Why Do PD Presenters Keep Talking When Lunch Just Got Delivered? A Teacher’s Breakdown
The fluorescent lights of our school gym were already burning my eyes by 11:45 on that Tuesday in-service day. I’d finished my last emergency granola bar at 10:15, after recess duty ran long, and my stomach had been growling so loud the para sitting next to me passed me a mint 10 minutes earlier. At exactly 12:02, we all smelled it: pepperoni pizza, warm through the cardboard boxes, as the custodians wheeled the lunch carts in through the double doors. Every head turned. Chairs scraped the floor as half the room shifted forward, ready to stand. The PD presenter, a district curriculum specialist who’d been talking about the new phonics scope and sequence for two hours, didn’t pause. She didn’t even glance at the carts. She just kept going, bullet point by bullet point, about progress monitoring check-ins. I slouched back in my chair, crossed my arms, and thought the same thing every teacher thinks at that moment: Why can’t she just stop talking when lunch is here?
I held that quiet grudge for weeks, until I volunteered to lead a 1-hour PD for new 1st and 2nd grade teachers at my school, focused on managing independent reading centers. Admin scheduled it from 11:30 to 12:30, told me boxed lunches would be delivered at 12:15, and I needed to end sharp to stay on schedule for the whole day. I was halfway through my last section, which covered how to troubleshoot rotation issues that almost all new teachers struggle with, when I saw the catering staff wheel a stack of lunch boxes into the back of the library. I froze mid-sentence.
I had seven minutes of content left that the new teachers had specifically asked me to cover. I’d spent two nights refining the handouts and examples. If I stopped now, I’d leave out the most useful part of the session. If I kept going, I could feel the room shifting, the hungry eyes drifting to the back of the room. That’s when it clicked: I was the person everyone would be resenting right now. It wasn’t that I didn’t see the lunch. I just didn’t know what else to do.
Most PD presenters, whether they’re district specialists or fellow teachers from down the hall, are working off a rigid timeline set by someone else. Admin books the rooms, maps out the full day of in-service, and tells presenters exactly when they need to start and stop. Cutting content short to accommodate an early lunch delivery can leave presenters on the hook for an incomplete session, with follow-up emails from admin asking why they didn’t cover all the required material. I’ve also heard from external presenters that they don’t want to overstep the school’s pre-planned schedule—they’re guests, after all, and changing the flow of the day feels out of line.
The other big thing no one talks about is that presenters can’t read the room as clearly as you think. Half the room may be staring at the lunch carts, but half brought their own meals from home and don’t care. Another quarter may be frantically taking notes on the content they need for the next school week. When you’re standing at the front, it’s hard to tell what the majority wants. I was once at a small PD where the presenter stopped early for lunch, and a teacher pulled me aside afterward to complain that she’d driven 45 minutes for that session and missed half the content she needed. Presenters remember that, and they’re nervous about making the wrong call.
After I froze up in the library that day, I tried something simple that’s stuck with me. I pointed to the back of the room and said, “Looks like lunch is here, and I have seven minutes of content you all asked for left. Would you rather run grab your lunches first, come back, and I’ll wrap up, or does it work for anyone to just finish this up quick before we eat?” Someone yelled from the back, “Let’s grab lunch! We can eat while you talk!” That’s what we did, and it worked perfectly. No one was annoyed, everyone got their food, and we covered all the content.
That experience changed how I handle these moments now, both as an attendee and as a presenter. If I’m sitting in a PD and lunch shows up but the presenter keeps talking, I don’t sit there sighing and shifting in my seat anymore. I just raise my hand and say, “Would it be okay if we pause a couple minutes so everyone can grab their lunches?” Nine times out of ten, the presenter breathes a sigh of relief and says yes. Most of the time, they were already thinking about stopping, they just didn’t want to be the one to bring it up or deviate from the plan.
If I’m leading a session, I don’t overthink it anymore. If I see lunch arrive, I stop for 10 seconds to acknowledge it. If I only have a few minutes left, I say, “I know lunch is here, I’ve got three quick points left to wrap up, I’ll move fast so you can get to eating.” If I have more time than that, I just ask the group what they prefer. It takes less time than awkwardly powering through while half the room stops listening.
Last week I went to a district-wide PD on behavior interventions, and the same thing happened: lunch rolled in, the presenter kept talking. I raised my hand and asked if we could grab our lunches, and she laughed and said, “Oh thank you for saying that. I was wondering if anyone wanted to stop, I didn’t want to be rude by bringing it up.” We all grabbed our slices of pizza, sat back down, and finished the session while we ate. It was fine.
I still get a little annoyed when my stomach is growling and a presenter keeps powering through. But I don’t think it’s because they don’t care about us being hungry anymore. Most of the time, it’s just a small awkward moment that no one has spoken up about yet. It’s not a big conflict, just one of the silly little frictions that come with spending a full day sitting in a gym or library, cramming in training before the school year picks up. Some days, all it takes is one person to say the quiet thing out loud to fix it.
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