The other day I wrote about the incredible shrinking lunch hour in the workplace and g0t a deluge of emails from people telling me that this is the new normal. If you want to get ahead, you’ll quickly gobble a sandwich at your desk and get right back to work. In this economy, nobody’s complaining.
[M]oney isn’t the only scarce commodity cafeteria operators have to grapple with. Another one is time. Get this:
In the Minneapolis public schools, we are supposed to have 15 minutes to eat, which would be bad enough. But realistically we get only 10 to 11 minutes (we have been timing it).
That’s from Minneapolis sixth graders Talia Bradley and Antonia Ritter, writing on the op-ed page of the Minnesota Star Tribune. Ten to 11 minutes to eat lunch? Welcome to fast-food nation, kids, where eating is a necessary inconvenience, to be dispatched with as rapidly as possible.
Nationwide, similar trends hold sway. According to the School Nutrition Association, elementary-school kids get a median of 25 minutes for lunch, while middle and high school students get 30.
Over at the Lunch Tray blog, University of Iowa law professor and parent of public-school children offers the following explanation for what he calls the “incredible shrinking lunch period”:
At a meeting with concerned parents, the school superintendent sympathized with our concerns, but explained how much pressure the administrators were under, because of No Child Left Behind, to raise standardized test scores. As a result, administrators felt that they had to add instructional time to the day, and there were only so many places to find those minutes. Hence the disappearing lunch and recess.
Evidently, they’re extending this to bathroom breaks as well. If you can make it all the way to the end of this odd story about a kindergartner having a bathroom accident you’ll find out that it happened because the child wasn’t allowed to leave her desk because she was taking a test.