Why Do PD Presenters Keep Talking When Lunch Just Got Delivered? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last month, I sat slouched in a wobbly folding chair at our district’s annual back-to-school PD, my notebook open to a page with three half-scrawled bullet points and a reminder to pick up dog food after work. It was 12:03 p.m., I’d skipped breakfast to drop my 7-year-old at early drop-off for soccer camp, and my blood sugar had dipped so low I was starting to see a little gray around the edges of the presenter’s slides. Then the double doors at the back of the cafeteria swung open, and two catering volunteers rolled in a cart stacked with aluminum pizza pans and paper lunch bags. Every head turned toward the back, then back to the front, like we were all waiting for her to pause. The whole room hummed — every stomach within 10 feet growled loud enough I swear the presenter could hear it. She paused for half a second, looked at the cart, looked back at her slides, and kept talking about the new state literacy requirements. We sat there for another 11 minutes, she wrapped up, and by the time we got up to get our slices, the pepperoni ones were already gone.
For years, I would have grumbled about this with everyone else. Rude. Power-tripping. Doesn’t care that we’re humans who need to eat. It wasn’t until last spring, when I got asked to lead a 3-hour PD on small group reading for K-2 teachers across three campuses, that I got it. I showed up with my slides printed, my handouts stacked, and a strict timeline from the district coordinator: presentation 9 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., lunch 11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., closing activity 12:30 p.m., out by 1 p.m. so everyone could get back to their classrooms for pre-opening week duty. I was 20 minutes out from the end when the catering team rolled in the boxed sandwiches and set them on the back table. It was 11:27 a.m. I froze mid-sentence.
What was I supposed to do? Stop everything 18 minutes early and send everyone to lunch? The coordinator had made it very clear that we had to cover all 8 core strategies the district was requiring for the new school year. If I cut it short, teachers would go back to their classrooms missing key information, and I’d get an email from the coordinator asking why I didn’t stick to the agenda. I also knew that if I dismissed early for lunch, at least a quarter of the group wouldn’t come back. They’d start checking their work emails, field calls from daycare about a sick kid, or start chatting with the teacher from the next campus and lose track of time. I’d worked three weeks after school prepping that presentation, driving 45 minutes each way to get there, and I wasn’t about to let the whole thing fall apart because lunch got delivered 18 minutes ahead of schedule. So I took a breath and kept talking. Just like that presenter last month.
The thing no one talks about when we get mad about this is that most PD presenters aren’t there because they want to annoy you. Most of the time, they’re working off a rigid schedule someone else gave them, and they’re more scared of messing up the timeline than they are of making a room full of hungry teachers annoyed. A lot of presenters are coming from outside the district, or outside the campus, so they don’t know the unspoken rules. They don’t know that the principal doesn’t actually care if we start lunch 10 minutes early. They just know what’s on the printed agenda, and they don’t want to be the person who throws the whole day off. That’s the dirty secret no one tells you when you’re new to presenting: the pressure to stick to the schedule almost always comes from the hosts, not the presenter.
It’s a small problem, but there are small, low-friction fixes that work, I’ve learned. If you’re hosting PD, the easiest thing you can do is tell your presenter upfront: “If lunch gets delivered early, we can wrap a few minutes early, no questions asked.” Write that on the agenda too, so there’s no confusion. I started doing that when I coordinate PD at my campus, and it cuts out 90% of the awkward “lunch is here but we’re still talking” tension.
If you’re the presenter, just say the quiet part out loud when you see the lunch roll in. When I was up there that day, after I froze for a second, I ended up saying, “Y’all, I see the sandwiches got here early, and I’m hungry too. I just need 15 more minutes to get through these last two points that everyone needs for this school year. If you need to slip out to grab your sandwich and bring it back here, that’s totally fine with me — no awkward side exits needed.” Half a dozen people got up, grabbed their lunch, came back, I finished on time, and no one was grumbly the whole time. It doesn’t fix everything, but it takes the edge off. Everyone hates feeling like the presenter is ignoring that their stomach is growling. Just acknowledging it makes it better.
If you’re an attendee sitting there hungry, remember you don’t have to wait for permission. If you have low blood sugar, you’re diabetic, you have an appointment you need to get to on time, or you’re just so hungry you can’t focus anyway, just get up and get your lunch. Most presenters are too busy worrying about finishing their talk to care that one or two people left early. I’ve been on both sides now, and I never once mind when someone slips out early to get their food. I get it.
After the presenter wrapped up that day last month, I grabbed a cheese pizza slice (all the pepperoni were gone, of course) and sat down with a few other teachers, and they were complaining about her for 10 minutes straight. I didn’t say anything, but I just thought, she’s probably going to get a written evaluation that says she was rude and didn’t care about our time, but really she was just following the rules the district gave her.
It’s still one of those small, annoying things that comes with back-to-school season, right? No system is going to be perfect, and catering companies always deliver lunch 10 or 15 minutes early no matter what you tell them. But now that I’ve been on both sides of the screen, I don’t get as mad about it as I used to. It’s just one of those little miscommunications that happens when a bunch of people are all trying to do what they’re told, and no one thought to talk about the unspoken stuff ahead of time. Last week, I led a PD for new teachers at my campus, and I wrote in big bold letters on my agenda “Lunch whenever it gets here, no waiting.” We wrapped 12 minutes early, everyone got their salad while it was still cold, and no one left grumpy. It’s not a big fix, but it works for now.
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