Based on my daily, I have a theory about why and how our students do well or poorly in high school. And it’s based on food.
There’s a food hierarchy, if you didn’t know.
1–kids eat with their folks and bring pretty good food to school. Lunch time isn’t always when they eat this food, but it’s usually a nice product.
2–kids eat school food. Ours is your basic cafeteria/red cart food. If you know the ins and outs, you might get some nutrition.
3–kids eat crap. They bring it from home or the local convenience store. Sugar and calories.
4–kids don’t eat. No, really. They do not eat.
Numbers one through three are pretty ordinary, I would think. They have been the norm for quite some time. I was number one, but I would also buy a crappy sugar product here and there. They sold Pepsi in vending machines, and candy/chips/etc. in the student store.
We don’t have a student store. There are a few vending machines, but they don’t have much in them. I rarely see kids eating anything in class anymore, which was not the case when we sold soda and Gatorade in the vending machines, along with snacky items in machines and carts. Granted, kids ate some horrific meals–the Mountain Dew, Grab Bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, and a big cookie were a standard 1500 calorie snack–but there were choices that weren’t so bad. Heck, when I taught at Long Beach Poly, they had a fruit machine that ran out of product every day.
So what’s the excuse for number four? Why don’t kids eat. I asked my 6th period today–“How many of you have not eaten yet today?” About 10 or 12 kids raised their hands. When asked if they were hungry, the kids with raised hands said yes. It was 2:30 at this point in the day.
We are under healthy school restrictions, but there’s still food to eat at school.
If the issue is money, we have free and reduced lunches for any family that claims it. I believe that’s all you have to do to get on the free and reduced lunch list–claim it. In turn, that self-reporting gives students access to fee waivers on college apps, along with AP tests.
I guess I don’t have an answer, but I do know one thing. Students who are fed do better. All the time we spend arguing over how to get students to integrate quotes, or write commentaries, or form common assessments, or whatever, might all be solved with a cheese stick. Or an apple.
Crap. Everyone likes to be fed. I know people who literally get hangry if they’re running low on sustenance. You throw me a donut in the morning, or a breakfast burrito, and I’m a better teacher.
Food gets forgotten in the school equation, or maybe like the rest of us, it just gets lost. But, I know what would happen if I brought good healthy food and put it in front of my students.
Maybe I’ll bring that up at our next PLC or RTI or WASC meeting. We have had so many other learning philosophies of the past that were also turned into acronyms that we have long since stopped talking about, forgotten, and abandoned.
And, where sometimes it’s hard to assess data in our WASC group when there is no data, there should always be a place to get something good to eat.https://youtu.be/5ea5jKFGgUw