Birthday Cake Day

In my last year at Yankee Magazine, we ran a story about a remarkable teacher from Massachusetts who gave every one of his students a piece of cake on his or her birthday. I thought it was an inspiring story, and I said so at a parent-teacher meeting at ConVal. Wouldn't it be great way to bond with students, I said, if every teacher did something as simple as that?

Then I became a teacher, and I decided to emulate the man from Massachusetts . In each of my three classes, plus my homeroom, I took Polaroid pictures of all my students -- there must have been 80 or 90 of them -- and asked them to write their names and birthdays on the back, so that I could supply cake on the proper days.

I ran into a problem right away. Under block scheduling, most classes meet for only one semester. That meant that less than half the birthdays in each academic class (homeroom met all year) actually occurred during the semester. So I made a schedule that divided all the other birthdays among the months I was teaching that class -- September included February birthdays, October and March went together, and so forth. I put all the summer birthdays in January.

Then I realized that if I provided cake on their actual birthdays, I'd be baking a cake almost every day. So I designated one day per month as Universal Birthday Cake Day. I figured that one cake would probably take care of all the birthdays in all four groups.

And it did -- but it felt chintzy not to give the other kids cake, too, so one cake wasn't enough. In time, I had to have a separate Birthday Cake Day for each class. It came to about one day per week, which doesn't sound like much. But I was having such a hard time adjusting to my new career that I often went home after school and curled up in a fetal ball on the bed, wishing I were doing almost anything else -- not a mood conducive to baking cake.

I kept it up all year, though it was a logistical nightmare. By then, I knew something else I hadn't known when I began: my students ate sugary snacks all day long. Birthday cake was the last thing they needed. I don't do it anymore.

It's not that making cake for the students is a bad idea; in fact, I know a lot of teachers who do it. What makes me cringe now, five years after that parent-teacher meeting, is how little I knew then about the complexity of a teacher's job, and yet how ready I was to offer teachers advice. I wouldn't offer a doctor advice on how to treat a patient, or make suggestions to a plumber on a better way to fix my frozen pipes. But all of us have been to school, so we all feel like experts on education. It all seems so simple -- from the outside.

That's why, around this time of year, when I see letters to the editor urging simple solutions to complicated problems -- solutions like 'just say no to the teachers' contract' -- I get a little uncomfortable. I'm thinking about birthday cake.