Critical thinking

High School cafeterias are almost all the same, only some small differences exist. To many schools are overcrowded these days, and so lunch is done in shifts; usually three shifts for half an hour each. The time of the Lunch varies a bit, but at my school the first started at around eleven-thirty or so and the last was at around 12:30. We had started school at 7:15 in the morning and we finished at two in the afternoon. Lunchtime therefore couldn’t come soon enough for most of us, we were all very hungry by then as most teenagers don’t get up and eat any breakfast before going to school. A very real worry was whether or not you would have the same lunch as your friends. First lunch was always the best one to be in because not only did you get to eat first, it was more likely that you would see your friends. In the reading by Emily White she says that the lunches for the students are “drawn”, rather then assigned. At Everett High which building your fourth period class was in determined which lunch you had. If you didn’t like the lunch you had you could always see a counselor and change your fourth period class to one you liked better to see friends. The lines in the counselors’ office the first week of any semester were always long. Emily White interviews a girl who had gotten a different lunch then her friends and how the girl was then left out of plans and didn’t hear the stories or inside jokes of her friends, and how the girl can not break into the third lunch crowd. At Everett High that could have been solved by simply changing one class, many students did just that. The lunchroom had very definite cliques; the popular kids sat in the middle of the room, the rockers/rebels sat in the back of the room nearest the student store and the back exit from the cafeteria. The nerds, or geeks sat in the front of the room nearest the entrance to the cafeteria seemingly the nerds had the most fun during lunch playing “Magic the Gathering", setting up a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, or simply talking about the newest video or PC game. For some reason all the military recruiters were sent to stand near where the nerds stood, to this day I am not sure why but we made friends with them all easily.
“In these free moments violence can erupt, and Calhoun has employed an armed cafeteria monitor, a nice guy in a golf shirt with a gun tucked discreetly into his belt.” (16) At Everett high we had three different lunchroom monitors. The Vice Principle of the school, an Everett Police officer, and a man who was known as the discipline officer, a former history teacher at the school. All three were nice men who looked out for the students and booked no nonsense from the rebels or the popular kids. Everyone was equal to them; however their sense of humor was such that they tended to good-naturally tease the kids who were known to them as having a bad reputation or those of us who had taken one of the discipline officer’s history classes. Our lunches had very few fights and the Police officer almost never needed to be involved the Vice Principle was usually enough to stop anything from happening.
I think that reading over this has shown that high schools are very similar in many ways, but that my experience seems to show that not all high schools are as rigid or difficult to deal with.