My favorite part of my job is actually not part of my job. As a public high school teacher in a state and district with a teachers union, my contract entitles me to a “tax-free” lunch. However, over the years, I have willingly and with some pride developed a lunch team.
Many teachers have a lunch team: the same group of students who choose to make their classroom their home base for the week. When I was a first-year teacher and new to the school and district, I left my classroom door open during lunch in the hope that my coworkers would come chat and eat with me, but it was the students who gradually took advantage. my opening door policy.
While I'm still figuring out healthy and sustainable boundaries while working contractual hours, making my classroom a place where changing groups of young people share food and talk with each other has helped me grow as a teacher, and I believe it has had an observable impact. in children's learning and participation in school.
The children were not well
My first year as a teacher was the first full school year after COVID. When our district went remote for three semesters, I noticed that students were struggling to relearn how to socialize and navigate changing friendships and relationships with each other and with adults at school. Whether that meant not interacting with people they didn't know, exploding and lashing out at someone, or sitting alone on their phones, I watched students struggle to exist in a community and deal with social anxieties or frustrations during class.
Many teachers don't necessarily see their students outside the boundaries of their class often, but high school is about so much more than class time. Lunchtime in American high school is such a culturally ingrained experience that I bet every person who went through this school system has a vivid image of what it entails; Some of the clichés that come to mind are food fights, awkward trips through the cafeteria, or eating lunch alone in the bathroom.
A little over a decade ago, during my first weeks at a public high school as a student, I experienced all of these scenarios in excruciatingly memorable detail. I changed schools between my ninth and tenth grades, and I'll never forget the first week of sophomore year when a teammate's mom assigned her as my friend, against her will, I might add. She was so upset and I was so mortified that I ended up eating my PB&J on the last toilet in the girls' bathroom. After that day, I mustered up the courage to sit with some students I knew and we established a routine of sitting in a corner outside our history teachers' classroom. It was that group of children who became my lifelong friends, and it was that teacher who inspired me to pursue education and still influences my teaching today. When I think back to high school, it is these interactions and moments that stand out in my memory.
I wish I could say that I purposely cultivated the food-sharing community in my classroom, but instead, it evolved naturally. All I did was decide that it was okay for anyone to eat in my classroom and I picked up two old microwaves and a mini fridge. From there, I watched as a culture of breaking bread and eating together as a community evolved naturally in my room, led by the children. This practice of eating and sharing food seems to play an important role in making my classroom feel open and welcoming to a very eclectic variety of youth and friend groups.
The salad bowl and the crucible
One thing I love about my school is the representation I see of the diverse identities and cultures of all of our students. One challenge we face with this diversity is overcoming barriers and tensions between different cliques or groups of students, especially students who primarily speak different languages and who come from very different cultures of origin.
During class time, these students encounter many difficulties that prevent them from participating in learning, such as being hungry or not knowing how to communicate with the other students at their table. I want to start by saying that many teachers, rightly so, do not allow food in their classrooms for a variety of reasons, including to avoid pests or messes, or especially in a lab science class where eating is a safety issue. However, allowing students to eat in my classroom has led to many interactions between students who would not normally acknowledge each other's existence, which over time makes them more comfortable or confident in working with that student or asking for help.
While sharing bags of popular chips is one way students can interact and see their similarities, another thing I've seen happen, especially at lunchtime, is that students learn about their shared culture or totally foreign cultures. through food. Some of the students on my potluck team will bring me food whenever their cultural club has an event or fundraiser. I've enjoyed the homemade falafel wraps, pupusas, and lumpia, and if I'm not too hungry, I never hesitate to offer a falafel or cut my pupusa in half to split with any student who asks.
Last year, when I saw a semi-regular student on my lunch team warming up her injera and what In my microwave, another lower grade student and I recognized the dish. That led us to chat about his Eritrean family and how the two became friends. Besides the surprising added benefit of getting a piece of injera, small exchanges like these are important to me because they exemplify how my open lunch hour helps me get to know my community and creates connections between different students.
Dessert to go
If you are reading this from a non-teaching perspective, it is important that you understand that I am incredibly fortunate to be able to do this in my classroom. If I didn't have the support of my union, or the support of a school that could assign me my own classroom and provide me with resources like napkins and running water, none of this would be possible for me to do.
Most of the students I will work with in my career will reheat their lunches and chat with other teachers, or spend their 40 minutes of free time each day outside playing on the field or other parts of our beautiful campus. However, my hope is that by building a culture of sharing meals in my room, students will experience a welcoming and safe place when they walk through my door.
Part of the reason I became a teacher is because I have always felt at home in the classroom. No matter where my family moved during my K-12 childhood, I felt most at home when I found a familiar place on campus to be by myself with my friends. It may seem inconsequential, but I have witnessed how pop tarts, takis, and tupperware of home-cooked meals break down barriers between diverse groups of students and contribute to a sense of connection that these young people need and deserve.
