School portraits / Spoon Games, December 2025
A Berkeley Carroll Senior Missed Class Because of a Spoon
Every December, Upper Schoolers at a Brooklyn school play Spoon Games, a two-week hunt with plastic cutlery. One senior filed a dispatch from the front.
On Tuesday, December 9, 2025, Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn began Spoon Games, which a senior, in the student newsletter The Blotter, called the school's annual version of the Hunger Games. You pay $5. You get a plastic spoon with your name on it and someone else's. You tag that person with the spoon, take their spoon, and hunt their target, while someone you don't know hunts you.
Classrooms, the atrium, the library, the cafeteria and study hall are off limits, which leaves the hallways. There is no running, although, she noted, enforcement is shaky, because there must be a witness.
A rule that only applies if someone sees you is the founding principle of every family vacation I have ever led.
The dispatch. On December 10, at 12:38 p.m. on the dot, the senior was heading up the back stairs to class when she realized that the sophomore hunting her (which she had learned by eavesdropping) had lunch. She peeked onto the third floor. Her hunter was standing directly outside Room 305, her classroom, spoon raised, with maybe five sophomore friends. They made eye contact. The senior turned around.
She went around to the main staircase and asked a teacher for help. He scouted the situation and returned with his assessment: she was not getting through that blockade. "Definitely true," she wrote, "yet I knew I had to attempt it."
That is the spirit behind every bad idea I have ever loved.
She persuaded the teacher and a friend to escort her past the herd. On the approach, three more sophomores had appeared on the bench outside the bathroom. Then the signal: "CA-CA-CA-....CA-CA-CA." The sophomores had moved to bird calls. She realized her hunter was prepared to "walk" after her until the tag landed, and she did not make it to class, for which she deeply apologized, in print, to her teacher.
She did not lose, though. Later, hunting a classmate in study hall, she waited for him to leave, got a tip that he was at his locker, and came round the corner, spoon out, at 3:29, when a friend shouted, "3:30!!!!! 3:30!!!!" She slid the spoon into her pocket, told him someone had been chasing her all day, and walked off. He had no idea.
Her verdict on the whole two weeks, falling as it did right before exams: "a little insanity is keeping us all sane."
The middle one has proposed Spoon Games at home. I agreed, on the condition that the kitchen is off limits. He pointed out that's where the spoons are. The game ended before it began, and I have never been so outmaneuvered by a piece of cutlery.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- The Blotter: Spoon Games? More like Hunger Games. bcblotter.substack.com
- Berkeley Carroll: Students Cook Up Smiles in Kindergarten Bake Shop berkeleycarroll.org
- Berkeley Carroll: Middle School Explorations berkeleycarroll.org
- Niche: The Berkeley Carroll School reviews niche.com