We ended up going with sushi boat and bottle of sake. It worked nicely .
And, oh man, do you know what they did to me? I've got teachers in the audience, so I'll explain.
We lost two of our teachers (well, 1.8) to unusually low enrollment. As a result, they had to turn every schedule upside down. Unfortunately, what they communicated to us was that there would be "a few" "minor" schedule changes for "some" students. Nope, they barely left a handful of students in the same class they'd started out in.
If you're not a teacher, I'll explain. A good portion of my job is creating and maintaining a positive classroom culture. The class culture is like a bank account. You can make withdrawals - pushing the kids, making them anxious or screwing up and getting negative with them - and you must make the occasional deposit - fun time, one-on-one interaction, in-jokes - if you expect the class to stay solvent. The class culture is also kind of like an animal, in that it can survive the removal of some tissue (students) and still survive.
With this much change, however, my class culture just went up in an economic crash. They took it out back and shot it. It's like starting over on the first day of school. If I'd known it was going to be this bad, I could have prepared for it, but that would have taken communication from my principal, and this is the man who didn't warn us we were all getting layoff notices (even the ones who were going to get to stay) last year.
Furthermore, I knew that the other science teacher had some... classroom management issues. This wasn't shaping up to be his year, and he was never great at discipline. What I didn't know instead of "classroom management issues" I should have said "no classroom management system to speak of." His kids, my new students, had no basis for behavior. They expected carte blanche do do whatever they wanted.
Man, it was exhausting. I thought I'd already passed the part of the year where I have to be a disciplinarian jerkface - to establish myself - and started the part where the job begins to be fun. And with kids who have just experienced an upheaval, it's going to take even longer.