Was this the norm in your school?

[Alida]

It's not the norm in my daughter's school, thankfully!  They do only have 20 minutes to eat, but that's better than skipping it altogether.  We also had 20 minute lunches back in the day   Just enough time to get through the line, eat and get back to class, but there was food involved.

I can't imagine who would think making children skip meals is a good idea! 

[hobish]

We could choose to give up a lunch period; but it was in no way a part of regular scheduling. Usually it was for an extra lab or band. I never did it myself.

[melodrama]

This is a really interesting thread, reading about everyone's different experiences. Besides the "Flap class" science periods I described, here's some more scheduling fun:

I went to high school in Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs in a not-rich but not-poor school.  State standards may have mandated the 60 minute science class, I'm not sure.  

State standards did mandate that we take PE every day, for a full 40 minutes, for all 4 years, unless you were in a sport on season.  That contributed to our scheduling woes, although I'm glad we were forced to be active.

With all the afterschool extracurriculars, not only did I rarely have a good lunch, I almost never got a real dinner, either.  

All afterschool activities began 20 minutes after the last period ended, and often lasted to 7 or 8pm.  So either someone with a car had to make  a lightning fast run to McDonalds (or other fast food), often buying for several friends, or you ate dinner out of the vending machines--which we had several of, although they weren't turned on during the school day.  Animal crackers and Pepsi were my preferred dinner option, although I would go for McNuggets if I could scrape together enough spare change.

And it wasn't just us drama nerds, either.  All the sports were on the same schedule, as well as activities like Forensics and model UN.

The big debate when I was in school, which was still raging when I was student teaching, was early morning sports practices.  Often baseball and soccer (because it was warm in the mornings) players would have practice from 6:30-7:30am, then they'd shower and show up in class half dead and proceed to sleep through the rest of their day.  Classroom teachers were (understandably) irate, but the coaches felt like they didn't have enough time to practice in the evenings without keeping kids at school until 9pm, which would be too late for them to do any homework or studying.

While I do agree that forcing kids to skip lunch is a terrible idea, I think there are only so many ways to structure the basic 7/8 hour school day to make sure kids are really getting all the information they need.  Without major overhaul of the public school system (which it needs, but which is expensive and therefore unlikely for political reasons) I can't say I fault districts for trying to use their time creatively.  If, say, a student has English class at noon and the teacher understands the situation and is willing to allow kids to eat a sandwich while she reads aloud, or while they're writing in their journals or whatever, I'm not sure it's the end of the world.  

[Sophia]

I would have been quite upset.  Then and now, lunch was the highlight of my day.  It really had nothing to do with the food.  It is a long break with friends that you oculd count on happening every day.  It is usually the ONLY break in the day.  No matter how busy it got at work, I always went out for lunch, almost always with friends.

[purplebunny]

Where I went to school we had 8 "classes" per student, 4 subjects per day on an 8-day rotation. Each day there would be a double period of one class, before and after lunch. So we always got our full (40-minute) lunch... labs would be scheduled for a double period day and the teacher would make sure there was a convenient stopping point, if necessary.

[Suze]

We always had our lunch period as well. (been out 30 years this year - sigh)

Remember though, that we had ONE lunch to get (no choosing different things) no vending machines, no ice creams and your choice of white or chocolate milk.  Oh and no Pizza either.

You ate it and were happy or you went to the gas station down the street. (bringing your lunch in high school - who did that?)

I still can't stand the site of hamburger gravy over mashed potatos.  ICK

[EvilAlice]

Wow.  We only had 20 minutes for lunch in high school, and that was bad enough.  Not really enough time to stand in line then scarf your food down.  And if you brought your lunch, it was barely time to get to your locker from one end of the school and inhale your sandwich on the way to the other side.

I can't believe it's even allowed, though, to have NO lunch at all.  I didn't  usually have a problem missing lunch and still have the bad habit of skipping meals sometimes- but when you are hungry you can't concentrate at all and feel terrible if you're really starving.  What do students do, keep pockets full of string cheese and other portable foods like that?  I guess you'd have to.

[RoseRose]

I typically didn't eat lunch, but we had a 20 min lunch in high school (year before last) and a 5 minute passing period afterwards.  We ran on the "block" schedule, 4 classes one day, and 4 different classes the next.  It worked out pretty well.  There were always enough time for labs and stuff.  Only problem was the music teachers would have prefferred meeting every day.  But, it worked, and we always had lunch.

[kherbert05]

When I was in school - no way. The parents would have raised 9 types of hell. We had a little longer than 30 min. In HS there was the plate lunch, stack bar (sandwiches, snacks), and a salad bar. I brought a sandwich and got a salad.



My school now kids get a 30 min recess/bathroom time and a 30 min lunch time. Teachers are paired up and 1 supervises both classes for the 30 min recess/bathroom and the other for the 30 min lunch time. By law teachers have a 30 min duty free lunch.*When I've been in the lunch room (I teach specials so no homeroom class), the line tends to be empty when each pair of classes enters the serving area. They move through quickly and get most of the time to eat. If there is a delay it tends to be with 5Th grade, because they ran out of food and had to make more. Those kids are given extra time to eat.

*Our principal and AP are real strict about this. I covered an ARD (special ed meeting) because they had to have a regular ed teacher and I have all the kids. It started during my conference time --> went through my lunch time --> into my next class. I signed off and took off running. When the AP realized, what had happened. He came in and covered my kindergartners and insisted I take a full 30 min. lunch. He is comfortable with computers but 28 kinders + 25 computers = difficult class.

[Ko-Ko]

This is just crazy. I'm in high school, and I'll tell you how we do it. We have cycles of six days, and each student with a lab gets assigned either one or two days on the six day cycle, depending on the level of the science class. For example, my days are 2 and 5 for my physics lab. Normally, I go to gym and then go to physics. On days 2 and 5 I skip gym, and go straight to lab, so I have a double period of physics. Nobody has to miss lunch, and gym is useless anyway, so nobody cares about that. It's the one thing I'll miss about quitting science my senior year.

Ko-Ko

[Alida]

Gym is useless?  Why would you say that?

[Ko-Ko]

It's because everyone just stands around pretending to be busy so they don't get in trouble. During running days, many of the teachers are sadistic monsters who shout that the students are going to slow. Well, I don't see them running around the track with us! I also witnessed the head teacher shouting at my friend because she had stopped running. She was having an asthma attack! I also tend to meet all sorts of psychos in gym class, so overall it's not a very enjoyable experience, and nobody really gets exercise. Sorry about the rant, it's just something I feel very strongly about.

Ko-Ko

[RoseRose]

I somewhat agree with Ko-Ko.  The IDEA of gym class is very useful, but I know when I was a sophmore, my gym class was useless (my school only required two semesters total of gym).  My senior year it was better, but that's because I had a friend in class, and we decided to help each other make it work.  Gym class is a good idea, but can be a failure in implementation.

[Lisbeth]

I have to agree with Ko-Ko about the usefulness of gym as it's taught in high school too.

When I was in high school, gym was to cull the truly athletically gifted, who were then encouraged to play for the school teams, from everyone else, who were then put in regular gym classes.  I enjoyed it when we did aerobics and sometimes volleyball and basketball, but we also had to play softball, and when we did, you would think the only girls on the field were the pitcher, the catcher, and the first basegirl (we were in separate classes from the boys).  Once a girl got to first base, nobody cared about putting her out, so the other fielders basically just stood around with nothing to do, especially the outfielders.  Boooooooooorrrring.

[RuneGuardian]

In my high school, a lot of people got the displeasure of having science labs the period before lunch. One teacher acted very smug and would sometimes not let the class go until the stampede of people from other classes had gone by. The lines are, of course, huge (even with the lunches broken up over three periods of twenty minutes). Some people would get through the line and have only five minutes to eat everything they picked up. I know many times I wouldn't bother waiting in line because it took so long and I'd just eat when I went hom three or four hours later.

But I know someone would have gone postal if lunches were taken away entirely. Not everyone wants to feel a rumbling stomach for the rest of the day, and call me crazy, but it's pretty hard to concentrate when you're aching for a meal.

As far as gym classes...I admit they were pretty useless, especially when it came to playing team sports. There was almost always about a half dozen athletically-inclined people in my classes, so that put the rest of us at a disadvantage, especially me. People figured that, due to my size (overweight), I must not exist on the gym floor...and that since I don't play sports, I don't know how to catch a basketball or hit a hockey puck. On more than one occasion, I had my own teammates steal the ball from me in soccer and basketball because they figured they were that much better than me. In all honesty, gym class taught me that teamwork is worthless and the only way to get things done is to do it yourself. My typical gym day was spent walking back and forth across the gym trying to make it look like I was doing something so I'd pass.

I really think the gym classes should be divided up into the athletic people and the non-athletic people - perhaps that way the competitive crazies can do their thing and those of us who aren't that great at sports can play and still have some kind of fun without the inflated-ego athletes ruling the court or the field. I know I once 'accidentally' hit one of the cross-country girls in the ankle with my hockey stick because she was trynig to steal the puck from me (and was on my team). I so wished it did enough damage to make her do awful in her next meet - that would have made my day, as mean as that sounds. Unfortunately, it didn't do much of anything  I digress.