A Royal Tea Party

The Royal Wedding -- how exciting! The prince is getting married, and a lovely normal girl will become a princess. It’s the stuff of fairy tales… unless you’re a modern 8th grader carrying all of the typical cynicism and self-focus of 21st century teenagers. While my students have the attitude that the royal wedding is no big deal, I think it’s a rare opportunity that they are not likely to see again for many years. (Does anyone really see Harry settling down any time soon? And when’s the last time a president’s offspring was married while his/her father was still in office?) Such a thing hasn’t happened during my own lifetime since Charles and Diana’s wedding in the early 1980’s. I don’t remember watching that one, but I DVR’d a couple different broadcasts of Friday's royal wedding to watch when I got home from school.

To be honest, I didn’t really care that much about the wedding itself. It’s more about the event, and for my students, I want them to understand how important the events of other countries can be in the world, even if they don’t register on American teenagers’ radars. It’s the idea that American events don’t define world news – although we certainly act as if they do. Making a big deal about the wedding in class allowed me the perfect social studies opportunity to talk about international events and royal families and several other sorts of topics that don’t apply to the U.S. Furthermore, because I talked about it in class, I was also able to talk about another difference between the U.S. and the U.K. -- the conduct of the spectators. After I watched the wedding itself, I was so struck by the behavior of the British people at the event that it was vital to point this out to my students. When the wedding party was safely inside Buckingham Palace, the police constables slowly allowed the crowd to move up to the high fence surrounding the property. As they moved forward, the British citizens walked calmly, peacefully, even politely. They did not push or shove, they did not scream, and they were not out of control in any way, although they were cheering and obviously happy. It was amazing, and my students thought so as well when I told them.

There were several other pieces that stuck out to me, on which I pontificated to my students the following Monday, but that was the biggest and the one by which they were most surprised. At any rate, my making a big deal out of the wedding provided the open door for the other lessons and conversations, so I consider it a worthy effort. And, as a treat, one of my classes decided to have a tea party to celebrate. We had no idea where to procure crumpets, so one of my students brought English muffins (which, of course, are not at all English, but since they have “English” in the name, we decided they could count just this once). I brought jam, and we borrowed a toaster oven from another teacher. I brewed tea in my coffee pot, and another student provided sugar cubes (so that we could say to each other, “one lump, or two?” in our terrible British accents). And while we discussed what books we’ve been reading, we had tea and jam and English muffins and looked out the windows at the rain and spoke in incredibly bad fake accents and had a jolly time.