The Cafeteria

I gotta admit that for many of my students, the highlight of the day is the 30 minutes spent in the cafeteria. It is the one environment in our school where students have to make decisions that will affect their social lives. They have the opportunity to not only pick what they eat, but also who they will sit next to. For the most part, there is no assigned seating in the lunchroom. This means our students have the freedom to pick whether they sit next to the smelly kid with dandruff or the overly mature cheerleader with the too short for school skirt. Many a hard decision is made.

During my stint in a Junior High school in upstate New York, i found the cafeteria to be the second scariest place in school (the scariest by far was the boys locker room). Our cafeteria was monitored by lunch ladies who had little if any control over the students that freely roamed and wreaked havoc among weaker students. If there was going to be a fight there was a good chance that it would occur somewhere in the cafeteria. At least once a month my lunch would be ruined when two meatheads fighting over the cheerleader with the too short for school skirt would come flying across the cafeteria spilling trays full of delicious school food. They would inevitably land on the end of my table launching my turkey chunks with gravy skyward and leaving my stomach growling for the rest of the day.

In order to prevent my students from enduring this same hostile environment in the cafeteria our team has made a point to remain in the cafeteria with our students. Our contract stipulates that we are entitled to a duty free lunch. This means that we could drop our students off at the doors and then enjoy our fiesta pizza in peace and quiet. As a team, however, we would rather have our students eat in a peaceful and safe cafeteria. Although it is an inconvenience, we enjoy fewer behavior problems than teams who rely on "lunch lady" monitors. I also get the satisfaction that my students will always get to finish their turkey chunks with gravy.