Monthly Archives: February 2010

Jamie Oliver’s TED speech

You got to watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIwrV5e6fMY
(It’s 20 minutes long so get comfortable)

And the accompanying article for more information about the award: http://www.tedprize.org/jamie-oliver/

Jamie Oliver is working to change children’s lives by tackling school lunch. When he accepts the award he does a dramatic display with sugar. That’s all I’m going to say about that. And then the clips of the families he is working with…wow.

My favorite part is when he takes a bunch of different vegetables into the classroom and shows them to the students. He asks them to name each of them. A kid calls an eggplant “a pear.”

I’m going to try the that with my students sometime soon (this week if I find time to get to a grocery store). It’s the Jamie Oliver Vegetable Experiment!

This is bigger than just me

I have been touched by so many of your comments and everything that you have shared with me via email. It seems like there is a real need for people to share their school lunch experiences: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In the spirit of sharing and continuing the dialogue about school lunches in the US and abroad, I’ve started a Flickr Photo Group (see flickr badge to the right):

http://www.flickr.com/groups/fedupwithschoollunch/

If you choose to join my photo group, your “homework” is to take a picture and share it. The photo can be anything related to school lunch. You might be a teacher who wants to take a photo of the lunch at your school. You might be a nutritionist who wants to highlight some really great lunches. You might be a lunch lady who wants to share some terrific (or not so terrific) meals. What are you (students, kids, teachers) eating for school lunch? Or even what great lunches have you packed for your child?

I need you to know that I will be monitoring the content aggressively. The group rules include:

  • Post only your own pictures (taken by you).
  • Please obtain parental permission to post pictures of students’ faces.
  • If you must post pictures of students’ without parental permission (as in a large group photo), please blackout their faces.
  • Might as well get adults’ permission to post their faces on the photo group.

For example, you can take a picture of your own child with a lunch, because you are that child’s parent. For this reason I haven’t taken pictures of the cafeteria or the lunch line because I do not have parental permission to shoot the kids.

You also must have a Yahoo ID to access Flickr (it’s a part of Yahoo). And if you want to enjoy the photos and comment, you do need to log in with your Yahoo ID.

A picture is worth a thousand words. It seems that mine are making a difference… and I want you to be a part of the School Lunch Revolution.

Time

At my school the kids get 20 minutes for lunch, which is bell-to-bell time. So lunch time includes waiting in line, getting your items, finding a seat, opening your food packages, EATING, throwing out your trash, and lining up to go back to class. If they don’t finish it all, they have to throw it away. Taking food back to the classroom is not allowed. I think kids get about 12-13 minutes to eat maximum if everything goes as planned. If their class is the last to get into line, well, they might have as little as 5 minutes sitting at the table.

Well, it just doesn’t seem like enough time to eat.

It’s hard enough for the teachers to grab a bite in 20 minutes. After taking the kids to the cafeteria, getting my meal together (using the microwave), chatting with a teacher, and using the bathroom, I might have about five minutes to eat.

Also the food prepared in the school cafeteria is very often meant to be eaten by hand. So that’s pretty easy to do in 5-10 minutes. It can’t be utensil-friendly fare if you only get a spork.

I personally can wolf down food when necessary, but I am an adult. Imagine a little person who maybe eats a little more slowly than an adult. Do they actually eat very much in 5 minutes?

I guess my wish is that all kids get 30 minutes to eat. Lunch is about learning too; it’s not just filling an empty stomach (and sometimes they don’t even have a chance to do that). Lunch is a break for students to chat with their friends in an informal setting. Learn about foods and enjoy eating.

HFCS

It was probably within the past two years that my husband came home from work and told me about one of his coworkers that stopped eating any foods with HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). I laughed and thought, “What a loon!”

Fast-forward to having a child and breastfeeding my baby. I started to have to supplement with a little formula when he was around six months old. One day I was looking at the ingredients of the formula and I noticed that HFCS was right up there in the ingredient list. That broke my heart!

As a mother, I just want my kid to get the best food possible with the least amount of cheap additives. And here my baby was so small and getting a lot of this corn product straight. Something felt wrong to me.

What do you know about HFCS? Are we overreacting about how it might change students’ classroom behavior?

Milk

 
Above: Chocolate milk
Above: Skim (fat free) milk
Below: 1% milk
Milk has been there my whole life. I loved the stuff and drank it everyday. But like many folks in my family as I have gotten older it’s gotten harder for me to digest milk products. This project has revealed to me that I’m lactose-intolerant. Just to make my life easier I’m cutting out straight milk and ice cream (dairy products with the most lactose). Lact*aid products although great just seem like too much fooling around for me with my busy schedule. I can’t imagine removing dairy completely from my life since I love yogurt (and luckily it is low in lactose).
Milk is a staple of school lunches. Kids really do love it (I know my toddler does). I think the debate about milk that I’ve seen online is that students should only be served skim milk because it is low in fat and that it does not contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) like chocolate milk. I am concerned about HFCS and how it influences children’s behavior, but I don’t have a lot of information about it. I also think it’s possible that students who don’t get good fats (vegetable oils) in their diet could benefit from milk fat instead of trans fat.

Modeling material

And I’m not referring to anything related to pageants.

When I’m teaching something new to my students, I first pre-test them to find out if they know how to do it. My pre-testing is accomplished by asking questions. Maybe a couple of them can answer my questions, but most of the time if it’s truly new material, they can’t. So I model or demostrate how to do it.

Some students grasp material right away, but most average students require a lot of repetition and additional models. Then there are students in special education programs that require additional support including multimodal input (learning through more than just visual and auditory – oftentimes it’s tactile: “let’s trace an ‘m’ on paper,”) or through cueing.

In my humble opinion, modeling is teaching and the basis of learning is through imitation. To imitate well a student needs to have adequate attention and memory.

I believe schools can learn how to “model” good food. Many students get either bad models or no models at home in regards to nutrition. So they come to school to learn not only reading and math, but also basic life skills that their parents aren’t teaching (or aren’t able to teach) them at home.

I hate to add something else to the full plate (pun intended) that schools already have, but school lunches are important. Executive functions like attention and memory are supported by good nutrition. Let’s teach kids what they should eat at lunch by modeling good food and giving them the best we can offer.