Picture this: You’ve just arrived in your favorite class, excited to learn. Or maybe it’s your least favorite class, and there’s nowhere you’d want to be less. Either way, you have to be there and you have to be focused.
And you are! Until your stomach starts rumbling and time begins to slow down. A pounding headache arrives and you feel dizzy just looking at the projected notes. You think of the bag of pretzels in your backpack, just a few inches away from you. Just a few pretzels would cure it all, you’re sure.
Unfortunately, NHS has a strict no-food-outside-the-cafeteria policy. So until it’s time for either lunch or to go home, you have no choice but to starve while studying, hunger in history, crave in calculus, or long in lang for a snack.
Why is this? We’ve been told that it’s because of the risk of crumbs. A mess will attract animals and make the jobs of the custodial staff harder.
I, for one, am completely in favor of keeping animals out of NHS and minimizing mess on behalf of the custodial staff. However, we are also teenage students. I believe that by now, we know how to eat without causing a mess. Wouldn’t a better solution to improve the focus and mental clarity of our students be to allow food with the stipulation that there can be no mess? The reality of the rule is that anyone who would create a mess is probably not going to follow the no-food rule anyway, but when I really need pretzels or a protein bar, I know I can eat it quietly and cleanly.
Isn’t it more important to give students the opportunity to learn responsibility and learn how to listen to what their body needs to function best? If I could have a few pretzels in math, I promise my grade would look a whole lot better.