Lunch Duty

I am going to be teaching solo again tomorrow and Wednesday, but today I had the privilege of lunch duty. As it's summer school here at LoLMEECoA, all of the students get free lunch at about 11:30, which is halfway through their third hour class. Why the bearded wizards in administration conjured up a split class rather than just allowing half of the students to eat before and half after 3rd period I am not sure, but it's on par with Napoleon's decision to go all the way into Russia. In the winter, of course. All I'm saying is that not much learning goes on after lunch is over.

Lunch is a strange time in middle school. You see the cliques, the outcasts, the lovebirds and the mortal enemies. One thing that has been seen, though not by me, every day since summer school began, is pizza. The cafeteria has basically given the students the choice of eating pizza or going hungry. Oh, the students could also get a prefabricated graham cracker peanut butter sandwich and a string cheese, but that sounds about as appetizing as, well, a prefabricated graham cracker and peanut butter sandwich with crappy, Crystal Farms string cheese. That's a tautology, but I don't care.

So, students are currently on day 11 of the pizza feast. It's like the Irish potato famine, but exactly the opposite. Students are clamoring for something, anything else, but the school cafeteria is no place for innovation. Or so I thought. The students are learning, innovating. And in their innovation, the students are revolting.

It would seem, at least to me, that pizza isn't the kind of food that needs a lot of dressing up. Some people like parmesan cheese, some like red pepper. And, sure, Papa John's has their dipping sauces, but those are really just a secret government conspiracy to make Americans obese. (From what I've heard, we'd totally be thin if it weren't for the garlic butter sauce.) My stuffy, old-school brand of thinking is not shared by the student body, however.

These effervescent little echinoderms are taking their pizza and jazzing it up a bit. They aren't so stodgy in their thinking as to believe that pizza can't be improved. These wonderful little wallabies are taking the quart-sized squirt containers of ranch dressing and hot sauce and splurting those ingredients together in ridiculous proportions onto their trays and then dipping their doughy, soupy pizza into that unholy alliance of condiments. I understand that they're trying to do whatever they can to make their food palatable, but it's depressing to see them create a sorry-looking pink paste of hot ranch into which they can dip their pizza. I even saw one dip his mushy pineapple cubes in this evil concoction. Truly, truly I say to you: the students are revolting.

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