As a former teacher and a fat person, I wish one of these people had mentioned the added difficulty of doing these days while fat (either as a child or a teacher). All the last minute shopping is often impossible for folks who can only by clothes online due to in person stores not carrying their size. Also, there's just so many less options for plus size clothing that it's a lot harder to meet the theme!
Yes to this. My son, now 18 and in college, was and is a big kid. I could never find his size easily for spirit days, which was stressful for both of us. If you're thin, you don't have to worry about it because your size will be in a store.
You’re absolutely right. Like so many other things, the hassle/drain/expense of these “Spirit Days” is going to affect anyone not in the accepted “status quo” even more negatively.
I would like to thank whatever genes or spirits gave me an obnoxiously contrary child. He’s always responded to any school-mandated costume day with an enormous Nope.
Totally! My youngest goes to school with bed head everyday. Last time I tried to fix his hair, he's like "Why do I need to fix my hair mom? It's not like I'm nervous."
I was that obnoxiously contrary child who noped right out of anything sprit related in school and the higher powers must have thought it hilarious to give me the two most spirit-day-loving kids. The youngest is in high school now so I'm almost done and he is mostly in charge of his own spirit but that was its been a long journey. (My biggest spirit day triumph was "dress like a video game character" day in middle school and I dug out a headband, green cardstock, scissors and glue and like 5 minutes later, he was dressed as a Sim.)
As a parent, it is a relief to see that so many teachers share my concerns. Particularly the observations that spirit days are:
- mostly performative, especially for young students;
- deeply rooted in consumption/capitalism; and therefore
- highly inequitable and incredibly wasteful.
Once my local school board refused to implement/enforce any pandemic protections, I removed my elementary-age child from public school and started homeschooling. Even though I now have to:
- know the curriculum;
- prepare lesson plans;
- gather resources;
- teach;
- document evidence of learning; and
- consult with, and report to, supervising teachers
I somehow feel less overwhelmed than when my child was attending public school full-time. That’s partly because the performative aspects of parenting a school-age child have disappeared from my to-do list.
It is fascinating to see how these spirit days are a collective coping mechanism to create the illusion of belonging/community and calm/fun.
“Yes, you six-year-olds had to do lockdown drills again, but at least you got to do it in your pyjamas! Fun!”
“Sure, we’re in the middle of a traumatic pandemic that is orphaning our schoolmates, but surely we’d feel a lot better if we wore expensive sports jerseys on Friday!”
“We are all, students, parents and teachers alike, completely overwhelmed by our increasing workloads, but these themed sugar cookies we baked last night will help us manage the overwhelm! Right? Right?!?”
Thank you for posting about this. I have taught in a high-income school and now teach in a low-income school. My current school gets it right. There are a handful a year and are very low-key. At my previous school, I had to spend so much money on theme t-shirts and matching Halloween costumes. (This begs the question, why do we make t-shirts for every occasion? The environmental cost is unreal.)
I was wondering if this was why I don't see these days yet for my first grader, we are in an under-served district. Our version is free dress days, where they don't have to wear their uniform t-shirts. You can also get the uniform t-shirts for free if needed, so it's a double boost for parents.
I feel for every teacher. Thankfully kids are grown and on their own now, but what I see with my cousin's kids is sometimes too much. The 'gamification' of every subject to make it 'fun'. Tik Tok and IG need to calm down. Social media has destroyed everything good in the world. It always starts as a great idea, but it never ends that way. To all the teachers out there. I appreciate you. I also don't blame you if you leave the profession for the sake of your own mental health.
I am a teacher (or was) and a mom and so much yes to these comments. Spirit days can be fun and they can also be toxic. I recall a school nearby whose classes got colors for homecoming week. The seniors wore white and a number of them showed up to a pep rally with WHITE PRIDE written in sharpie on their shirts. We live on an Indian reservation. It ended up in the WaPo. This could have happened without spirit days but for gods sake it’s one more stressful thing for teachers and administrators (and the entire student population, in this case) to contend with that could have been avoided.
My mom always gets really depressed at how trash people are, but I kind of think that people are just very social and most of them go along with whatever their family / circle is doing. And that doesn't need to be a bad thing, if we can have a society that encourages positive behavior through social norms. Class color white for spirit day is not it.
Totally recognize/feel the responses that mentioned the gap between haves and have-nots, and the nebulous way that affects the perception of which students are "cool" and which teachers are "fun". I'm a quadruplet, and both my mother and us HATED spirit days because of the stress of trying to do participating outfits x4, and the inevitable visual gaps/fights/ill feelings between which of us got the one on-theme item of clothing in the house, and the others making do with whatever could be made or scrounged from Wal-Mart/Target the day before. This also always played out in the contrasts between the rich kids (new, custom spirit stuff), middle-class kids (homemade or cheap stuff), and poor kids (often nothing). Teachers got the judgment, too, because of course the ones who had the time/money/resources to decorate themselves and their classrooms were viewed positively ("fun teacher") by everyone, and the ones who didn't were seen as boring, unengaged, etc.
So, yeah, all this to say that spirit days for everyone in my childhood were marked by stress, class performance, and gossip, and I feel sorry for the teachers, parents, and kids who have one more thing to worry about. Happy, like, Dress-Like-The-Mouse-In-If-You-Give-A-Mouse-A-Cookie-Day, I guess.
What I recall of school celebrations as a kid growing up in the 80's in the East Bay in California is that we wore costumes on Halloween and gave tiny cards on Valentine's Day, and any other celebration basically involved someone's mom bringing in cupcakes. Now that we are honoring so many food sensitivities, celebration seems to have been channelled into clothing because... we all wear clothes? But my kids are very sensitive to clothes and so coming up with something to wear on these days, or worse, having to wear the same t-shirt as everyone else (always the same enormous boy-cut rough cotton t-shirt), has always been an issue. I ignore the Spirit Day notifications or maybe mention them in passing, see the corresponding eye roll, and drop it. But I do sense that my kids, while unwilling to participate, also don't enjoy being part of the out crowd that didn't wear a red t-shirt that day. For us, these days contribute to my kids' sense of alienation from school that was exacerbated by the pandemic.
Why are those shirts always a sensory nightmare? I get that it's probably the cheapest option but they're guaranteeing those shirts won't get worn again on another day, which is a huge waste.
As a child my school had Spirit Week and 100 day and I hated all of it, so I was relieved to find that my own kids' school does nothing like this. No spirit. No special observance of any day. It is wonderful. I see my friends' social media posts of their kids' cute/funny outfits and yes, very cute, very glad we don't do it.
The Chicago teacher's observation that school is too long is right on target, in my opinion - my kids go to a non-traditional private school that believes that school itself is a very demanding environment for children and it isn't reasonable to expect high engagement all day/every day, so they have a short school day, three recesses, art/music/etc. every day, a developmentally appropriate curriculum and no homework. As it turns out kids are plenty enthusiastic about just putting on their uniform and going to school when school itself is engaging to them. This makes our home life/my work-home balance so much more pleasant - we don't need to think about school when they're not at school!
The comment with about the school day being too long resonated with me as well. I’m an administrator at an elementary school. During 2020-2021, I was also the third grade math teacher due to staffing shortages. We were in person, but cut the length of the school day from seven hours to six hours to facilitate daily cleaning. Friday afternoons were for deep cleaning, so Friday was a half instructional day. We didn’t have formal assessments that year due to several compounding factors, but I found that my third grade math students did alright through my anecdotal observations. I think a huge part of it was that I had more time to plan instruction and really look at the work the students were doing. Unfortunately, the half day Fridays and shortened days Monday-Thursday were a point of public contention. I’m not sure how many parents were upset, but some pretty vocal people went to the school board to rail against the shorter days. The normal schedule returned in 2021-2022 and it feels like many of the teachers on my school are at a breaking point. After 2020-2021, I learned that the job could be done in a way that it actually fit in a normal week. Even though I’m not covering a classroom in addition to my administrative duties, I feel like I’m working way harder now. I want the pandemic schedule back, but as long as public schools are our de facto national childcare system, it isn’t happening.
There's so much tension between parents and teachers over school day hours. There's no evidence that a longer school day is better, some that it's worse, but parents need their kids to be somewhere so they can go to work. I wish we could have a shorter school day and offer free public after school activities but the funding money just isn't there.
Well, this reminds me that tomorrow is dress like a book character day for my first-grader, which I had been forgetting. Yikes. The last time we had dress like a book character day he was in daycare and they gave us two days of warning and I assessed his wardrobe then went out and bought a book with a skeleton character so we could send him in his skeleton pajamas. Also I wrote a snippy email to the director about the lack of notice. Happily, the skeleton book turned into a longtime favorite.
Reading this piece, though, my kid's school is sooooo laid back, which I think is partly a district-wide thing though I don't know how spirit days will be for the older kids. But our schools don't do any holiday celebrations beyond "Friendship Day" on February 14. No Halloween etc. And even the dress like a book character day, they will make masks in school, so if they don't arrive dressed as a character they get to participate. I think that's a self-conscious effort to not exclude kids.
There are a couple of pajama days a year, which last year did cause one emergency shopping trip because our kid always sleeps in long sleeves and pants and there was a pajama day on a hot day and we had to get shorty pajamas. Luckily there's a Gap near my husband's office and he just went there. For the 90th day of school it was mismatch day, like half one thing and half another but they helpfully mentioned that mismatched socks were a good choice. Then 10 days later it was the 100th day of school, and ... it can't really have been wild and crazy day, right? They wouldn't have used crazy? I hope? Anyway, some kind of dress weird thing, and we just went with mismatched socks again. So thus far it's been manageable but reading these responses fills me with fear.
I've seen a meme going around that's a message from a school office reading "Attention Parents: For World Book Day tomorrow, every student must come dressed as a character from the classic book 'The Child Who Went to School in their Normal Fucking Uniform' by Julia Donaldson. Thank you, School Office."
Yes yes yes to all the comments about how much effort Spirit Days are for parents. But I’m really here to share that this year my daughter’s high school had “Early 2000s Day” as one of their spirit days, which had the same knife-to-heart energy as the newest historical American Girl doll being from 1999.
1st grader’s school is private and goes PK4-8th grade, but has a high number of Louisiana tuition voucher students (low-income kids who would otherwise be enrolled in a failing public school). Has uniforms and 6 optional “color days” per year: 2 Saints colors (wear black and/or gold or a Saints jersey), 1 Halloween colors (black, orange, lime green, purple), 1 Christmas colors (red, green, and white), 1 Mardi Gras colors (purple, green, and gold), and 1 either Valentine’s (red, pink, purple and white) OR St Patrick’s colors (green and white), whichever one falls further on the calendar from Mardi Gras that year. This seems reasonably nonspecific, stuff that they would likely have in their closets already, and a lot of it can be re-used from one Spirit Day to another. And there are enough of them to make being out-of-uniform special without it being overwhelming. About 2/3 of the kids participate.
My younger daughter’s DAYCARE OTOH (it goes from 10 weeks to 3-4 year olds, she is 20 months old) and which has no uniforms has had Halloween Pajama Day (because every kid totally has special pajamas for every holiday and is not wearing her sister’s hand-me-downs), a whole week of Christmas dress up days, a whole week of themed dress-up days for National School Choice week, a Valentine’s party and dress-up day, and for Mardi Gras I was told to send in a plain white t-shirt for them to decorate (which I did, and then never saw or heard anything about again) and then told to dress her in a Mardi Gras outfit (we’re in New Orleans, so this isn’t TOTALLY random, but I’m not buying my kid a Mardi Gras outfit that will only fit for one year and then have it get ruined at daycare) for the Friday before Mardi Gras. And every Friday during football season is "Black and Gold Friday" because we must have pictures of all the babies in their tiny Saints onesies! (Note: even though my husband grew up in the suburbs here and literally works next to the Superdome, he doesn't follow football or any sports at all and upon seeing a traffic jam heading downtown will ask me if the Saints are playing that day when it's, like, April. So unless I got it as a hand-me-down, my baby isn't likely to own a Saints onesie.)
Next week there’s a whole week of Dr. Seuss-themed dress up days. There will undoubtedly be dress up days if not whole weeks for St. Patrick’s Day and Easter.
THIS IS A DAYCARE. It exists because mothers are AT WORK. There is absolutely no educational benefit for this at this age. It is ENTIRELY for the benefit of the school’s social media presence.
I’m just flat-out ignoring these dress-up days for the younger kid and getting dirty looks from some of the teachers for sending my kid in in a Santa Claus shirt on Valentines Day, but a large portion of the parents aren’t. (Most of the parents are upper-middle-class white folks.)
I’d argue that these days are NOT harmless, as there are undoubtedly mothers there with PPD or PPA beating themselves up over their “failures” to provide this or that socially-pressured thing for their kids that doesn’t actually matter. This is just one more thing added onto them.
Tangentially related: when my older daughter was at this daycare, she was an "honorary graduate" of PK3.
She missed the school cut-off by seven hours, so she's always going to be one of the oldest kids in her class. When she was in the 2 year old room, she was getting "bored and destructive" so they moved her up to the PK3 room a little early, which was perfectly fine with us.
Except that they did a "graduation" for the PK3 kids, with caps and gowns and tassels, in the morning, during a work day. In May, and the kids who "graduated" not only would still be there in that same classroom with those same kids and same teachers for the same hours every day til August for "summer camp," they LITERALLY WENT STRAIGHT BACK TO THE CLASSROOM AFTER "GRADUATION."
But my kid wasn't "graduating" to PK4. She was going to be in there for another year. And they didn't want her to feel left out of "graduating" with her classmates, because she was three and didn't understand. So she was an "honorary graduate."
And my husband had to take off work during the day to see our 3-year-old become an "honorary" graduate of PK3. Because she was three, and she doesn't understand that this is complete and total bullshit, and she would have been inconsolable if at least one of us didn't show up to see her walk across the stage. And I'm STILL hearing from my kid about how I missed this, because ALL the other kids' mothers were there. (The next year was COVID and they did a graduation with caps and gowns but without parents there. Thankfully, her actual grade school doesn't call ANYTHING graduation until eighth grade, and the eighth graders don't wear caps and gowns, just "Sunday best.")
When I bring up that this PK3 "graduation" is completely unnecessary, would go completely unmissed by the "graduates," makes no logical sense, and puts a hell of a burden on the WORKING PARENTS who only use the DAYCARE because THEY ARE AT WORK, I get crap about "we want to encourage education."
I teach college and have my own academic regalia in the back of the closet and have to wear a cap and gown and hood myself semi-regularly for actual COLLEGE commencements, which honor actual achievements that not everyone in a given class cohort attains and which are always on a weekend to allow the parents to show up.
Quit the Pinterest crap, teachers! This mother completely supports education and will completely support you getting rid of all this nonsense!
UPDATE: the night before St. Patrick's Day, we got a note from the daycare saying that students "may wear green tomorrow," like they were being graciously PERMITTED to dress for this holiday (there is no uniform or official dress code for the daycare other than weather-appropriate clothing and closed-toe shoes with backs.)
In protest I sent her in white pajamas with mermaids on them. (They are the exact same fabric and fit as toddler t-shirts and leggings and she is 20 months old, ergo, these are appropriate to wear to daycare).
Then my phone blew up all day because my daughter was supposedly "tagged" in a photo...that contained every other student in the class except her, all dressed in green, most in holiday-specific t-shirts.
The topic of spirit days actually came up in my district administration meeting today. After a pause due to COVID, average attendance is now part of my evaluation again as a school administrator. I do take issue with this because it’s not something I completely control as a school leader.
After a colleague said she does spirit days to boost attendance, I looked at my school’s data for this school year. Our top four attendance days for the year so far are:
- The first day of school
- Valentine’s Day
- Halloween
- The day of the December music program
I’m not a huge fan of special events at school because they are just so darn disruptive. However, the data shows they are also the days when the most kids come to school. I really bristle at using spirit days to cajole students to come to school. At the same time, I don’t blame my colleague for using them to get kids to school, especially if a poor evaluation means being out of a job.
Attendance being part of my evaluation is just another example of the many expectations that are placed on educators without the proper resources to pull them off. As a school leader, it’s easier for me to procure the resources for an epic Kindergarten Valentine’s Blowout and cook my attendance numbers than it is for me to hire a social worker or connect families with community services that are needed to actually tackle the issues that lead to poor attendance.
The attendance data is fascinating to me, because I’ve found that spirit days in my daughter’s elementary school are usually on holidays and days leading up to a vacation week, and those days *seem* to be some of the lease academically rigorous of the year! (More movies, games, thematic crafts, etc. than usual)
Staff attendance is also part of my evaluation. Currently, I have two teachers out on medical leaves and another teacher who will be on maternity leave any day now. These are counted against my average staff attendance. They are actually enough of a drag that I will score as “approaching standard” in that area of my eval.
Staff and student attendance are a reflection of the overall school climate, so attendance percentages are used as a data point to measure this. Unfortunately, it’s an imperfect measure because it’s not the only factor that impacts attendance.
When I was a classroom teacher at the middle school level, I had some concern about how much these days accentuated the differences in resources available to families and children, if the day involved costumes.
The busy, not affluent parents bought inexpensive costumes for the younger children, while the affluent parents facilitated homemade costumes that, when you count the time it takes to make them, were much more expensive and striking. It became a status display.
On twins day at the school, another teacher and I would wear black pants and the same color shirt. But pairs of kids would go shopping to buy identical outfits. One year some of the students came in and had the price tags dangling from their new hats. These were not the affluent students at the school. I thought it was by accident and said to one of my students, 'the tag is still attached to your hat,' and she told me that was the style.
I didn't say anything but found that alarming.
I have to believe flooding the calendar with spirit days is mainly distracting everyone from learning. Events are special if they happen less frequently. In my classroom I timed some off-curriculum projects for the day of the Halloween dance or day before Winter break when I knew kids could not focus on the lesson anyway.
"Events are special if they happen less frequently."
You have it here. Halloween and Valentines Day were the two 'special' school days that I really remember from elementary through middle school, plus in 2nd grade ONLY we celebrated the 100th day of school by bringing 100 of anything to class. But who has time and energy for all that other stuff?! This doesn't build authentic community, or help kids learn. It's just another thing for women to do, all the time ... and for what? What good does this do in the world?
As I read this, I kept thinking about how helpful it is to teach kids that things like “holiday magic” (as Eve Brodsky’s Fair Play brilliantly put it!) require work and labor from someone. Not because there is never value in these kind of fun activities or that kids need to be in charge of them, but because we actually devalue the miracle of them happening at all thanks to the tireless work of underpaid educators and (generally speaking) mothers and women!
I think kids, especially by the time they reach high school, can understand and appreciate being taught that special and fun things in life do not happen without an emotional, physical, and monetary cost paid by someone, and understand that someone is often invisible. As many people interviewed in this story mention, the only way to change this is system is for teachers/parents to start opting out of things like this — but we need to have future generations who know opting out is an option and won’t punish those who do!
My first teaching job was a wild time (a classical charter high school in AZ), and we had a strict curriculum. Since we didn’t celebrate any holidays, but we could celebrate curricular-themed things, and I taught American history + state history to ninth graders, we had a statehood potluck every year. It coincided with Valentine’s Day, and students had been learning about the 5 C’s (cotton, copper, cactus, citrus, climate), so they had to sign up for a contribution that represented something related to state history OR one of these C’s. It worked out well—some of the boys got really into making cookies for our state universities, and some of the girls who already loved baking got very creative with marshmallows for cotton. One year, a student made a Rice Krispie saguaro cactus (that I cut up into slices)!
And the fact that we had this One Thing, after a whole semester of learning history, was a nice way to bring my curriculum together. Similarly, they had One Thing for their Latin class, and One Thing for Chemistry, etc. It only worked bc we had engaged older students and such a strict curriculum, and I wonder how we can prune things down to that level on a wider scale.
As a former teacher and a fat person, I wish one of these people had mentioned the added difficulty of doing these days while fat (either as a child or a teacher). All the last minute shopping is often impossible for folks who can only by clothes online due to in person stores not carrying their size. Also, there's just so many less options for plus size clothing that it's a lot harder to meet the theme!
Yes to this. My son, now 18 and in college, was and is a big kid. I could never find his size easily for spirit days, which was stressful for both of us. If you're thin, you don't have to worry about it because your size will be in a store.
You’re absolutely right. Like so many other things, the hassle/drain/expense of these “Spirit Days” is going to affect anyone not in the accepted “status quo” even more negatively.
I would like to thank whatever genes or spirits gave me an obnoxiously contrary child. He’s always responded to any school-mandated costume day with an enormous Nope.
“If the whole point of Pink Shirt Day is that it’s ok to be different, it’s stupid to all dress the same.”
Lol. Yes! 🤓🤓🤓
For some of us, every day is crazy hair day anyway.
Totally! My youngest goes to school with bed head everyday. Last time I tried to fix his hair, he's like "Why do I need to fix my hair mom? It's not like I'm nervous."
Lol.
Same here in my house!
"Why can't it just be a normal day?"
"Why would I wanna wear my pajamas to school?"
On the bright side, they've had a lot of practice at just being themselves :)
I was that obnoxiously contrary child who noped right out of anything sprit related in school and the higher powers must have thought it hilarious to give me the two most spirit-day-loving kids. The youngest is in high school now so I'm almost done and he is mostly in charge of his own spirit but that was its been a long journey. (My biggest spirit day triumph was "dress like a video game character" day in middle school and I dug out a headband, green cardstock, scissors and glue and like 5 minutes later, he was dressed as a Sim.)
As a parent, it is a relief to see that so many teachers share my concerns. Particularly the observations that spirit days are:
- mostly performative, especially for young students;
- deeply rooted in consumption/capitalism; and therefore
- highly inequitable and incredibly wasteful.
Once my local school board refused to implement/enforce any pandemic protections, I removed my elementary-age child from public school and started homeschooling. Even though I now have to:
- know the curriculum;
- prepare lesson plans;
- gather resources;
- teach;
- document evidence of learning; and
- consult with, and report to, supervising teachers
I somehow feel less overwhelmed than when my child was attending public school full-time. That’s partly because the performative aspects of parenting a school-age child have disappeared from my to-do list.
It is fascinating to see how these spirit days are a collective coping mechanism to create the illusion of belonging/community and calm/fun.
“Yes, you six-year-olds had to do lockdown drills again, but at least you got to do it in your pyjamas! Fun!”
“Sure, we’re in the middle of a traumatic pandemic that is orphaning our schoolmates, but surely we’d feel a lot better if we wore expensive sports jerseys on Friday!”
“We are all, students, parents and teachers alike, completely overwhelmed by our increasing workloads, but these themed sugar cookies we baked last night will help us manage the overwhelm! Right? Right?!?”
Thank you for posting about this. I have taught in a high-income school and now teach in a low-income school. My current school gets it right. There are a handful a year and are very low-key. At my previous school, I had to spend so much money on theme t-shirts and matching Halloween costumes. (This begs the question, why do we make t-shirts for every occasion? The environmental cost is unreal.)
I was wondering if this was why I don't see these days yet for my first grader, we are in an under-served district. Our version is free dress days, where they don't have to wear their uniform t-shirts. You can also get the uniform t-shirts for free if needed, so it's a double boost for parents.
I feel for every teacher. Thankfully kids are grown and on their own now, but what I see with my cousin's kids is sometimes too much. The 'gamification' of every subject to make it 'fun'. Tik Tok and IG need to calm down. Social media has destroyed everything good in the world. It always starts as a great idea, but it never ends that way. To all the teachers out there. I appreciate you. I also don't blame you if you leave the profession for the sake of your own mental health.
I am a teacher (or was) and a mom and so much yes to these comments. Spirit days can be fun and they can also be toxic. I recall a school nearby whose classes got colors for homecoming week. The seniors wore white and a number of them showed up to a pep rally with WHITE PRIDE written in sharpie on their shirts. We live on an Indian reservation. It ended up in the WaPo. This could have happened without spirit days but for gods sake it’s one more stressful thing for teachers and administrators (and the entire student population, in this case) to contend with that could have been avoided.
YIKES
Wow. No words.
My mom always gets really depressed at how trash people are, but I kind of think that people are just very social and most of them go along with whatever their family / circle is doing. And that doesn't need to be a bad thing, if we can have a society that encourages positive behavior through social norms. Class color white for spirit day is not it.
Oh my.
My kid recently has "Dress like your favorite idiom" day and I LOL'd about the absurdity of it. It was definitely a "LOLSOB" moment.
WHAT
Um.... wow.
Totally recognize/feel the responses that mentioned the gap between haves and have-nots, and the nebulous way that affects the perception of which students are "cool" and which teachers are "fun". I'm a quadruplet, and both my mother and us HATED spirit days because of the stress of trying to do participating outfits x4, and the inevitable visual gaps/fights/ill feelings between which of us got the one on-theme item of clothing in the house, and the others making do with whatever could be made or scrounged from Wal-Mart/Target the day before. This also always played out in the contrasts between the rich kids (new, custom spirit stuff), middle-class kids (homemade or cheap stuff), and poor kids (often nothing). Teachers got the judgment, too, because of course the ones who had the time/money/resources to decorate themselves and their classrooms were viewed positively ("fun teacher") by everyone, and the ones who didn't were seen as boring, unengaged, etc.
So, yeah, all this to say that spirit days for everyone in my childhood were marked by stress, class performance, and gossip, and I feel sorry for the teachers, parents, and kids who have one more thing to worry about. Happy, like, Dress-Like-The-Mouse-In-If-You-Give-A-Mouse-A-Cookie-Day, I guess.
Wow. Quadruplets and Spirit Days. I’m so sorry.
What I recall of school celebrations as a kid growing up in the 80's in the East Bay in California is that we wore costumes on Halloween and gave tiny cards on Valentine's Day, and any other celebration basically involved someone's mom bringing in cupcakes. Now that we are honoring so many food sensitivities, celebration seems to have been channelled into clothing because... we all wear clothes? But my kids are very sensitive to clothes and so coming up with something to wear on these days, or worse, having to wear the same t-shirt as everyone else (always the same enormous boy-cut rough cotton t-shirt), has always been an issue. I ignore the Spirit Day notifications or maybe mention them in passing, see the corresponding eye roll, and drop it. But I do sense that my kids, while unwilling to participate, also don't enjoy being part of the out crowd that didn't wear a red t-shirt that day. For us, these days contribute to my kids' sense of alienation from school that was exacerbated by the pandemic.
Why are those shirts always a sensory nightmare? I get that it's probably the cheapest option but they're guaranteeing those shirts won't get worn again on another day, which is a huge waste.
As a child my school had Spirit Week and 100 day and I hated all of it, so I was relieved to find that my own kids' school does nothing like this. No spirit. No special observance of any day. It is wonderful. I see my friends' social media posts of their kids' cute/funny outfits and yes, very cute, very glad we don't do it.
The Chicago teacher's observation that school is too long is right on target, in my opinion - my kids go to a non-traditional private school that believes that school itself is a very demanding environment for children and it isn't reasonable to expect high engagement all day/every day, so they have a short school day, three recesses, art/music/etc. every day, a developmentally appropriate curriculum and no homework. As it turns out kids are plenty enthusiastic about just putting on their uniform and going to school when school itself is engaging to them. This makes our home life/my work-home balance so much more pleasant - we don't need to think about school when they're not at school!
The comment with about the school day being too long resonated with me as well. I’m an administrator at an elementary school. During 2020-2021, I was also the third grade math teacher due to staffing shortages. We were in person, but cut the length of the school day from seven hours to six hours to facilitate daily cleaning. Friday afternoons were for deep cleaning, so Friday was a half instructional day. We didn’t have formal assessments that year due to several compounding factors, but I found that my third grade math students did alright through my anecdotal observations. I think a huge part of it was that I had more time to plan instruction and really look at the work the students were doing. Unfortunately, the half day Fridays and shortened days Monday-Thursday were a point of public contention. I’m not sure how many parents were upset, but some pretty vocal people went to the school board to rail against the shorter days. The normal schedule returned in 2021-2022 and it feels like many of the teachers on my school are at a breaking point. After 2020-2021, I learned that the job could be done in a way that it actually fit in a normal week. Even though I’m not covering a classroom in addition to my administrative duties, I feel like I’m working way harder now. I want the pandemic schedule back, but as long as public schools are our de facto national childcare system, it isn’t happening.
There's so much tension between parents and teachers over school day hours. There's no evidence that a longer school day is better, some that it's worse, but parents need their kids to be somewhere so they can go to work. I wish we could have a shorter school day and offer free public after school activities but the funding money just isn't there.
Yes, agreed. Too long, not enough recess, not enough music and art. Sigh.
Well, this reminds me that tomorrow is dress like a book character day for my first-grader, which I had been forgetting. Yikes. The last time we had dress like a book character day he was in daycare and they gave us two days of warning and I assessed his wardrobe then went out and bought a book with a skeleton character so we could send him in his skeleton pajamas. Also I wrote a snippy email to the director about the lack of notice. Happily, the skeleton book turned into a longtime favorite.
Reading this piece, though, my kid's school is sooooo laid back, which I think is partly a district-wide thing though I don't know how spirit days will be for the older kids. But our schools don't do any holiday celebrations beyond "Friendship Day" on February 14. No Halloween etc. And even the dress like a book character day, they will make masks in school, so if they don't arrive dressed as a character they get to participate. I think that's a self-conscious effort to not exclude kids.
There are a couple of pajama days a year, which last year did cause one emergency shopping trip because our kid always sleeps in long sleeves and pants and there was a pajama day on a hot day and we had to get shorty pajamas. Luckily there's a Gap near my husband's office and he just went there. For the 90th day of school it was mismatch day, like half one thing and half another but they helpfully mentioned that mismatched socks were a good choice. Then 10 days later it was the 100th day of school, and ... it can't really have been wild and crazy day, right? They wouldn't have used crazy? I hope? Anyway, some kind of dress weird thing, and we just went with mismatched socks again. So thus far it's been manageable but reading these responses fills me with fear.
I've seen a meme going around that's a message from a school office reading "Attention Parents: For World Book Day tomorrow, every student must come dressed as a character from the classic book 'The Child Who Went to School in their Normal Fucking Uniform' by Julia Donaldson. Thank you, School Office."
IF ONLY THAT WERE REAL.
Yes yes yes to all the comments about how much effort Spirit Days are for parents. But I’m really here to share that this year my daughter’s high school had “Early 2000s Day” as one of their spirit days, which had the same knife-to-heart energy as the newest historical American Girl doll being from 1999.
Parent of a 1st grader and a toddler.
1st grader’s school is private and goes PK4-8th grade, but has a high number of Louisiana tuition voucher students (low-income kids who would otherwise be enrolled in a failing public school). Has uniforms and 6 optional “color days” per year: 2 Saints colors (wear black and/or gold or a Saints jersey), 1 Halloween colors (black, orange, lime green, purple), 1 Christmas colors (red, green, and white), 1 Mardi Gras colors (purple, green, and gold), and 1 either Valentine’s (red, pink, purple and white) OR St Patrick’s colors (green and white), whichever one falls further on the calendar from Mardi Gras that year. This seems reasonably nonspecific, stuff that they would likely have in their closets already, and a lot of it can be re-used from one Spirit Day to another. And there are enough of them to make being out-of-uniform special without it being overwhelming. About 2/3 of the kids participate.
My younger daughter’s DAYCARE OTOH (it goes from 10 weeks to 3-4 year olds, she is 20 months old) and which has no uniforms has had Halloween Pajama Day (because every kid totally has special pajamas for every holiday and is not wearing her sister’s hand-me-downs), a whole week of Christmas dress up days, a whole week of themed dress-up days for National School Choice week, a Valentine’s party and dress-up day, and for Mardi Gras I was told to send in a plain white t-shirt for them to decorate (which I did, and then never saw or heard anything about again) and then told to dress her in a Mardi Gras outfit (we’re in New Orleans, so this isn’t TOTALLY random, but I’m not buying my kid a Mardi Gras outfit that will only fit for one year and then have it get ruined at daycare) for the Friday before Mardi Gras. And every Friday during football season is "Black and Gold Friday" because we must have pictures of all the babies in their tiny Saints onesies! (Note: even though my husband grew up in the suburbs here and literally works next to the Superdome, he doesn't follow football or any sports at all and upon seeing a traffic jam heading downtown will ask me if the Saints are playing that day when it's, like, April. So unless I got it as a hand-me-down, my baby isn't likely to own a Saints onesie.)
Next week there’s a whole week of Dr. Seuss-themed dress up days. There will undoubtedly be dress up days if not whole weeks for St. Patrick’s Day and Easter.
THIS IS A DAYCARE. It exists because mothers are AT WORK. There is absolutely no educational benefit for this at this age. It is ENTIRELY for the benefit of the school’s social media presence.
I’m just flat-out ignoring these dress-up days for the younger kid and getting dirty looks from some of the teachers for sending my kid in in a Santa Claus shirt on Valentines Day, but a large portion of the parents aren’t. (Most of the parents are upper-middle-class white folks.)
I’d argue that these days are NOT harmless, as there are undoubtedly mothers there with PPD or PPA beating themselves up over their “failures” to provide this or that socially-pressured thing for their kids that doesn’t actually matter. This is just one more thing added onto them.
Tangentially related: when my older daughter was at this daycare, she was an "honorary graduate" of PK3.
She missed the school cut-off by seven hours, so she's always going to be one of the oldest kids in her class. When she was in the 2 year old room, she was getting "bored and destructive" so they moved her up to the PK3 room a little early, which was perfectly fine with us.
Except that they did a "graduation" for the PK3 kids, with caps and gowns and tassels, in the morning, during a work day. In May, and the kids who "graduated" not only would still be there in that same classroom with those same kids and same teachers for the same hours every day til August for "summer camp," they LITERALLY WENT STRAIGHT BACK TO THE CLASSROOM AFTER "GRADUATION."
But my kid wasn't "graduating" to PK4. She was going to be in there for another year. And they didn't want her to feel left out of "graduating" with her classmates, because she was three and didn't understand. So she was an "honorary graduate."
And my husband had to take off work during the day to see our 3-year-old become an "honorary" graduate of PK3. Because she was three, and she doesn't understand that this is complete and total bullshit, and she would have been inconsolable if at least one of us didn't show up to see her walk across the stage. And I'm STILL hearing from my kid about how I missed this, because ALL the other kids' mothers were there. (The next year was COVID and they did a graduation with caps and gowns but without parents there. Thankfully, her actual grade school doesn't call ANYTHING graduation until eighth grade, and the eighth graders don't wear caps and gowns, just "Sunday best.")
When I bring up that this PK3 "graduation" is completely unnecessary, would go completely unmissed by the "graduates," makes no logical sense, and puts a hell of a burden on the WORKING PARENTS who only use the DAYCARE because THEY ARE AT WORK, I get crap about "we want to encourage education."
I teach college and have my own academic regalia in the back of the closet and have to wear a cap and gown and hood myself semi-regularly for actual COLLEGE commencements, which honor actual achievements that not everyone in a given class cohort attains and which are always on a weekend to allow the parents to show up.
Quit the Pinterest crap, teachers! This mother completely supports education and will completely support you getting rid of all this nonsense!
UPDATE: the night before St. Patrick's Day, we got a note from the daycare saying that students "may wear green tomorrow," like they were being graciously PERMITTED to dress for this holiday (there is no uniform or official dress code for the daycare other than weather-appropriate clothing and closed-toe shoes with backs.)
In protest I sent her in white pajamas with mermaids on them. (They are the exact same fabric and fit as toddler t-shirts and leggings and she is 20 months old, ergo, these are appropriate to wear to daycare).
Then my phone blew up all day because my daughter was supposedly "tagged" in a photo...that contained every other student in the class except her, all dressed in green, most in holiday-specific t-shirts.
I am so counting the days until she ages out.
I agree that these days sound not harmless. The complete opposite.
The topic of spirit days actually came up in my district administration meeting today. After a pause due to COVID, average attendance is now part of my evaluation again as a school administrator. I do take issue with this because it’s not something I completely control as a school leader.
After a colleague said she does spirit days to boost attendance, I looked at my school’s data for this school year. Our top four attendance days for the year so far are:
- The first day of school
- Valentine’s Day
- Halloween
- The day of the December music program
I’m not a huge fan of special events at school because they are just so darn disruptive. However, the data shows they are also the days when the most kids come to school. I really bristle at using spirit days to cajole students to come to school. At the same time, I don’t blame my colleague for using them to get kids to school, especially if a poor evaluation means being out of a job.
Attendance being part of my evaluation is just another example of the many expectations that are placed on educators without the proper resources to pull them off. As a school leader, it’s easier for me to procure the resources for an epic Kindergarten Valentine’s Blowout and cook my attendance numbers than it is for me to hire a social worker or connect families with community services that are needed to actually tackle the issues that lead to poor attendance.
The attendance data is fascinating to me, because I’ve found that spirit days in my daughter’s elementary school are usually on holidays and days leading up to a vacation week, and those days *seem* to be some of the lease academically rigorous of the year! (More movies, games, thematic crafts, etc. than usual)
Oh my. To be evaluated based on attendance seems incredibly unfair.
Staff attendance is also part of my evaluation. Currently, I have two teachers out on medical leaves and another teacher who will be on maternity leave any day now. These are counted against my average staff attendance. They are actually enough of a drag that I will score as “approaching standard” in that area of my eval.
Staff and student attendance are a reflection of the overall school climate, so attendance percentages are used as a data point to measure this. Unfortunately, it’s an imperfect measure because it’s not the only factor that impacts attendance.
When I was a classroom teacher at the middle school level, I had some concern about how much these days accentuated the differences in resources available to families and children, if the day involved costumes.
The busy, not affluent parents bought inexpensive costumes for the younger children, while the affluent parents facilitated homemade costumes that, when you count the time it takes to make them, were much more expensive and striking. It became a status display.
On twins day at the school, another teacher and I would wear black pants and the same color shirt. But pairs of kids would go shopping to buy identical outfits. One year some of the students came in and had the price tags dangling from their new hats. These were not the affluent students at the school. I thought it was by accident and said to one of my students, 'the tag is still attached to your hat,' and she told me that was the style.
I didn't say anything but found that alarming.
I have to believe flooding the calendar with spirit days is mainly distracting everyone from learning. Events are special if they happen less frequently. In my classroom I timed some off-curriculum projects for the day of the Halloween dance or day before Winter break when I knew kids could not focus on the lesson anyway.
"Events are special if they happen less frequently."
You have it here. Halloween and Valentines Day were the two 'special' school days that I really remember from elementary through middle school, plus in 2nd grade ONLY we celebrated the 100th day of school by bringing 100 of anything to class. But who has time and energy for all that other stuff?! This doesn't build authentic community, or help kids learn. It's just another thing for women to do, all the time ... and for what? What good does this do in the world?
The cost. THE COST. I don't even have kids, I just hear about it from my sister and I cannot get over the cost.
I don't have kids either, but I get tired just reading about all this stuff. How on earth do parents & teachers do it??
Right? Good grief.
As I read this, I kept thinking about how helpful it is to teach kids that things like “holiday magic” (as Eve Brodsky’s Fair Play brilliantly put it!) require work and labor from someone. Not because there is never value in these kind of fun activities or that kids need to be in charge of them, but because we actually devalue the miracle of them happening at all thanks to the tireless work of underpaid educators and (generally speaking) mothers and women!
I think kids, especially by the time they reach high school, can understand and appreciate being taught that special and fun things in life do not happen without an emotional, physical, and monetary cost paid by someone, and understand that someone is often invisible. As many people interviewed in this story mention, the only way to change this is system is for teachers/parents to start opting out of things like this — but we need to have future generations who know opting out is an option and won’t punish those who do!
My first teaching job was a wild time (a classical charter high school in AZ), and we had a strict curriculum. Since we didn’t celebrate any holidays, but we could celebrate curricular-themed things, and I taught American history + state history to ninth graders, we had a statehood potluck every year. It coincided with Valentine’s Day, and students had been learning about the 5 C’s (cotton, copper, cactus, citrus, climate), so they had to sign up for a contribution that represented something related to state history OR one of these C’s. It worked out well—some of the boys got really into making cookies for our state universities, and some of the girls who already loved baking got very creative with marshmallows for cotton. One year, a student made a Rice Krispie saguaro cactus (that I cut up into slices)!
And the fact that we had this One Thing, after a whole semester of learning history, was a nice way to bring my curriculum together. Similarly, they had One Thing for their Latin class, and One Thing for Chemistry, etc. It only worked bc we had engaged older students and such a strict curriculum, and I wonder how we can prune things down to that level on a wider scale.