
     That experience was actually a real disillusionment for Yani, and it was hard to watch her try to sort it out in her mind. At that age of giant teeth and giant beliefs that people are good and kind, she was stunned that Buster had made a false promise and gotten away with it. Despite her 23 years, despite experiences a-plenty that life is darned complicated and that people are often untethered from principles of kindness and fairness, this early experience remains a tiny smudge on Yani's generally affectionate view of humankind.
    Buster and his high-pitched promise changed in my mind when I read an email Laura received today. I now understand Buster may simply have been naive -- and an optimist -- hoping against hope that that's how things work: you get elected to a leadership position and the adults ask you for guidance on what needs fixing. He may have thought he could inform the school of the pizza scarcity issue...and pizza would appear. Though one might fault him for false promises, and little Yani understood why his campaign speech was not fair play, I can no longer blame him for giving it a shot. Who, I ask you, would not want longer recesses?

     Here is the email that allowed me at last to absolve Buster of all ill will:

Dear Principal Danforth,

We are running for FSG Presidents and one idea we have had is to make "Sleep-in Tuesdays" a more frequent occurrence, perhaps every four to six weeks or so. We are sure we don't need to emphasize with you the importance of sleep for young people, or the fact that we rarely get enough of it, and our hope is that because late starts do occur on Tuesdays with some regularity* to accommodate faculty meetings, accomplishing this agenda item would not be impossible. Our question for you is whether you would view this as something we would be able to explore using the appropriate channels if we are elected?

Thank you very much for your help.

Sincerely,

xx and yy (not their real names)

Sent from my iPhone

I just love that. "Sent from my iPhone." Hope, man. Hope springs eternal.

* FYI: twice a year