Why I Spend My Lunch Hour with Students

My favorite part of my job is not actually part of my job. As a public high school teacher in a state and district with a teacher’s union, my contract entitles me to a “duty-free” lunch. Over the years, however, I have willingly and somewhat proudly developed a lunch crew.

Many teachers have a lunch crew — that same group of students who choose to make their classroom a home base during the week. When I was a first-year teacher and new to the school and district, I left my classroom door open at lunch in the hopes that coworkers might come to chat and eat with me, but it was students who gradually took advantage of my open-door policy.

While I am still figuring out healthy and sustainable boundaries while working contractual hours, making my classroom a place where shifting groups of young people share food and talk to each other has helped me grow as a teacher, and I believe it’s had an observable impact on the kids’ learning and engagement at school.

The Kids Were Not Alright

My first year teaching was the first full school year post-COVID. When our district went remote for three semesters, I noticed students had difficulty re-learning to socialize and navigate changing friendships and relationships with each other and adults in the school. Whether that meant not interacting with people they didn’t know, blowing up and lashing out at someone or sitting alone on their phones, I observed students struggling to exist in a community and dealing with social anxieties or frustrations during class.

Many teachers don’t necessarily see their students outside the confines of their class often, but high school is about way more than class time. Lunchtime at high school in the United States is an experience so culturally ingrained that I would wager every person who went through this school system has a vivid image of what it entails; some of the cliches that come to mind are food fights, awkward journeys across the cafeteria or eating lunch alone in the bathroom.

A little over a decade ago, during my first weeks attending public high school as a student, I experienced all of these scenarios with excruciatingly memorable detail. I switched schools between my ninth and 10th grade year, and I will never forget the first week of sophomore year when a teammate’s mom assigned her to be my friend — against her will, I might add. She was so annoyed, and I was so mortified that I ended up eating my PB&J in the end stall of the girl’s bathroom. After that day, I gathered the courage to sit with some students I knew, and we established a routine of sitting in the corner outside our history teachers’ classroom. It was that group of kids who became my lifelong friends, and it was that teacher who inspired me to go into education and still influences my teaching today. When I reminisce on high school, it is these interactions and moments that stand out in my memory.

I wish I could say I purposefully cultivated the community of sharing food in my classroom, but instead, it evolved naturally. All I did was decide that it was okay for anyone to eat in my classroom and scavenged two ancient microwaves and a mini fridge. From there, I watched a culture of breaking bread and eating together in community evolve naturally in my room, led by the kids. This practice of eating and sharing food has seemed to play a big part in making my classroom feel open and welcoming to a very eclectic assortment of friend groups and young individuals.

The Salad Bowl and The Melting Pot

One thing I love about my school is the representation I see of all of our students’ diverse identities and cultures. An accompanying challenge that we face with this diversity is overcoming barriers and tensions between different cliques or groups of students, especially students who primarily speak different languages and who come from vastly different home cultures.

During class time, there are many difficulties these students encounter that prevent them from engaging in learning, including being hungry or not knowing how to communicate with the other students at their table. I want to preface that many teachers rightfully do not allow food in their classrooms for various reasons, including to prevent pests or messes, or especially in a lab science class where eating is a safety issue. Nonetheless, allowing students to eat in my classroom has led to so many interactions between students who wouldn’t normally acknowledge each other’s existence, which over time makes them more comfortable or confident in working with that student or asking them for help.

While sharing popular bags of chips is one way that students can interact and see their similarities, another thing I have seen happening, especially around lunch time, is students learning about their shared culture or totally foreign cultures through food. Some of the students in my informal lunch crew will bring me food whenever their cultural club has an event or fundraiser. I have enjoyed homemade falafel wraps, pupusas, and lumpia, and if I am not particularly hungry, I never hesitate to offer a falafel or tear my pupusa in half to split with whatever random student asks.

Last year, when I saw a semi-regular student of my lunch crew heating up her injera and wot in my microwave, another student from the grade below and I both recognized the dish. It led to us chatting about her Eritrean family and the two becoming friends. Besides the amazing ancillary benefit of scoring a piece of injera, small exchanges like these are important to me because they exemplify how my open-door lunchtime helps me to get to know my community and builds connections between different students.

Dessert to Go

If you are reading this from a non-teacher perspective, it is important to understand that I am incredibly lucky to be able to do this in my classroom. If I didn’t have the support of my union, or the support of a school that can assign me my own consistent classroom and supply resources like napkins and running water, none of this would be possible for me to do.

Most of the students I’ll work with in my career will reheat their lunches and chat with other teachers, or spend their 40 minutes of free time each day outside playing on the field or other parts of our beautiful campus. However, my hope is that through building a culture of sharing meals in my room, students will experience a welcoming and safe place when they do pass through my door.

Part of why I became a teacher is because I’ve always felt at home in the classroom. No matter where my family moved during my K-12 childhood, I felt most at home when I found a familiar spot on campus to be myself with my friends. It may seem inconsequential, but I have witnessed pop tarts, takis and Tupperware of homemade meals breaking down barriers between diverse groups of students and contributing to a sense of connection that these young people need and deserve.