For perspective: I come from a country where “cafeteria” food at school is good and affordable (most is less than the equivalent of 5-10 USD max and it’s not slop, it’s actual food), but it’s not an obligation for everyone since it’s up to the student if they want to buy something or bring their own lunch.
The “cafeteria” in my school isn’t a typical American one, rather it’s closer to a canteen where they sell food you can purchase from cup noodles, fried stuff, sandwiches, baked goods, etc. also appliances like a kettle or microwave are available in the dining hall for students to heat up left overs if they wanted.
The thing I tend to notice from American schools (according to US movies, there’s bias whether it’s true or false) is that they tend to depict kids always heading for the cafeteria for recess or lunch picking up whats available instead of bringing their own food from home (left overs from dinner), why is that the case?
Many United States public schools treat their students more like prisoners.
When I was going to elementary school in Texas, there was a traffic light on the cafeteria wall. If the light was green, we could sit where we liked. If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line. If the light was red, we had to sit in the same order, and also we were not allowed to speak.
The food was terrible. We loved our awful little pizza rectangles because they were the least terrible thing we were served.
Holy shit that has to be against the Geneva convention or something.
It’s all corrupt government contracts. Instead of teaching supplies and paying for good teachers, you get free prison slop.
Sports teams and band suspiciously overfunded while everyone else gets garbage.
God, another reason to dislike Texas.
I usually skipped lunch and would pocket the cash my parents gave me to shoot hoops in the gym or play video games or watch TV in one of the computer labs. The only ones who had any sort of lunch restrictions were those in detention and, if I remember correctly, even then there was no specific seating arrangement unless they were associated with someone else as co-troublemakers.
ps edit: what was the point of “yellow”? Didn’t you generally go through the line with your friends anyway?
Yes, but that might be difficult if you were in different classes, since we were supposed to go straight from class to cafeteria. It was also like “you were kind of bad today, do better tomorrow.” I think at least one time, they even changed it from yellow to red while we were eating because they deemed us too loud or rowdy or something.
Naturally this meant one group of troublemakers could get the whole school in trouble. Collective punishment for individual offenses, just like god does in the bible. They wanted us to live in fear and shame, they were cramming us into an inhuman mold to better serve our corporate overlords.
I was in a small school and even then I can’t imagine the work it would take to arrange us in anything even close to a prescriptive order.
When third period ended, everyone had priorities. Maybe you need to hit the restroom to suck down a dart. Maybe you have to settle a beef with someone from second period PE. A romantic tryst in the north stairwell. Or you might be a normal kid and throw your shit in the locker and press up in the line, trying to cut as far forward as your social class allows. No matter how you use it, you have 45 minutes. If they tried to put us in some sort of prescribed order, that would be all we did that day
What does this even mean? Were the chairs numbered?
We had tables with benches iirc. I think whoever came out of the line first would go all the way to the front of the cafeteria and sit down on the side closest to the stage, closest to the door we came in through. Everyone else would fill the rest of that side, then the other side of the table, then the next table, etc. So if you counted it out correctly, you could still sit next to your friends. There were also teachers present to make sure we sat where we were supposed to. I think there was also a guard with a pistol. It was Texas.
I think you went to school at a cult
Yeah… I wrote a song about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6dC2eKQBFc
Oh god that fucking sucks. I’d ask why, but you alrready said the real reason: it’s prison
Holy shit, someone else that had the traffic light! They made us do alphabetical order seating instead of the order you went through line, which sucked because you couldn’t sit with your friends even if you couldn’t talk.
What?? Why? Like what caused the light to change?
For us it was always being ‘too loud’, like a cafeteria full of children 10 and under is ever going to be that quiet. It’s not like kids were shrieking all the time or anything, they just talked excitedly. There weren’t even classrooms near the cafeteria to be bothered by the noise! The more I think about it the more I want to go kick them in the shins about it
So like if it changed mid lunch would you shuffle seats?
This is such an insane thing to do to kids lol I’m so sorry you had a traffic light in the cafeteria
Oh, it was somehow even more convoluted. If the light went to red we had to remain silent the rest of the lunch where we were, and THEN the next lunch was sitting in alphabetical order in complete silence. It might be extended to multiple lunches if people kept trying to talk.
There was one period of time when we had heavy rain, it lasted for what felt like weeks straight, and we weren’t allowed outside. We kind of collectively started going insane from lack of exercise (we had no indoor gym), and then we got multiple days of red light silent lunches.
That is weird as fuck. What a stupid rule. Kids are noisy.
The people who run schools hate kids and want them to suffer
But why ? Sounds like totally absurd as a rule
Control. Punishment and guilt are ingrained in our culture. Abuse has been normalized.
It’s a very unsympathetic thing to say but it’s also 100% true.