In your experience as a teacher, when/where/how have you found yourself participating in “the teacher’s lounge?” Address your own awareness of, participation in, and avoidance of the deficit thinking that comes with the teacher’s lounge? In my early teaching years, I hadn’t been warned of the teachers lounge like the teacher in the article mentioned. I made many teacher friends and we enjoyed lunch together. We hardly ever talked about colleagues or students during lunch! The negativity began during my fifth or sixth year of teaching when I found myself caught in the web of a department full of adult drama. I heard stories about teachers before I met them, and I was told to believe it all to be true. I heard stories about students and I was supposed to go along and call them a pain in the..., too. I was engulfed in gossip. It was not necessarily in the lunch room because we typically ate in our classrooms or in a common departmental area. Sometimes even in passing between classe...