Myths of Public Schools

It’s that time of year, the time when parents are happy to get their kids into a place that won’t rot their brains; however, kids don’t feel the same way. Back to school boys and girls, grab your pencils and notebooks and get ready for homework and less free time. But are kids really afraid of tests and textbook readings; is the school lunches that bad; are the bullies going to stop? The hype about problems with the school system has been floating around for quite sometime, but there are some problems that the schools can’t control. Time to dive in to the common thoughts about school and separate the ones that are true, and the ones that are rumors.

For the longest time kids have had a discomfort with eating school made lunches. I myself have found a few hairs in the mac and cheese. At my own school, more teenagers will get just a slice of pizza and flavored water for lunch a day, and then have a sugar crash in their next class. With young elementary kids, there’s always the one kid who comes up with the idea that the chicken nuggets weren’t actually chicken. I myself felt iffy about eating school lunch. As I grew older, these thoughts about school lunch disappeared, and I ate it like I made it myself. Of course not everyone is like me. My friends ate the school without a problem, but everyone else grabbed a cookie and a PowerAde and called it a lunch. When I was in elementary school, there was one kid who wouldn’t eat anything but chicken nuggets. He wouldn’t eat the fries, cookies, veggies; nothing except chicken nuggets. There were quite a large number of people who brought lunch from home as I got older.

Why do kids have such a fear of school lunch? Maybe that isn’t the right question. Maybe the better question is: is there anything to fear in a typical school lunch? The answer is it depends. Remember the hair I found in my lunch, no one else to my knowledge has found one. School lunches are the same as any other mass cooking foods. It’s bought from a vendor, cooked fairly fast, and served to you. Most school food is frozen and reheated. What about the raw fruits and vegetables? Very few kids eat them, so they have them there (and yes they are fresh) and your lunch ladies take the time to cut them up. Mashed potatoes? Instant Jello? Made the day before. Salads? Readily available in iceberg mix bags. School lunches are like Spam, they have an unnecessary hype and disgust. And for those who think spam is a mixture of mystery meats, spam is actually just ground pork shoulder (which is a very rough part of pork) with a little spices. Hence forth SPiced hAM=SPAM. Maybe schools should serve spam. Maybe kids will actually realize they aren’t eating poison.

Next week, we continue the school myth series.

If you have a lie, myth, or falsified fact you’d like to see on my blog, send me an e-mail at nickmantzios@yahoo.com
-Enitocin 

~ by smashedglass on August 15, 2007.