Once a week, my students have the option to spend time in my classroom during their lunch break.

There’s no agenda. No lesson. No carefully planned activity.

Mostly, it’s just a quieter place to be.

For some of my gifted students, that’s exactly what they need. School can be loud. The lunchroom is loud. The playground is louder. And for kids who experience the world a little more intensely, sometimes eighty minutes of Discovery isn’t the only thing they need from my room.

Sometimes they just need a place to reset.

So once a week, they bring their lunches back.

We eat.

We talk.

We laugh.

Sometimes the conversation is about friendships or something happening at school. Sometimes we end up discussing surprisingly deep thoughts over surprisingly questionable cafeteria food. Sometimes I’m part of the conversation. Sometimes they barely notice I’m there.

And sometimes we watch a TEDEd riddle, pause it before the solution, and refuse to press play again until we’ve figured it out.

There are no standards attached to any of it.

It’s just time together.

And I love it.

But one week, I canceled lunch.

My father-in-law had passed away the day before.

I was at school, and I was okay. Or at least okay enough.

I taught my classes. I did what needed to be done. But when lunchtime came, I realized I just didn’t have it in me that day.

I needed a minute.

So I told the students that unfortunately, we’d have to reschedule lunch.

One of them looked genuinely confused.

“Why can’t we come back today?”

I didn’t give her the whole story. I simply told her I was feeling a little sad that day and needed some time by myself.

She looked at me for a moment.

And then, with complete sincerity, she said:

“But you love kids.”

I almost laughed.

She wasn’t trying to make some profound observation about teaching. She was simply confused.

Mrs. Sopko loves kids.

We are kids.

Therefore, Mrs. Sopko should obviously want us to eat lunch in her room.

The logic was pretty solid.

And she was right.

I do love kids.

I also loved them considerably more from the other side of a closed classroom door that particular afternoon.

What she didn’t understand yet was that loving something doesn’t mean you have an endless supply of yourself to give it.

But that isn’t the part of her comment that stayed with me.

What stayed with me was this:

She knew.

Somewhere along the way, this child had decided that loving kids was simply a fact about me.

I had never taught her that.

It wasn’t written on the board.

It wasn’t part of a lesson.

I don’t remember ever sitting down with my students and explaining how much I love being around them.

She had just been paying attention.

Maybe she noticed that I opened my classroom during lunch.

Maybe it was the conversations.

Maybe it was the laughing.

Maybe it was the fact that I was willing to stop everything because someone found a particularly good riddle and now, obviously, none of us could continue with our lives until we solved it.

More likely, it wasn’t any one thing.

It was a hundred little things.

And she had put them together.

Years later, another student would catch me working with our Future City team on a Saturday morning and announce that he’d figured out my ikigai.

Apparently, I’m not particularly good at keeping the things I love a secret.

I’m starting to think that’s a good thing.

We spend a lot of time thinking about what we want children to learn from us.

We plan lessons.

We choose books.

We design experiences.

We decide which ideas are important enough to spend our limited time exploring.

But children are learning other things from us too.

They’re watching.

They notice what makes us laugh.

They notice what makes us curious.

They notice the questions that make us stop and say, “Wait. I don’t know. What do you think?”

They notice when an idea excites us.

They notice what we’re willing to spend a Saturday morning doing.

And apparently, they notice who we love spending our lunch with.

Children don’t just learn from what we teach. They learn from what we love.

Maybe that’s one of the quietest ways we teach them.

Not by telling them what deserves their curiosity, their attention, or their care.

By letting them see what deserves ours.

I want my students to find things they love someday.

I want them to discover questions they can’t stop thinking about. Problems they want to solve. Work that feels like theirs. People and places and ideas that make them want to contribute something uniquely their own.

I can’t choose those things for them.

But I can let them see what it looks like to care deeply about something.

To be curious.

To get excited.

To keep learning.

To love the work.

And, yes, to love the people you get to do it with.

Even if every once in a while you need to eat lunch alone.

Maybe our students already know more about what we love than we realize.

The question is:

What have we shown them is worth loving?