Lunch

We do our fair share of weird things around here but perhaps one of the oddest is lunch. If your first experience with SW is the lunch time you will leave with some questions.

First, we do not eat in the cafeteria. That is not completely true since there are a very regular group of students who do eat in the lunch room and enjoy sitting around the tables and socializing with their friends. But there is another large group that go through the line and head toward the link and the commons. It is like one large scattered picnic.

Most of the same students eat with the same friends in the same place each day. During the first week of school different groups try out sections and eventually end up with their favorite spot and that is the way it is for the rest of the school year. Junior and seniors are allowed to leave campus for lunch but bad weather will bring them inside. As with most things around schools, senior have first pick of spots and that is theirs whether they are there daily or not. We do have some seniors who do not leave the building and "hold" the senior spot informally.

I think the unstructured time is good for the kids. Yes, they are all over, sitting on the floor with their lunches and/or lunch bags scattered about. It may look odd but it works. The kids need social time. They need to mix and mingle. As an observer, one gets a feeling and flavor of how the day (or week) is going. It is a great time to watch the interactions and see groups of friends and even spot the beginnings of some problem.

It would be an excellent case study of maturity. For the first four weeks, the freshman have great difficulty in determining the difference in recess and high school unstructured time. Right about now almost all of them are figuring out that running around in a circle and screaming was cool in the elementary grades but just isn't that "cool" in high school. And yes, I will say it, the boys are the worse. It takes boys the longest to understand that one can stand (or sit) quietly for more than two minutes without hitting whoever is close or bouncing off the wall or any of those other wonderful traits that stereotype young teenage boys.

The students are through the line and finished eating in about 7 minutes. That gives them a full 23 minutes of unstructured time. And they make the most of it.

For someone new to the building this entire process appears chaotic and out of control. For those of us in the middle of it, it is a time of conversation and friendship. Our students work hard and it is good for them to have some minutes to talk with friends and catch up on the news.