My grade has the last lunch of the day this year, so it really becomes important for the students (and the teacher) to have a morning snack. Without it, some of us are going a solid five or six hours with no nourishment before lunch, and we can’t have a room full of empty tummies because empty brains will inevitably follow. But think about the kind of mess one kid can make when she or he sits down to eat, then multiply that by twenty-five to thirty times, and welcome to the middle of my morning. (FYI: Now that I’m teaching 3rd grade again, I'm becoming much more comfortable using all forms of the word “tummy” than I would have been even a month ago.)
In a perfect world the kids would sit down at their desks, eat their snacks in five minutes, throw away any trash they have left and be ready to get back to work. I promise it never happens this way. During my years in the classroom, I’ve seen enough snack incidents to turn nearly anyone into a compulsive neat freak. We end up with at least one fruit snack wrapper on the floor beside the trash can on most days, because some kids don’t have that magic three-point shot touch they think they do, and they show very little interest in chasing down their rebounds. By the time snack is finished, the classroom floor has become a minefield of Goldfish crackers and cereal nuggets waiting to be crushed into flavored dust by the first foot to accidentally find them. I know that if the syrup from a single-serving plastic fruit cup isn’t wiped up immediately with both wet and dry paper towels, the next sheet of paper to touch that desktop will become fused to it at the molecular level. More than once I’ve seen a student cleaning out their desk and finding a forgotten (and blessedly sealed) plastic container that never quite had all of the ranch dressing rinsed out of it, discovering an impromptu science project had commenced since it was last seen. Which is to say nothing of the kid who one day found eleven forks in her desk. I don’t mean plastic picnicware here, I mean actual take-them-out-of-the-kitchen-drawer metal forks. Eleven of them. It made me wonder how long her family had been living off finger food and cereal.
Let’s also talk about the stink. I don’t know at what point in the past ten years snack food companies decided they needed to offer so many “Flamin’ Hot” options, but kids LOVE them. The few I’ve ever tried taste very wrong, and the smell that lingers in the room afterward is even worse. It’s an artificial stench so foul it wouldn’t surprise me if it had been engineered to offend anyone older than sixteen. It’s so bad that one day a kid brought in a bag of sliced red peppers which, while still strong-smelling, were refreshingly natural by comparison.
Don’t even get me started about birthday treats and class parties. Regarding those, I’ll leave you with three snapshot visuals to consider: Cupcakes buried in sprinkles with frosting that turns tongues different colors. Lollipop sticks sucked and chewed on until liquified. Root beer puddles. It’s always the root beer....
Even though dealing with the mess drives me crazy, I enjoy a lot of our incidental snack time moments and how they reveal little things about my students I wouldn’t otherwise learn. One morning this week one of the kids stepped out to his locker at snack time and returned moments later carrying the first Honeycrisp apple I’ve seen this season. If you don’t know Honeycrisps, they can get pretty big, and this one had. He walked in with it carried in both hands like a trophy.
“That...is the biggest apple...I have ever seen...in my life!” I exclaimed when I saw it, causing every other head in the room to turn his direction, making him smile even wider. “That apple is bigger than your head!" I continued. "There is no way you’ll ever eat the whole thing!”
To reply, all this quiet, unassuming little guy did was look at me with raised eyebrows as if to say, “You think? Okay. Just sit back and watch.” Sure enough, he powered that thing down to a thick core, but easily ate enough to count it as finished.
Thankfully that core made it into the trash can.
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