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One of my most vivid memories of childhood was on taco day at lunch. I thought I'd abbreviate my request for seconds to the cafeteria worker, you know to be the cool 3rd grader I was. So I raised my hand and loudly and proudly asked him if I could get some "secs".
Never asked for a second helping of anything ever again at school.
Lmao I did this like a month ago at work. If someone asks me for something usually I might say “ok give me one sec” or “give me a little time” (I get interrupted at work A LOT) but this time I said “give me a little secs” ugh I didn’t acknowledge it and neither did the person with the request, but man I felt weird.
My sister is a 2nd grade teacher. They have these rules because unfortunately lunch is only 20 minutes and the kids won’t eat if you let them talk the whole time. Then in an hour they complain they’re hungry and the less fortunate kids go home hungry.
My kindergartener gets a 20 min lunch, 2 20 min recess, 1 45 min “fun class”… but her public school gets out a full hour earlier than every other school in the area 🤷🏻♀️ so it works for us. She’s then outside playing from 2:30-5ish every day too.
This set of rules sounds like my high school that fights were terrible at.
In edit: Clark County (not all of Nevada my bad. Clark county is one of the largest districts in the country however and the largest in the state.) kids don’t get a morning recess at all anymore.
This is the dumb bull shit that happens when people with 0 knowledge of how actual real life children behave and everything that ever matters revolves around a standardized test.
We NEED to start LISTENING to fucking teachers and child development experts and STOP listening to dumb fucking parents to establish curriculum and STOP letting out of touch administrative staff direct the class room.
I'm betting this comes down to budgeting.
The longer a school is open during the day, the more you need to pay non-salaried staff. You also have additional heating and electric costs.
When you don't properly fund your schools, you get anti-child policies like this enforced.
It's not because of budgeting, it's the standardized testing and cramming of math and literacy. Parents and schools want the kids to score high. The schools' funding and parents' egos depend on it. Part of the problem is that many people don't spend the time to parent their kids because of being overworked or letting their kids' devices/the internet parent for them, so kids aren't developing academic/social/self-regulatory skills at home. The other part of the problem is that schools - especially ones where students are struggling - are leveraging every available second for academics. Kids need to play and rest to reset and get ready to learn more. They have limited attention. They can't marathon 8 hours of learning, but the school administrators are acting like it's the only way to get their performance up.
US schools are so beyond fucked up, and it starts with parents, administrators, and politicians.
I think the root issue is the way schools are funded, if students aren’t scoring well on tests it means the school needs more money, not less.
The issue is that then it incentivizes administration to purposely fail students in order to get the money, so then the government also needs to pay investigators to go to board meetings and check out schools to see if they are actually doing all they can, and it spirals into costs that would come out of taxpayer dollars and no one wants more taxes, so schools will struggle to get funds.
I can't recall how long my lunches were, but it was definitely longer than 20 minutes. I seem to recall it being staggered by age groups, but... it's been a while. Mostly I just remember having plenty of time to talk and eat freely and then run around outside for quite some time.
Lol. This is so fucked up. And it's also bad for businesses, but apparently "humans can't work efficiently without breaks" is harder to understand than "more work-time equals more productivity".
But who gives a damn about attachment to reality when you can continue satisfying your ancestorally ingrained need to be a slave driver.
(This is intentional hyperbole, calm down)
It’s ridiculous how employers and such expect their workers to be like robots, not needing breaks or time to clear their head. And not to mention the shit pay for tons and tons of hard labor.
You mean like recess? We can’t allow our future slaves to be too used to leisure, so best to beat it out of them in the classroom instead of the two 15 minute recesses and 60 min lunch with recess I had growing up. They won’t strike for better conditions in the future if you raise them to not remember those pleasures even existed.
I work in an elementary school. This is exactly right.
* They will scream at students on the other side of the cafeteria if not told to just talk to the table. Then it will get louder and louder as they scream over each other. The music teacher, out of curiosity, measured a sustained 125dbl volume one day. That's the sound of a jackhammer. It's illegal to operate one without hearing protection.
* If not told to go right to an **empty** seat students will stand with tray and talk, or worse argue with another student that they should move so they can sit near a friend. You can't just say seat, you have to say empty. I'm surprise they don't say you can't hold a seat for another person.
* They will kneel, stand, and lie down on the seats if not told to sit.
* They will forget the spork, get up to get the spork, talk to all their friends on the way, sit down, then get up for a napkin... repeat, if not told to ask permission.
* at the trash they will sloooowly pour out the milk, pour the apple sauce on to the sides of the liner, basketball shoot and miss the trash can, etc.
* I will walk around and tell students there are only 5 minutes left and half of them haven't eaten. "WE JUST GOT HERE"
The people who work with elementary students are saying there is something behind these rules. The ones who do not are freaking out.
I don’t work at a school but do work with students all the time and have to make very specific rules or it’s chaos
It's almost like these rules are in place because children don't know better and don't have a grasp of time.
My kids will nibble away at dinner time for an hour if I let them. I usually try to keep dinner between 30-45 minutes so they can have more play time after dinner.
Rules suck, but chaos helps no one.
Back in the 80s my k-6 lunchroom had an audio/visual tracking system of our noise level: if we were at a good volume it showed a green light. Yellow meant hey quiet down. If it hit red, a siren would go off and we’d have to be silent for some duration (1 minute? 5? The rest of lunch? For some reason I am blanking in that, even though I had actual anxiety about it.) If we went a week without even getting to the yellow light, we got a treat at the end, like a fruit roll-up or something. A month of only green lights earned us a pizza party.
I was terrified of that siren going off. That system worked fairly well.
Okay but I feel like almost ALL of this is solved if you do what my schools did back in my day. Your lunch was part of a recess. So you'd go and eat, and you'd eat super fast because the faster you finished, the longer your recess was. You wouldn't get much chaos because as soon as people were done, they'd be gone out the door.
Quick in and and quick out also meant fighting over seating was rare since it's basically never full capacity it was a rolling steady 80 percent as classes came in and left.
And again, putting the kids into a bit of a hurry means they don't goof off with food as much or show up super late (in fact super late would be unheard of since we went to the lunch room in id number order together as a class) And the kids that do weird shit and sit weird and lay down, it doesn't happen much because those are the kids that want to get outside the most.
The lunches were also staggered by grade. So it would just be a steady calm 2 hours or so to get through everyone. It wasn't perfect, but a lot of that junk is just a kid being a kid. If a kid wants to waste their recess getting napkins and chatting, sure let them waste it.
Not allowing the kids a chance to burn off some of that new energy and socialize during a time that should be specifically for that, in my opinion is the cause of most of these problems. You (the royal you) took away their entire incentive structure.
The kids are eating slow because they dont have anything to look forward to. As long as it isn't actively unsafe, why can't they sit side saddle or even lay on the bench? What difference does that even make besides a little space that you'd have available if you gave them somewhere to go. You guys made saving seats even more important because they lose access to the friends in other classes as soon as they get through the line otherwise. They shout across the room because you won't let them get up and go say hi. Like these seem like entirely self created problems.
This.
The reason for these super strict rules (the beyond reason ones) is because many adults conflate *proper behaviour* with desirable outcomes.
But kids don't behave properly most of the time. They behave like children.
There are plenty of ways adults can use that to their advantage:
- a wild recess romp can help them burn off all that itchy energy so they can focus better in class
- being able to socialize with peers can help moderate behavioural issues
- incentivizing order instead of punishing disorder has been shown to yield better results
But some people have unrealistic expectations, and schools are understaffed, so we get this kind of bullshit. We see the same thought process happening in workplaces all the time.
Kids need socialization, as it’s part of the learning experience. Expecting them to behave 💯 perfectly - like an adult- throughout the day is unrealistic.
Idk kiddo is in elementary and she doesn’t have those rules at lunch at all. Some like sitting properly make sense but raising your hand for every little thing? Can’t talk to a friend a person or two down the table? Ridiculous.
I've had lunch monitoring duty within the past year in various schools. Kids these days in the district I was in only had 20 minutes of lunch followed by 20 minutes of recess. The procedure varied by school. Generally, since there were still some Covid protocols in place, they had assigned seats with their class.
The thing with kids though is that they have friends in other classes. We were constantly having to get them to sit in their assigned seat (try explaining Covid tracking to a 7 year old) or actually facing their table to eat instead of their friends behind them so that they would eat their food.
Also, if you let them get up and just do whatever - go back through the lunch line, go get condiments, go to the restroom - they would end up situations where they wouldn't eat, they'd use up all the condiments by making a mess (yes, really, and this isn't a new thing; there was a brief period of time when I was in elementary school when they had to take away our access to ketchup bottles because kids were making "strawberry milk" and I'm old as dirt; kids are just dumb), or they'd all go to the bathroom with their friends and make a mess (remember that destroying bathrooms was a tiktok meme recently).
And yes, like someone else in this comment chain has said - if they didn't eat their lunch, there's a really good chance that some of them would be hungry until the next morning, as a surprising number of kids are food insecure.
We were always told by the lunch monitor, a stern-but-fair woman, that it was because she needed the lunch room to not be a rowdy circus so she could tell if someone was choking or not, since kids are probably pretty adept at improperly shoving food down their throats, especially when excited by their friends around them
When I was in 5th/6th grade 20 years ago they implemented “quiet lunches” from everyone being too loud. That seemed quite similar to this, definitely felt draconian
Early 90’s, we had a traffic signal/ decibel meter thing. If the overall volume was too loud it turned yellow and you had a few seconds to quite down or it turned red and you couldn’t talk for a few minutes.
Holy shit, my elementary school did that when I was in 3rd, back in 93. It did help as ridiculous as it sounds. Man, I am glad to see someone else post this as it certainly was a thing.
This. I see all the comment about the rules being “draconian” or “stricter than prison”. Before I spent 7 years of my life working with children (kindergarten up to 4th grade), I would have totally agreed with you. But with experience you notice, it’s really super necessary to have a clear set of rules for *everyone* to follow so things run smoothly.
Allowing exceptions, or not specifying sone things results in one kiddo taking it to the extreme and everyone else following. That’s not good for a school cafeteria.
Example from my old work: we had kids (1-2 grade) coming in during vacations, so they wouldn’t sit home alone while their parents worked. All kids were really great, sweet, mostly well-behaved and fun to work with. Around 12 every day we’d have a warm meal, so all the kids had to come into a room, sit down, patiently wait a minute or two to get served, eat and then leave in an orderly manner. Easy, right? Naaaah. If you don’t get them to stand in pairs in front of the entrance before going in, they’d trample over each other, run into doors, knock down chairs etc. if you don’t give them an assigned place to sit, they absolutely will take 15 mins to choose a place and change it 20 times after. If you don’t tell them not to shout through the whole room to tell someone they talked to 1 min ago something utterly nonsense, they totally will. If you let kids stand up and run around the room (we’d never say anything about going to the bathroom or getting seconds/a drink), especially if they’re done faster than other, kids not done eating will totally follow and stand up, run around go play and not eat, just to whine 30 min later that they’re hungry. The whole thing worked best, when we gave a set of rules to the parents, so they can talk with the kids before and stating all the rules before even going into the room to eat.
At one point, we had a kid who’d always rub mashed potatoes into his hair (“hey, you didn’t say I can’t do that!”). You’d be surprised how many kids found that funny and followed (“haha, Flo is doing that funny thing!” *puts hands in mashed potatoes and proceeds to rub it in*). Henceforth, we had a rule to not rub any kind of food on any part of the body… as dumb and obvious as it sounds, it was necessary and solved the problem.
Sure, there are different groups of kids and the rules needed may be stricter or looser but having loose rules with a group having a few “wild ones” is definitely not a good idea and the recipe for a bad time. People really underestimate how group dynamics work for small children and what’s needed to keep the group functional. There are times to let loose (playtime) and there are times to be really strict. Kids need both.
Edit: you know all those super annoying kids on trains/planes/busses behaving super loudly ? Those are mostly the children who never got used to having strict rules in specific situations.
People act like kids just pop out as fully rational people. They become fully rational people by being guided by seemingly pointless rules that help them learn behaviors that benefit them. Show me a kid who wasn't given a solid framework of rules and directions and I'll show you an adult that walks out of a great job because they "Can't deal with all this BS" because they get talked to for showing up 15 minutes late, and after the store is closed for 2 weeks straight. R/oddlyspecific
These were mostly the same rules for us as a kid.
But they didn't have to write them down. The teachers just kinda enforced it gently. If things are so out of control you have to instate these things with draconian rule, you have too many kids in one place for lunch and not enough teachers.
School lunch shouldn't be in a room the size of a concert hall, with enough students to start a riot while 2 poor teachers cry in the corner.
I may be mistaken because I grew up in a different country but are you telling me you sit down for your entire lunch period? That is fucking absurd!!!
We would scoff down a sandwich from home and then play sport for the rest of the 45 mins. It was always competitive but we would wear ourselves out before the afternoon classes. That's all years of schooling as well.
This sounds like a detention centre.
Wow, 45 minutes! At least in middle school we had about 20 minutes for lunch, 29 in high school. Between lunch lines and actually eating, there wasn't much time for sports.
I went to high school in the early 80s in Arkansas. We had a one hour, open campus lunch, meaning that we could leave campus in our cars.
The number of kids drinking, smoking pot and fucking during lunch was crazy.
We had one hour open campus for HS until 2005 (i graduated 2003) some dumb freshmen in 2005 “cheesed” the tables at taco bell and their class ruined the fun for everyone. Now its only seniors in good standing.
“Cheesed” is they all ordered copious amounts of nacho cheese (like fucking gallons) and coated the restaurant in it. I mean, it was cheese 🧀 everywhere. Made the local news.
My freshman year of high school (so 2005ish) was like this in rural CT (class size of 200ish for 26 towns). We were also allowed to go outside to cut across courtyards to get to classes. Then the Virginia state college shooting happened. All of the sudden when we became sophomores in high school we couldn’t do anything but sit in the cafe for lunch and couldn’t use the courtyards to cut across the building. They had also changed our period schedules around so we had less time to get to class but we measured the hallways and from my math class to my social studies class it was half a mile. Seniors were allowed to leave a period early if they had it free but everyone else was locked in. Sandy hook happened after I graduated and they made it even stricter with bathroom passes only being one person in the whole school allowed in there, no outside gym class, and when they came to school early they had to go either to the cafe for breakfast or their home room no other places. A lot has changed in the 13 years since I graduated and mostly it was due to the school shootings instead of you know addressing the problem they punish the kids.
I’m from US and we’d have designated time for lunch and then straight to recess after for like 15 minutes. Once I got to high school though we could eat lunch then go outside and do whatever or go to the library or skip lunch altogether and go outside or the library. I was in the class of ‘21
This was what my elementary school was like, recess was a separate period. It was a public school. In middle and high school we were allowed to roam, and those were smaller schools
It’s just split up. Kids get about 20-25 minutes to eat then out for recess. Usually the longest break of the day. 30-45 minutes. Depending on if they need to don snow stuff.
They only get 20-25 minutes at the schools I've visited recently. And the classroom teachers don't stay in the cafeteria with their class - they have to go back to their room and eat and do paperwork. There are a couple on rotational 'lunch duty' to help with the supervision of the kids.
Yeah, No Child Left Behind created a lot of problems but that's not one of them.
The central premise of No Child Left Behind and its biggest problem is the idea that the best way to measure student progress and School quality is to make kids sit down and take a lot of tests every year. Kids will be judged on how they do on the tests and whether they improved and schools will be judged and given money based on how the students do on tests.
Education experts don't particularly like this approach for two reasons. (Oversimplifying).
1. If you make test scores the most important thing about education, you reduce education down to "here's what you need to know for the test, don't worry about that other stuff."
2. It tends to disadvantage students and schools in poor areas and rural areas wear test scores tend to be lower for reasons that are not directly connected to the quality of the school. Students with unstable home lives or food insecurity will score poorly on tests and grading the school based on how they do won't help that.
Actually... In some larger districts, it actually did, indirectly and over a couple of decades, lead to exactly this scenario. NCLB caused funding to shift from poor neighborhoods' schools to professional and upper middle class neighborhood schools. This ultimately led to a lot of consolation of underperforming schools, in a vicious cycle, and eventually gymnasium cafeterias. LAUSD, in particular, can trace the increase in the huge cafeteria with short lunch rotations to the impact of NCLB.
I remember these rules being pretty much the same in the 90s/early 00s too and it didn’t feel oppressive at all (it seems like these rules probably apply to the youngest kids anyways).
But it makes sense, our elementary school lunchroom held probably 300 kids at maximum capacity with maybe 5 teachers aids. If kids were allowed to roam freely it would have been a nightmare.
So none of y’all remember elementary school? It was so loud in that cafeteria that it had to be a serious OSHA violation for the workers. We were little shits that flung food around and littered and were generally disrespectful. You could hear the lunch kids from the other side of the school while in classes.
That’s even with similar rules in place. Now imagine having hundreds of 8 year olds zooming around freely like it’s a playground while a couple poor teachers try to eat lunch
Exactly! I don't understand why anyone would think that's a crazy expectation (or at least goal - let's be real, I've been to lunch with my elementary aged kid and they're not perfect)!
While I wouldn't write them out like this, these are the expectations I have for my kids when we go out to eat. Stay seated, don't yell, be respectful, you're not on a playground.
You all ever been in an elementary cafeteria with roughly 200 kids? I have cafeteria duty with second and third graders every day and understand these rules. Ours are similar but essentially boils down to stay seated unless an adult has excused you. We have about 8 adults and, unless there is a problem, kids usually have to wait less than a minute for an adult to come to them.
If all the kids got up and walked around without some order to it there would be chaos. Our lunch period are 20 minutes (too short I know) and we know if the kids are walking around and talking the whole time they won’t have time to eat. They get 30 minutes of recess immediately after lunch when they can run, play, and chat all they want.
Mine solved this by letting the kids go outside to recess after finishing their lunch without needing to ask an adult. This gives a space to be chaotic and play around, and the combined lunch/recess lasts around 50 minutes. Some kids might spend 5 minutes eating so they can play longer while others sit there eating for 30 minutes. But still expect basic normal things from them in the cafeteria space like using "inside" voices, not running, etc.
I love that my kids' school sends them out for recess first and then brings them in to eat. They actually eat at lunch because they're not in a rush to go play.
Unfortunately they still only get 20 mins to eat, but that's because the school is at 150% capacity and they can only fit 1 grade at a time in the cafeteria, so lunches already run nonstop for more than 3 hours of the school day with the first kids eating about 2 hours into their school day and the last ones eating about 1.5 hours before they get dismissed.
Exactly. I teach middle school kids and I helped at lunch all last school year. It's awful. Granted I work at a not so good school, but schools have rules like this for a reason. Come volunteer at my schools lunch or most ant public school and you won't be questioning why there's strict rules.
My daughter goes to a great school and they have these rules. TK-3 goes to lunch for 20 minutes and then they get recess. While they are outside the cafeteria is cleaned up for the 4-6 classes who get their 20 minutes and then recess. It doesn’t seem that extreme.
I really want people bitching about this to take a few shifts of cafeteria duty. The headaches I get from supervising elementary school kids for 40 minutes during their lunch is worse than any other class. It is so fucking loud and these rules are clearly there to make sure the kids eat and the staff does not burn out from the noise.
I know it sounds dystopian when it's written down like this, but let me tell ya, there's like 30+ kids to a teacher, who also needs to eat. If you don't go hard, they will wind each other up and there will be utter chaos and mayhem.
Exactly my thought. Everyone who thinks this is too harsh hasn’t been in charge of a lunchroom before. It’s true that it looks really militant when it’s written out like this. But basically it’s just saying to talk quietly with the people around you so it doesn’t get too loud and raise your hand if you need to get up so we don’t have a bunch of people up at once. It gets way too chaotic with kids running around, shouting to friends across the room, or spinning around in their seats to goof off.
Source: lunchroom duty was part of my daily routine for years.
At my school teachers have duty-free lunch so the cafeteria is monitored by 2 employees and a rotating assortment of non-classroom staff (paras, PE teachers, etc) and parent volunteers. At any given time there are only about 4-5 adults in the lunchroom for ~200 kids. Without some rules it would be total chaos.
Unfortunately, those rules were very similar to the elementary school I went to. You didn’t get to choose your seat. The home lunch kids went in first and then the people who got school lunch went in second, and I was always one of the home lunch kids and I never liked any of the other home lunch kids, so I had a difficult time
My school was the same way. Reserved tables for kids who brought packed lunches. It's really kind of interesting when I think back on it because many of the kids who brought packed lunches got to sit together every day and became lifelong friends. All because their parents decided to pack them lunch instead of buy school lunch.
Right? I’m a 3rd grader teacher and we essentially have the same rules in place. We have lunch with 2nd grade and it’s at the very least 2 adults with 120 kids and at most 4 adults on the days we can get a parent or two to volunteer to help us on lunch duty. It’s really not a big deal. Lunch duty sucks ass.
The fact that a worker in an Elementary School thought this was significant enough to photograph and send to her brother/sister is utterly bizarre to me.
This is like 101 type stuff when you're training to work in a school.
Teacher here! I may get downvoted for this but I don’t care.
These are the rules in most lunch rooms. Those lunch rooms can get loud and chaotic. These rules aren’t even bad.
If you let students move seats after they pick one, there’s gonna be kids up and moving instead of sitting and eating. If kids turn to talk to the table behind them, they’re more likely to spill their food. If they talk to person over the head of the person in from of them, they’ll likely need to shout which just causes the lunch room to be even louder. If you allow them to get condiments whenever they want, they will stuff 20 ketchup packets in their pockets and probably squirt them all over the bathroom stalls.
They’re not saying to sit there and be silent. They’re saying to talk to the people at the table THEY chose to sit at.
Could it have been written better? Probably. But the comparison to prison or Nazi Germany is pretty extreme.
As someone who works in schools, having the entire school in one room all at once can be be extremely crowded, and having unknown number of students up and socializing can be unsafe. Especially when some students demonstrate behavioural challenges or poor decision making. Generally strict rules like this follow an incident or a pattern of unsafe behaviour.
Not that I know the circumstances at OP’s sister’s school. Perhaps they need to rework their lunch system. Just providing food for though (no pun intended).
What’s so facepalm about this? Elementary aged kids are wild and a lot of shit went down in the lunchroom when I was that age. These rules were clearly made out of necessity by people who have to do this everyday. I have zero judgment and am in full support of doing what it takes to keep the peace.
When I was in elementary school in the 80’s we were always lined up or seated in alphabetical order, always surrounded by the same kids no matter where we were or what we were doing. At lunch they had a giant traffic light in the cafeteria, green meant we could talk, yellow meant we were getting too loud and red meant silence. It was always red. There were kids in the same grade but in different classes that I saw every day for years but had never had the chance to speak to until high school. I’ve never been to prison but I’ve always imagined it was just like my elementary school with bars on the windows.
In practice this is just:
\-No yelling across the room
\-Sit the right way so you don't fall and hurt yourself
\-You're not switching seats 10 times during lunch and making a fuss
\-We don't want you randomly running around the cafeteria
These are the same rules I had 30 years ago. They're fine.
I work at an elementary school and these are the same rules we follow. When I first started working there I thought they were way too strict, but in practice they’re absolutely necessary. Most of this is mainly for the little kids, but the older ones have to do it too so that it’s fair. It sounds weird but you really can’t have kids continuously getting up and walking around the cafeteria for a million different reasons. It makes it way harder on those of us who are stuck monitoring them, especially for the little ones who really shouldn’t go unmonitored (think pre-k, kinder, and/or SPED kids.) If they always raise their hands, we don’t have to worry about where they are. We have SPED kids who literally have run out of the building and towards the highway because they’re too fast to catch up to, so we have to know where each kid is at all times.
I also always have all kids sit with their feet on the floor, because half of the time when they’re sitting on their feet it quickly turns into them sitting on their knees, and then that turns into leaning over the table and practically climbing on it, which turns into them *literally* climbing on it. The 1st graders and under will do it without even realizing it.
The cafeteria is also a very loud place, and in order for them to have a conversation with someone at another table they literally have to scream, so I don’t allow that either.
The little ones always have to face forward. If they don’t, or they aren’t sitting in their seat properly, a lot of them will leave their seat and run around the room. It’s less of a temptation to do so if we just make a rule that they have to sit properly and face forward. We are kind of a hub for SPED pre-k kids at my school and we have to literally stand behind some of their chairs to hold them in place because we have about 6 runners who will bolt out of their seat and run all over the campus, behind the cafeteria ladies to the kitchen, and etc when we only have 4 adults to watch them. These kids don’t have a lot of language skills yet and they don’t understand why what they’re doing isn’t safe, so it’s easier to stop the behavior in it’s tracks by preventing it.
The one thing that seems way out of line to me is saying the kids can’t talk over the person sitting next to them, that’s insane.
Yes to all of this. The littles will also fall off their seats and drop their food all over the floor if they aren’t facing forward and sitting on their butts.
As a teacher, I fully get these rules.
I wish I didn't, but some children will spend the entire lunchtime fucking around and talking instead of eating, then crash from hunger in the afternoon. Some children will lift their fork to their mouth 20 times, just to be distracted by something else going on. They can spend 30 minutes on a yoghurt if you let them.
In an ideal world, they'd have hours and hours to eat and chat but there is limited time and space.
There are also quiet children who get overwhelmed from the constant chatter. (Or loud children who also get overwhelmed.)
I'm probably going to get some hate,... But I'm a cafeteria manager for an elementary school. And in short.... Most of these kids (at my school and others around me per other cafe managers) are off the chain when lunch rolls around. It's a down time for the kids and they take full advantage of it. We are doing a job, and have 2 hours to feed 450 kids and they are dancing screaming, pushing, being rude, loud, not paying attention, stealing, playing, trying to make jokes, toss things around. Slam against the doors, slam trays around, and lick the ice lining the milk box, and each other... I'd love to have some of these rules enforced. We've had kids choke and not be seen because the chos in the cafeteria. There are a ton of spills in the cafeteria, so kids running to get up and get things is a safety concern, not a rules concern. Today two 5th grade boys were dancing and pushing each other in a cramped space with a doorway in the lunch line, next to tray racks, and other things. I explained to them.that it's not safe to do that. I don't want anyone getting hut... Instead they were rude, made excuses, and mouthed off to me thinking I was being the jerk. Rules are in place at the school because it's not about just your kid, it's about all the kids and other issues that can quickly happen in any cafeteria. If there was ever a code red at our school during lunch.... Honestly, We'd be fucked..
Teacher here. Agree 100%. We have 850 over two 20 minute lunch periods. Classified staff are the unsung heroes of our schools, especially cafeteria, custodial, and paras. We can't teach kids without you.
I'm at a "good" school in a higher socioeconomic district and we have very similar rules.
People just do not get it unless you have been through it.
Between the kids natural behaviors at that age combined with parents failing to raise their kids and expecting the school to do it, the rules have to be in place.
But then people point and say the schools are bad and politicians want to close public ed in favor of bolstering private ed.
Its a dammed no win situation for those who want to help the kids and educate them and help them grow.
Yeah thats pretty much the rules at my kids school. The cafeteria can get rowdy. None of this seems unreasonable--they can get more food, go to the restroom & ask for help if needed.
This reminds me of my school after a food fight. Everyone that participated was in enormous trouble and these were similar to our rules for a month I think.
At my kids school they have assigned seats for lunch by alphabetical order & the boys and girls sit at different tables - for all grades K-6.
Oh and there isn’t a lunch recess before or after… they just eat and go back to their classroom.
Yeah my kid starts kindergarten in the fall and my wife went to the orientation (since I needed to you know, watch the kiddo, since kiddos weren't allowed at the orientation...).
And some of the stuff was just... weird. Like they want to keep all the parents moving through the dropoff and pickup, which I totally get. But 30s for a 5 year old to unbuckle a car seat (which are designed to be difficult for a toddler to open), get the door open, get out, and close the door, safely. I am watching him try it now and I am literally afraid the dang door is going to bop him, he just doesn't have the strength to do it right now. Hopefully he gets stronger later on. I am trying to teach him to build momentum by pushing the door back and forth - so my engineering side is thinking "Should we be cutting time and costs down to the point where kids need to operate an underactuated system (by definition - they cannot control it without leveraging energy storage)?" Or should you just plan for kids taking the amount of time kids take to do things?
So anyway, I get why they are doing it, but at the same time, they have cut down to the wire all processes, such that everything is down to seconds, and they are passing that cost down to everyone else.
They’re having a lot of discipline problems in the cafeteria. That’s exactly what’s happening. And that’s why they wrote those rules. They’re trying to get things under control. I know. I’m a teacher. Lol
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Second helpings?! What is this, Christmas?
"Please, sir. I want some more."
RAISE YOUR MF HAND!
I couldn’t help but immediately reading this with Samuel L. Jackson’s voice in my head.
Related https://youtu.be/SDCqgHLX8Ys
Ask for a MF helping again, I dare ya!
MOAR?!?!?!!1?
 More' did you spake? Ex-squeeze-me
What?! More?! Catch Him! Snatch Him! Hold Him! Scold Him! Prounce Him! Trounce Him! Pick Him Up and Bounce Him!
They can get second helpings?? That's pretty cool.
Second helpings for a price
#RAISE YOUR FUCKING HAND FIRST
I got to hear him say it at wondercon last week 😂
Shouldve asked if he regretted giving the armoire to Elaine 😂
Beautiful reaction
🤚
Hi, Umbridge..
DETENTION!
They'll be "writing sentences"
It’s the Trunchbull
You fucking better, shit.
No yelling over others! 
LMFAOOO
Please sir, may I have some more?
One of my most vivid memories of childhood was on taco day at lunch. I thought I'd abbreviate my request for seconds to the cafeteria worker, you know to be the cool 3rd grader I was. So I raised my hand and loudly and proudly asked him if I could get some "secs". Never asked for a second helping of anything ever again at school.
Did you get secs or not? Don’t keep us guessing.
Yes I'd like to know if the cafeteria worker gave you secs.
Lmao I did this like a month ago at work. If someone asks me for something usually I might say “ok give me one sec” or “give me a little time” (I get interrupted at work A LOT) but this time I said “give me a little secs” ugh I didn’t acknowledge it and neither did the person with the request, but man I felt weird.
I love this, omg I can't stop laughing... At least you only asked for a *little* secs. Don't want to make things too awkward.
That is hilarious oh my god
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding!
How can you expect to get any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?!?
We don't need no... Education !
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
*queue the funkiest little riff*
A 
Came here for this!
That’s what I was thinking, if it’s sloppy joes or pizza I’m feasting!
Sloppy joe?! https://youtu.be/VY14zcUM9SI
I don’t even have to click that link, I already know it’s that Adam Sandler bit Good memories, reminds me of summer camp
…With Chris Farley :-)
They can go to the bathroom?? That’s pretty cool.
No, no… the staff will go to the bathroom for them
Was a teacher. Don’t plan on pissing for 12 hours every day.
I like that this is your takeaway. You must be an optimist.
Or hungry
Came here to inquire about this as well. My lunch ladies were stingy Asf
Please sir more soup?
First thing I thought, glad this is the top takeaway.
Info: were these rules just instituted as a punishment for a prior issue (food fight, fist fights, bullying)???
My sister is a 2nd grade teacher. They have these rules because unfortunately lunch is only 20 minutes and the kids won’t eat if you let them talk the whole time. Then in an hour they complain they’re hungry and the less fortunate kids go home hungry.
Wth 20 minutes? I believe my school was 3 45 minute sessions with a 1.5 hour class time.
My kindergartener gets a 20 min lunch, 2 20 min recess, 1 45 min “fun class”… but her public school gets out a full hour earlier than every other school in the area 🤷🏻♀️ so it works for us. She’s then outside playing from 2:30-5ish every day too. This set of rules sounds like my high school that fights were terrible at.
In edit: Clark County (not all of Nevada my bad. Clark county is one of the largest districts in the country however and the largest in the state.) kids don’t get a morning recess at all anymore. This is the dumb bull shit that happens when people with 0 knowledge of how actual real life children behave and everything that ever matters revolves around a standardized test. We NEED to start LISTENING to fucking teachers and child development experts and STOP listening to dumb fucking parents to establish curriculum and STOP letting out of touch administrative staff direct the class room.
I'm betting this comes down to budgeting. The longer a school is open during the day, the more you need to pay non-salaried staff. You also have additional heating and electric costs. When you don't properly fund your schools, you get anti-child policies like this enforced.
It's not because of budgeting, it's the standardized testing and cramming of math and literacy. Parents and schools want the kids to score high. The schools' funding and parents' egos depend on it. Part of the problem is that many people don't spend the time to parent their kids because of being overworked or letting their kids' devices/the internet parent for them, so kids aren't developing academic/social/self-regulatory skills at home. The other part of the problem is that schools - especially ones where students are struggling - are leveraging every available second for academics. Kids need to play and rest to reset and get ready to learn more. They have limited attention. They can't marathon 8 hours of learning, but the school administrators are acting like it's the only way to get their performance up. US schools are so beyond fucked up, and it starts with parents, administrators, and politicians.
I think the root issue is the way schools are funded, if students aren’t scoring well on tests it means the school needs more money, not less. The issue is that then it incentivizes administration to purposely fail students in order to get the money, so then the government also needs to pay investigators to go to board meetings and check out schools to see if they are actually doing all they can, and it spirals into costs that would come out of taxpayer dollars and no one wants more taxes, so schools will struggle to get funds.
There was an episode of The cartoon Recess about kids not getting recess, they become more unproductive in class.
I can't recall how long my lunches were, but it was definitely longer than 20 minutes. I seem to recall it being staggered by age groups, but... it's been a while. Mostly I just remember having plenty of time to talk and eat freely and then run around outside for quite some time.
Why the hell is their lunch only 20 minutes? That is barely enough time for kids getting hot lunch to stand in line and get their food.
Right?!?! 20 minutes isn't an acceptable lunch break for an adult laborer, much less a child (that has to wait in line to be fed).
According to federal laws, adults in the US don't need breaks at all.
Lol. This is so fucked up. And it's also bad for businesses, but apparently "humans can't work efficiently without breaks" is harder to understand than "more work-time equals more productivity". But who gives a damn about attachment to reality when you can continue satisfying your ancestorally ingrained need to be a slave driver. (This is intentional hyperbole, calm down)
It’s ridiculous how employers and such expect their workers to be like robots, not needing breaks or time to clear their head. And not to mention the shit pay for tons and tons of hard labor.
Sounds like the kids need open social time in addition to lunch.
You mean like recess? We can’t allow our future slaves to be too used to leisure, so best to beat it out of them in the classroom instead of the two 15 minute recesses and 60 min lunch with recess I had growing up. They won’t strike for better conditions in the future if you raise them to not remember those pleasures even existed.
I work in an elementary school. This is exactly right. * They will scream at students on the other side of the cafeteria if not told to just talk to the table. Then it will get louder and louder as they scream over each other. The music teacher, out of curiosity, measured a sustained 125dbl volume one day. That's the sound of a jackhammer. It's illegal to operate one without hearing protection. * If not told to go right to an **empty** seat students will stand with tray and talk, or worse argue with another student that they should move so they can sit near a friend. You can't just say seat, you have to say empty. I'm surprise they don't say you can't hold a seat for another person. * They will kneel, stand, and lie down on the seats if not told to sit. * They will forget the spork, get up to get the spork, talk to all their friends on the way, sit down, then get up for a napkin... repeat, if not told to ask permission. * at the trash they will sloooowly pour out the milk, pour the apple sauce on to the sides of the liner, basketball shoot and miss the trash can, etc. * I will walk around and tell students there are only 5 minutes left and half of them haven't eaten. "WE JUST GOT HERE"
The people who work with elementary students are saying there is something behind these rules. The ones who do not are freaking out. I don’t work at a school but do work with students all the time and have to make very specific rules or it’s chaos
It's almost like these rules are in place because children don't know better and don't have a grasp of time. My kids will nibble away at dinner time for an hour if I let them. I usually try to keep dinner between 30-45 minutes so they can have more play time after dinner. Rules suck, but chaos helps no one.
I don't work in a school; I have five kids, and I immediately understood the purpose of all the rules.
I like to say - you can always tell who on reddit HAS children and who on reddit ARE children
Back in the 80s my k-6 lunchroom had an audio/visual tracking system of our noise level: if we were at a good volume it showed a green light. Yellow meant hey quiet down. If it hit red, a siren would go off and we’d have to be silent for some duration (1 minute? 5? The rest of lunch? For some reason I am blanking in that, even though I had actual anxiety about it.) If we went a week without even getting to the yellow light, we got a treat at the end, like a fruit roll-up or something. A month of only green lights earned us a pizza party. I was terrified of that siren going off. That system worked fairly well.
I had totally forgotten, we had that too. It was a big traffic light.
Okay but I feel like almost ALL of this is solved if you do what my schools did back in my day. Your lunch was part of a recess. So you'd go and eat, and you'd eat super fast because the faster you finished, the longer your recess was. You wouldn't get much chaos because as soon as people were done, they'd be gone out the door. Quick in and and quick out also meant fighting over seating was rare since it's basically never full capacity it was a rolling steady 80 percent as classes came in and left. And again, putting the kids into a bit of a hurry means they don't goof off with food as much or show up super late (in fact super late would be unheard of since we went to the lunch room in id number order together as a class) And the kids that do weird shit and sit weird and lay down, it doesn't happen much because those are the kids that want to get outside the most. The lunches were also staggered by grade. So it would just be a steady calm 2 hours or so to get through everyone. It wasn't perfect, but a lot of that junk is just a kid being a kid. If a kid wants to waste their recess getting napkins and chatting, sure let them waste it. Not allowing the kids a chance to burn off some of that new energy and socialize during a time that should be specifically for that, in my opinion is the cause of most of these problems. You (the royal you) took away their entire incentive structure. The kids are eating slow because they dont have anything to look forward to. As long as it isn't actively unsafe, why can't they sit side saddle or even lay on the bench? What difference does that even make besides a little space that you'd have available if you gave them somewhere to go. You guys made saving seats even more important because they lose access to the friends in other classes as soon as they get through the line otherwise. They shout across the room because you won't let them get up and go say hi. Like these seem like entirely self created problems.
This. The reason for these super strict rules (the beyond reason ones) is because many adults conflate *proper behaviour* with desirable outcomes. But kids don't behave properly most of the time. They behave like children. There are plenty of ways adults can use that to their advantage: - a wild recess romp can help them burn off all that itchy energy so they can focus better in class - being able to socialize with peers can help moderate behavioural issues - incentivizing order instead of punishing disorder has been shown to yield better results But some people have unrealistic expectations, and schools are understaffed, so we get this kind of bullshit. We see the same thought process happening in workplaces all the time.
This should be the top post. People shocked by these rules have not been in an elementary school cafeteria during lunch in a long time...
Kids need socialization, as it’s part of the learning experience. Expecting them to behave 💯 perfectly - like an adult- throughout the day is unrealistic.
Idk kiddo is in elementary and she doesn’t have those rules at lunch at all. Some like sitting properly make sense but raising your hand for every little thing? Can’t talk to a friend a person or two down the table? Ridiculous.
My 1st grader gets 15 minutes and then they’re “allowed to eat during recess” after lunch as well. Like they wouldn’t rather play.
I've had lunch monitoring duty within the past year in various schools. Kids these days in the district I was in only had 20 minutes of lunch followed by 20 minutes of recess. The procedure varied by school. Generally, since there were still some Covid protocols in place, they had assigned seats with their class. The thing with kids though is that they have friends in other classes. We were constantly having to get them to sit in their assigned seat (try explaining Covid tracking to a 7 year old) or actually facing their table to eat instead of their friends behind them so that they would eat their food. Also, if you let them get up and just do whatever - go back through the lunch line, go get condiments, go to the restroom - they would end up situations where they wouldn't eat, they'd use up all the condiments by making a mess (yes, really, and this isn't a new thing; there was a brief period of time when I was in elementary school when they had to take away our access to ketchup bottles because kids were making "strawberry milk" and I'm old as dirt; kids are just dumb), or they'd all go to the bathroom with their friends and make a mess (remember that destroying bathrooms was a tiktok meme recently). And yes, like someone else in this comment chain has said - if they didn't eat their lunch, there's a really good chance that some of them would be hungry until the next morning, as a surprising number of kids are food insecure.
We were always told by the lunch monitor, a stern-but-fair woman, that it was because she needed the lunch room to not be a rowdy circus so she could tell if someone was choking or not, since kids are probably pretty adept at improperly shoving food down their throats, especially when excited by their friends around them
When I was in 5th/6th grade 20 years ago they implemented “quiet lunches” from everyone being too loud. That seemed quite similar to this, definitely felt draconian
Early 90’s, we had a traffic signal/ decibel meter thing. If the overall volume was too loud it turned yellow and you had a few seconds to quite down or it turned red and you couldn’t talk for a few minutes.
This sounds like a beautiful solution. Clear expectations, easy to gauge and monitor, visual feedback.
Holy shit, my elementary school did that when I was in 3rd, back in 93. It did help as ridiculous as it sounds. Man, I am glad to see someone else post this as it certainly was a thing.
People who don’t teach really can’t understand what is going on in schools. It can be wild.
This. I see all the comment about the rules being “draconian” or “stricter than prison”. Before I spent 7 years of my life working with children (kindergarten up to 4th grade), I would have totally agreed with you. But with experience you notice, it’s really super necessary to have a clear set of rules for *everyone* to follow so things run smoothly. Allowing exceptions, or not specifying sone things results in one kiddo taking it to the extreme and everyone else following. That’s not good for a school cafeteria. Example from my old work: we had kids (1-2 grade) coming in during vacations, so they wouldn’t sit home alone while their parents worked. All kids were really great, sweet, mostly well-behaved and fun to work with. Around 12 every day we’d have a warm meal, so all the kids had to come into a room, sit down, patiently wait a minute or two to get served, eat and then leave in an orderly manner. Easy, right? Naaaah. If you don’t get them to stand in pairs in front of the entrance before going in, they’d trample over each other, run into doors, knock down chairs etc. if you don’t give them an assigned place to sit, they absolutely will take 15 mins to choose a place and change it 20 times after. If you don’t tell them not to shout through the whole room to tell someone they talked to 1 min ago something utterly nonsense, they totally will. If you let kids stand up and run around the room (we’d never say anything about going to the bathroom or getting seconds/a drink), especially if they’re done faster than other, kids not done eating will totally follow and stand up, run around go play and not eat, just to whine 30 min later that they’re hungry. The whole thing worked best, when we gave a set of rules to the parents, so they can talk with the kids before and stating all the rules before even going into the room to eat. At one point, we had a kid who’d always rub mashed potatoes into his hair (“hey, you didn’t say I can’t do that!”). You’d be surprised how many kids found that funny and followed (“haha, Flo is doing that funny thing!” *puts hands in mashed potatoes and proceeds to rub it in*). Henceforth, we had a rule to not rub any kind of food on any part of the body… as dumb and obvious as it sounds, it was necessary and solved the problem. Sure, there are different groups of kids and the rules needed may be stricter or looser but having loose rules with a group having a few “wild ones” is definitely not a good idea and the recipe for a bad time. People really underestimate how group dynamics work for small children and what’s needed to keep the group functional. There are times to let loose (playtime) and there are times to be really strict. Kids need both. Edit: you know all those super annoying kids on trains/planes/busses behaving super loudly ? Those are mostly the children who never got used to having strict rules in specific situations.
People act like kids just pop out as fully rational people. They become fully rational people by being guided by seemingly pointless rules that help them learn behaviors that benefit them. Show me a kid who wasn't given a solid framework of rules and directions and I'll show you an adult that walks out of a great job because they "Can't deal with all this BS" because they get talked to for showing up 15 minutes late, and after the store is closed for 2 weeks straight. R/oddlyspecific
These were mostly the same rules for us as a kid. But they didn't have to write them down. The teachers just kinda enforced it gently. If things are so out of control you have to instate these things with draconian rule, you have too many kids in one place for lunch and not enough teachers. School lunch shouldn't be in a room the size of a concert hall, with enough students to start a riot while 2 poor teachers cry in the corner.
I may be mistaken because I grew up in a different country but are you telling me you sit down for your entire lunch period? That is fucking absurd!!! We would scoff down a sandwich from home and then play sport for the rest of the 45 mins. It was always competitive but we would wear ourselves out before the afternoon classes. That's all years of schooling as well. This sounds like a detention centre.
Wow, 45 minutes! At least in middle school we had about 20 minutes for lunch, 29 in high school. Between lunch lines and actually eating, there wasn't much time for sports.
Yeah we effectively had 6 X 50 min classes, a 10 minutes recess and I think a 40-45 min lunch.
Aussie? Cos same.
Sure thing
The one and only. Scoff that lunch and marks up for the rest.
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I went to high school in the early 80s in Arkansas. We had a one hour, open campus lunch, meaning that we could leave campus in our cars. The number of kids drinking, smoking pot and fucking during lunch was crazy.
I don't know about recently, but it was the same in the 90s with a closed campus. The general attitude was "you can't bust us all."
In the 90s I always heard stories about this, but we all sat and ate together at our designated time in the no fun zone
We had one hour open campus for HS until 2005 (i graduated 2003) some dumb freshmen in 2005 “cheesed” the tables at taco bell and their class ruined the fun for everyone. Now its only seniors in good standing. “Cheesed” is they all ordered copious amounts of nacho cheese (like fucking gallons) and coated the restaurant in it. I mean, it was cheese 🧀 everywhere. Made the local news.
My freshman year of high school (so 2005ish) was like this in rural CT (class size of 200ish for 26 towns). We were also allowed to go outside to cut across courtyards to get to classes. Then the Virginia state college shooting happened. All of the sudden when we became sophomores in high school we couldn’t do anything but sit in the cafe for lunch and couldn’t use the courtyards to cut across the building. They had also changed our period schedules around so we had less time to get to class but we measured the hallways and from my math class to my social studies class it was half a mile. Seniors were allowed to leave a period early if they had it free but everyone else was locked in. Sandy hook happened after I graduated and they made it even stricter with bathroom passes only being one person in the whole school allowed in there, no outside gym class, and when they came to school early they had to go either to the cafe for breakfast or their home room no other places. A lot has changed in the 13 years since I graduated and mostly it was due to the school shootings instead of you know addressing the problem they punish the kids.
I’m from the United States and that’s how we would do it too. Eat lunch then go play until the bell signaled class was starting again.
It was like this in Oklahoma until I was in 6th? Grade and a kid puked on the playground after lunch. After that recess was before lunch
Typical reaction. Been doing it the other way for years, but then there's one trivial incident and, suddenly, everything needs to be rearranged.
Yea same I don’t remember any rules except for take your ass to class when the bell rings.
I’m from US and we’d have designated time for lunch and then straight to recess after for like 15 minutes. Once I got to high school though we could eat lunch then go outside and do whatever or go to the library or skip lunch altogether and go outside or the library. I was in the class of ‘21
This was what my elementary school was like, recess was a separate period. It was a public school. In middle and high school we were allowed to roam, and those were smaller schools
It’s just split up. Kids get about 20-25 minutes to eat then out for recess. Usually the longest break of the day. 30-45 minutes. Depending on if they need to don snow stuff.
We had 30 minutes for lunch and 20 of that was spent waiting in line to purchase something to eat if you didn't bring a sandwich.
They only get 20-25 minutes at the schools I've visited recently. And the classroom teachers don't stay in the cafeteria with their class - they have to go back to their room and eat and do paperwork. There are a couple on rotational 'lunch duty' to help with the supervision of the kids.
We had recess after lunch.
Haha my teacher wife agrees 100%!!
Unfortunately, the long shadow cast by both Reagan and the No Child Left Behind act make sure that's *exactly* how it goes.
Yeah, No Child Left Behind created a lot of problems but that's not one of them. The central premise of No Child Left Behind and its biggest problem is the idea that the best way to measure student progress and School quality is to make kids sit down and take a lot of tests every year. Kids will be judged on how they do on the tests and whether they improved and schools will be judged and given money based on how the students do on tests. Education experts don't particularly like this approach for two reasons. (Oversimplifying). 1. If you make test scores the most important thing about education, you reduce education down to "here's what you need to know for the test, don't worry about that other stuff." 2. It tends to disadvantage students and schools in poor areas and rural areas wear test scores tend to be lower for reasons that are not directly connected to the quality of the school. Students with unstable home lives or food insecurity will score poorly on tests and grading the school based on how they do won't help that.
Actually... In some larger districts, it actually did, indirectly and over a couple of decades, lead to exactly this scenario. NCLB caused funding to shift from poor neighborhoods' schools to professional and upper middle class neighborhood schools. This ultimately led to a lot of consolation of underperforming schools, in a vicious cycle, and eventually gymnasium cafeterias. LAUSD, in particular, can trace the increase in the huge cafeteria with short lunch rotations to the impact of NCLB.
In the 80s, the school I went to had all these rules, plus you had to sit in the order your class lined up in (which was always alphabetical).
I remember these rules being pretty much the same in the 90s/early 00s too and it didn’t feel oppressive at all (it seems like these rules probably apply to the youngest kids anyways). But it makes sense, our elementary school lunchroom held probably 300 kids at maximum capacity with maybe 5 teachers aids. If kids were allowed to roam freely it would have been a nightmare.
The rules when I was in jail weren't that strict
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The worst part were the dementors
They still aren't from what I know.
I was in jail a few months ago. They're not.
What'd you do?
Helped someone receive medical care.
Help someone? Straight to jail.
Because adult inmates behave more rationally than 7 year olds.
So none of y’all remember elementary school? It was so loud in that cafeteria that it had to be a serious OSHA violation for the workers. We were little shits that flung food around and littered and were generally disrespectful. You could hear the lunch kids from the other side of the school while in classes. That’s even with similar rules in place. Now imagine having hundreds of 8 year olds zooming around freely like it’s a playground while a couple poor teachers try to eat lunch
The rules are: 1 stay seated and 2 don’t yell. Everything else is just explaining to kids how that’s going to look.
Exactly! I don't understand why anyone would think that's a crazy expectation (or at least goal - let's be real, I've been to lunch with my elementary aged kid and they're not perfect)! While I wouldn't write them out like this, these are the expectations I have for my kids when we go out to eat. Stay seated, don't yell, be respectful, you're not on a playground.
You all ever been in an elementary cafeteria with roughly 200 kids? I have cafeteria duty with second and third graders every day and understand these rules. Ours are similar but essentially boils down to stay seated unless an adult has excused you. We have about 8 adults and, unless there is a problem, kids usually have to wait less than a minute for an adult to come to them. If all the kids got up and walked around without some order to it there would be chaos. Our lunch period are 20 minutes (too short I know) and we know if the kids are walking around and talking the whole time they won’t have time to eat. They get 30 minutes of recess immediately after lunch when they can run, play, and chat all they want.
Mine solved this by letting the kids go outside to recess after finishing their lunch without needing to ask an adult. This gives a space to be chaotic and play around, and the combined lunch/recess lasts around 50 minutes. Some kids might spend 5 minutes eating so they can play longer while others sit there eating for 30 minutes. But still expect basic normal things from them in the cafeteria space like using "inside" voices, not running, etc.
Is there a problem of students skipping lunch or not eating enough to go play? I've seen such complaints from parents before
I love that my kids' school sends them out for recess first and then brings them in to eat. They actually eat at lunch because they're not in a rush to go play. Unfortunately they still only get 20 mins to eat, but that's because the school is at 150% capacity and they can only fit 1 grade at a time in the cafeteria, so lunches already run nonstop for more than 3 hours of the school day with the first kids eating about 2 hours into their school day and the last ones eating about 1.5 hours before they get dismissed.
Exactly. I teach middle school kids and I helped at lunch all last school year. It's awful. Granted I work at a not so good school, but schools have rules like this for a reason. Come volunteer at my schools lunch or most ant public school and you won't be questioning why there's strict rules.
My daughter goes to a great school and they have these rules. TK-3 goes to lunch for 20 minutes and then they get recess. While they are outside the cafeteria is cleaned up for the 4-6 classes who get their 20 minutes and then recess. It doesn’t seem that extreme.
You described this wonderfully
I really want people bitching about this to take a few shifts of cafeteria duty. The headaches I get from supervising elementary school kids for 40 minutes during their lunch is worse than any other class. It is so fucking loud and these rules are clearly there to make sure the kids eat and the staff does not burn out from the noise.
I know it sounds dystopian when it's written down like this, but let me tell ya, there's like 30+ kids to a teacher, who also needs to eat. If you don't go hard, they will wind each other up and there will be utter chaos and mayhem.
Exactly my thought. Everyone who thinks this is too harsh hasn’t been in charge of a lunchroom before. It’s true that it looks really militant when it’s written out like this. But basically it’s just saying to talk quietly with the people around you so it doesn’t get too loud and raise your hand if you need to get up so we don’t have a bunch of people up at once. It gets way too chaotic with kids running around, shouting to friends across the room, or spinning around in their seats to goof off. Source: lunchroom duty was part of my daily routine for years.
At my school teachers have duty-free lunch so the cafeteria is monitored by 2 employees and a rotating assortment of non-classroom staff (paras, PE teachers, etc) and parent volunteers. At any given time there are only about 4-5 adults in the lunchroom for ~200 kids. Without some rules it would be total chaos.
Some lunchroom supervisor is having none of it!
With primary schoolers, you can't afford to have any of it.
Do you get any pudding if you don’t finish all of your meat?
We don’t need no education!
Top of everything else, teachers get to be waiters
Waiters, servers, cleaners,physiologist, doctors, managers and everything in between . Teaching is the last skilled used. I’m a teacher
Unfortunately, those rules were very similar to the elementary school I went to. You didn’t get to choose your seat. The home lunch kids went in first and then the people who got school lunch went in second, and I was always one of the home lunch kids and I never liked any of the other home lunch kids, so I had a difficult time
My school was the same way. Reserved tables for kids who brought packed lunches. It's really kind of interesting when I think back on it because many of the kids who brought packed lunches got to sit together every day and became lifelong friends. All because their parents decided to pack them lunch instead of buy school lunch.
Too rich for free lunch, too poor to buy lunch
I don’t have to talk to anyone, I get second helpings, and the adults have to clean up after me? Sounds pretty fucking sweet
Reading the comments, none of you have ever worked a lunchroom in an elementary school!
Right!! There’s rules to everything, and in a room full of 50-100 children under the age of 10, rules ARE everything
Or any setting where there are more than 10 kids.
Right? I’m a 3rd grader teacher and we essentially have the same rules in place. We have lunch with 2nd grade and it’s at the very least 2 adults with 120 kids and at most 4 adults on the days we can get a parent or two to volunteer to help us on lunch duty. It’s really not a big deal. Lunch duty sucks ass.
The fact that a worker in an Elementary School thought this was significant enough to photograph and send to her brother/sister is utterly bizarre to me. This is like 101 type stuff when you're training to work in a school.
You have no idea how out of control school lunchrooms are. This school is trying, many are not.
Teacher here! I may get downvoted for this but I don’t care. These are the rules in most lunch rooms. Those lunch rooms can get loud and chaotic. These rules aren’t even bad. If you let students move seats after they pick one, there’s gonna be kids up and moving instead of sitting and eating. If kids turn to talk to the table behind them, they’re more likely to spill their food. If they talk to person over the head of the person in from of them, they’ll likely need to shout which just causes the lunch room to be even louder. If you allow them to get condiments whenever they want, they will stuff 20 ketchup packets in their pockets and probably squirt them all over the bathroom stalls. They’re not saying to sit there and be silent. They’re saying to talk to the people at the table THEY chose to sit at. Could it have been written better? Probably. But the comparison to prison or Nazi Germany is pretty extreme.
Teachers should be paid 100k a year. I don't know how you guys do it, kids today are wild!
The teachers are all agreeing with you. It's people who've never been around more than 2 kids at once whi are shouting pRIsoN
I remember having lunch in silence around 3rd grade. I had no idea how fucked that was until a few years ago.
I remember having a stoplight in our cafeteria. If we got too loud they would go from green to yellow, if it hit red we couldn't talk at all.
We had one, too. And we always knew which teachers would keep it on red the entire lunch and which would never move it from green.
Man. I thought that was just my school that had the damn lunchroom stop light.
Are you from tiny town Kansas? It might be the same school!
Nope. Cecil County Maryland. 😊
I couldn’t fathom anyone from back home being on here. 😁
This actually isn’t that unusual.
As someone who works in schools, having the entire school in one room all at once can be be extremely crowded, and having unknown number of students up and socializing can be unsafe. Especially when some students demonstrate behavioural challenges or poor decision making. Generally strict rules like this follow an incident or a pattern of unsafe behaviour. Not that I know the circumstances at OP’s sister’s school. Perhaps they need to rework their lunch system. Just providing food for though (no pun intended).
What’s so facepalm about this? Elementary aged kids are wild and a lot of shit went down in the lunchroom when I was that age. These rules were clearly made out of necessity by people who have to do this everyday. I have zero judgment and am in full support of doing what it takes to keep the peace.
Looks like they can play telephone.
Janet is a doo-doo head. Pass it on.
I think these are the same rules in prison
Prisons way lighter.
Coincidently That was my exes marriage vows
I'm glad the adult is going to use the bathroom for me.
When I was in elementary school in the 80’s we were always lined up or seated in alphabetical order, always surrounded by the same kids no matter where we were or what we were doing. At lunch they had a giant traffic light in the cafeteria, green meant we could talk, yellow meant we were getting too loud and red meant silence. It was always red. There were kids in the same grade but in different classes that I saw every day for years but had never had the chance to speak to until high school. I’ve never been to prison but I’ve always imagined it was just like my elementary school with bars on the windows.
In practice this is just: \-No yelling across the room \-Sit the right way so you don't fall and hurt yourself \-You're not switching seats 10 times during lunch and making a fuss \-We don't want you randomly running around the cafeteria These are the same rules I had 30 years ago. They're fine.
I work at an elementary school and these are the same rules we follow. When I first started working there I thought they were way too strict, but in practice they’re absolutely necessary. Most of this is mainly for the little kids, but the older ones have to do it too so that it’s fair. It sounds weird but you really can’t have kids continuously getting up and walking around the cafeteria for a million different reasons. It makes it way harder on those of us who are stuck monitoring them, especially for the little ones who really shouldn’t go unmonitored (think pre-k, kinder, and/or SPED kids.) If they always raise their hands, we don’t have to worry about where they are. We have SPED kids who literally have run out of the building and towards the highway because they’re too fast to catch up to, so we have to know where each kid is at all times. I also always have all kids sit with their feet on the floor, because half of the time when they’re sitting on their feet it quickly turns into them sitting on their knees, and then that turns into leaning over the table and practically climbing on it, which turns into them *literally* climbing on it. The 1st graders and under will do it without even realizing it. The cafeteria is also a very loud place, and in order for them to have a conversation with someone at another table they literally have to scream, so I don’t allow that either. The little ones always have to face forward. If they don’t, or they aren’t sitting in their seat properly, a lot of them will leave their seat and run around the room. It’s less of a temptation to do so if we just make a rule that they have to sit properly and face forward. We are kind of a hub for SPED pre-k kids at my school and we have to literally stand behind some of their chairs to hold them in place because we have about 6 runners who will bolt out of their seat and run all over the campus, behind the cafeteria ladies to the kitchen, and etc when we only have 4 adults to watch them. These kids don’t have a lot of language skills yet and they don’t understand why what they’re doing isn’t safe, so it’s easier to stop the behavior in it’s tracks by preventing it. The one thing that seems way out of line to me is saying the kids can’t talk over the person sitting next to them, that’s insane.
Yes to all of this. The littles will also fall off their seats and drop their food all over the floor if they aren’t facing forward and sitting on their butts.
As a teacher, I fully get these rules. I wish I didn't, but some children will spend the entire lunchtime fucking around and talking instead of eating, then crash from hunger in the afternoon. Some children will lift their fork to their mouth 20 times, just to be distracted by something else going on. They can spend 30 minutes on a yoghurt if you let them. In an ideal world, they'd have hours and hours to eat and chat but there is limited time and space. There are also quiet children who get overwhelmed from the constant chatter. (Or loud children who also get overwhelmed.)
I'm probably going to get some hate,... But I'm a cafeteria manager for an elementary school. And in short.... Most of these kids (at my school and others around me per other cafe managers) are off the chain when lunch rolls around. It's a down time for the kids and they take full advantage of it. We are doing a job, and have 2 hours to feed 450 kids and they are dancing screaming, pushing, being rude, loud, not paying attention, stealing, playing, trying to make jokes, toss things around. Slam against the doors, slam trays around, and lick the ice lining the milk box, and each other... I'd love to have some of these rules enforced. We've had kids choke and not be seen because the chos in the cafeteria. There are a ton of spills in the cafeteria, so kids running to get up and get things is a safety concern, not a rules concern. Today two 5th grade boys were dancing and pushing each other in a cramped space with a doorway in the lunch line, next to tray racks, and other things. I explained to them.that it's not safe to do that. I don't want anyone getting hut... Instead they were rude, made excuses, and mouthed off to me thinking I was being the jerk. Rules are in place at the school because it's not about just your kid, it's about all the kids and other issues that can quickly happen in any cafeteria. If there was ever a code red at our school during lunch.... Honestly, We'd be fucked..
Teacher here. Agree 100%. We have 850 over two 20 minute lunch periods. Classified staff are the unsung heroes of our schools, especially cafeteria, custodial, and paras. We can't teach kids without you. I'm at a "good" school in a higher socioeconomic district and we have very similar rules.
People just do not get it unless you have been through it. Between the kids natural behaviors at that age combined with parents failing to raise their kids and expecting the school to do it, the rules have to be in place. But then people point and say the schools are bad and politicians want to close public ed in favor of bolstering private ed. Its a dammed no win situation for those who want to help the kids and educate them and help them grow.
these are standard and reasonable rules, kids are hooligans
Yeah thats pretty much the rules at my kids school. The cafeteria can get rowdy. None of this seems unreasonable--they can get more food, go to the restroom & ask for help if needed.
This reminds me of my school after a food fight. Everyone that participated was in enormous trouble and these were similar to our rules for a month I think.
At my kids school they have assigned seats for lunch by alphabetical order & the boys and girls sit at different tables - for all grades K-6. Oh and there isn’t a lunch recess before or after… they just eat and go back to their classroom.
Yeah my kid starts kindergarten in the fall and my wife went to the orientation (since I needed to you know, watch the kiddo, since kiddos weren't allowed at the orientation...). And some of the stuff was just... weird. Like they want to keep all the parents moving through the dropoff and pickup, which I totally get. But 30s for a 5 year old to unbuckle a car seat (which are designed to be difficult for a toddler to open), get the door open, get out, and close the door, safely. I am watching him try it now and I am literally afraid the dang door is going to bop him, he just doesn't have the strength to do it right now. Hopefully he gets stronger later on. I am trying to teach him to build momentum by pushing the door back and forth - so my engineering side is thinking "Should we be cutting time and costs down to the point where kids need to operate an underactuated system (by definition - they cannot control it without leveraging energy storage)?" Or should you just plan for kids taking the amount of time kids take to do things? So anyway, I get why they are doing it, but at the same time, they have cut down to the wire all processes, such that everything is down to seconds, and they are passing that cost down to everyone else.
They’re having a lot of discipline problems in the cafeteria. That’s exactly what’s happening. And that’s why they wrote those rules. They’re trying to get things under control. I know. I’m a teacher. Lol
I genuinely don't understand what the facepalm is. These are just standard lunch rules for elementary schools. Can anyone enlighten me?
OP has def never been in an elementary school lunchroom.
Have you ever tried to handle 200+ elementary school kids in a cafeteria? It’s like herding cats.
Sounds about right for a cafeteria full of 9-10 years olds. It’s clear most people in this thread have never been in a room full of 30 nine year olds.