Episode 2 – In Defense of the Classroom Tea Party

In this episode, LCA World Lit teacher Danah Hashem explores classroom culture and ritual using tea parties. Episode Transcript: Welcome to Prose and Context, a podcast about lifegiving teaching by the English department at Lexington Christian Academy. (Intro Music) Hello! This is Danah Hashem, and thanks for joining me for today’s episode of Prose and Context. I am going to talk about tea parties in the classroom! Which sounds frivolous, but hear me out! I recently wrote a blog post, I maintain an educational blog called Pencils and Patience at pencilsandpatience.wordpress.com, and I recently published a post discussing this idea that I’ve been referring as my “Defense of the Classroom Tea Party.” Because, as much as this idea began accidentally and as much as it seems tangential to my classroom work with my students, I’ve actually come to find some very real, pedagogical value to these classroom tea parties in which my students and I actually drink hot tea together as we work on our classwork. As a tea lover myself, I have been accused of just trying to find excuses to buy more tea, and this accusation is not entirely wrong, but I’ve actually found real value to fostering this tradition or this, this ritual in my classroom. Now I understand 100% that we are really lucky here at LCA to have pretty small classes. My classes don’t usually go over 16-18 kids, and sometimes they’re really small, like 6 or 7 kids. So this is a pretty realistic possibility for me to maintain. But, even if you’re a teacher with larger classrooms, I think there’s a principle here that we can all consider. You know, this doesn’t have to be about tea. Ultimately this is more about the mindset and the kind of ethos that we create in our classrooms. I happened to accidentally create this ethos with tea parties, but I think there’s a lot of different ways as educators that we can think about creating spaces of sensitivity and confidence and places where our students feel really safe taking intellectual risks. I think we can always strive to be more intentional about fostering that kind of environment with our students. So this whole tea party thing actually started completely unintentionally because I personally drink a lot of tea, especially in the winter, especially, you know, the school week gets long and that little boost of caffeine is very helpful. I usually brew the tea in bulk, and, so I pour myself the cup of tea, and there’s extra. So whatever students are there, I’ve got this pile of mugs, and they’ll say, “Oh, can I have the leftover?” and I’ll pour them a cup too. And then, over time, this sort of developed into this ritual where students now walk into my room and say things like, “Oooo, what’s today’s tea?” or “ughhh I’m so exhausted, I need the tea today.” And so now I’ve created this expectation that there’s going to be hot tea in my classroom. Um, I don’t hate it because, quite frankly, there almost always is hot tea in my classroom, so this makes sense. But what this has meant is that pretty much every class, particularly classes where we are reading together or individually or where we’re having a discussion, uh when students come in, we get out the mugs and we drink tea! I again never intended this to be a piece in my classroom design; however, over time, I’ve really started to value and appreciate what this practice does for my time with my students. And I’d like to take just a little bit of time to talk more specifically about some of the really concrete reasons why I’ve found this to be super valuable. So, in the interest of getting us thinking about that, I would like to share with you my list of, um, why this has become this really important piece of my classroom pedagogy. And, again, this is much less about the tea than it is about being educators who spend our time thinking about different thi...