To Snack or Not To Snack in the Classroom?

 
My time has come. It was a very long ride of not ever thinking about my weight and there was even a spell of having to eat to keep my weight up. Then came "Oh, look! I have curves!" when I looked in the mirror, which was amusing at first. Now, not so much. My time has come to lose weight. 

I tried to act surprised when I stepped on the scale at my recent medical appointment. "Well, what do you know! Look at that, will you!" But I knew it was coming. My doctor recommended the Whole30 plan with tremendous enthusiasm and first-hand experience, as she has been on it several years. (She looks fabulous, by the way.) 

The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom by Melissa and Dallas Hartwig is a heavy book that Amazon Prime got here lickety split. With the exception of the many recipes that make up the later half of the book, I have read all the rules, regulations, advice, guidelines, explanations and plans and am ready to begin on Monday. 

In a nut shell -- which is important, because you do keep it very simple and you do eat a lot of nuts -- you follow a very strict diet for 30 days and then reintroduce foods after that and see how they affect your body and your weight. The basics: no sugar, no alcohol, no dairy, no grain, no legumes, no exceptions. Losing excess weight is a side benefit, as the diet is really intended to target your gut bacteria and the inflammatory response, which my developing osteoarthritis and my skin issues will hopefully thank. 

I have heard that with any good diet should come advice on lifestyle changes and rethinking relationships with food consumption. The Whole30 book devotes a great deal to this and as I read, I came across something that made me think about my students and my growing aversion to snacking in the middle school classroom and had to write about it here

I have kept my classroom snacking disdain under wraps for a while now because I do not want to ever become that old persnickety teacher with the perpetual scowl. (If I do, put me out to pasture). But I have found allies in Melissa and Dallas Hartwig on the issue, so let's talk about it. 

The current rational for having students snack sometime between when they arrive (at our school it is 7:30 am) and when they get to lunch (11:20 am for our 7th graders) is two-fold. First, many 13-year-olds say they don't eat breakfast. And second, even if they did eat breakfast, they need to eat again before lunch because their metabolisms are high, their blood sugar drops, or they are simply growing so fast that the food needs to keep going in.

All of these are true. Most of my students say they are STARVING all the time and so the crumply-bagged snacks and small plastic ware containers from home enter into the classroom. Kids eat and we go on learning without much incident most of the time.

If you walked into our classroom during the middle of the school year, you wouldn't really notice the issue. That's because it takes a lot of management from my end to get there.

There is the snack-begging to control. At some point, a student will stroll in with a Family-Sized box of Cheez-It crackers tucked under his arm or a Picnic Day Extravaganza-Sized bag of SmartFood balanced on top of her books, and it turns into a feeding frenzy. 

"Can I have some?" The cries erupt. Hands are outstretched. Chairs go flying. And there's me in the center saying, as I so often do, "What's happening?" 

It's all fun and games until someone calls out, "Where's the broom?"

So management has to step in. That's me. "Here. Napkins. Pour out what you will eat and what you want to share at your table, then put the rest in your locker." Sometimes that directive in itself turns into a tussle.

The detritus of snacking is a problem too. I have to remind students often to take care of their trash because once the snack has been eaten, the wrappers and the small plastic ware that once contained them, are no longer within the vision of the student. It's as if it no longer exists in their physical realm. Many simply don't see their own wrapper.

Others do see it but are sneaky. Rather than walk to the bin to dispose of the trash, they invent some impressive ways of hiding it. There's always origami. I've found cranes made out of Cool Ranch Dorito bags and endless other shapes and bags folded and jammed into unusual places around the room. One that gets me every year is the small, strategically-placed plastic container aligned on a book shelf in front of a book spine of the same color as the lid. It usually hides for quite a while until the residue on the inside of the translucent part begins to decompose and change color and then the gig is up.

Aside from the management part, I am more concerned about why kids are so hungry and the choices of food that are available to them for snacking and for meals. Most of the snack choices I see on a daily basis are not healthy and lunch portions and the quality of the food not so good. So are kids really STARVING all the time?  Well, technically not starving but they certainly are hungry and in need of nutrition.

The authors of Whole30 are not fans of snacking and here's why. They believe snacking between meals can disrupt the normal hormonal functions which then increase the feeling of being hungry more often which forces you to eat more snacks and not enough at meal times. They advocate eating three or four full meals and increasing the quality and quantity of each meal, rather than snacking if you feel hungry. They emphasize eating in each meal more protein and more fats (yes, fats -- good fats) to help the hunger. 

With all the growing and hormones flying around in middle school, and the obvious fact that a classroom should be a place of learning, shouldn't we be focusing more on the quality and quantity of meals and not encouraging snacking during class? Can we ever imagine a school where meals of high-quality protein and a fabulous variety of organic vegetables and grain dishes are served in a way that truly nourishes students so they do not feel so hungry?

I don't know what the solution is within the reality of what I see right now. I do know that students are rushed in the morning. I do know that young adolescents would mostly prefer to start school later (which would give them more time perhaps to eat a larger breakfast). I do know that some students do not have food in their homes or a parent who is watching over their nutrition. And I do know that time for lunch, as well as the school lunch program, are limited. 

So they will continue to snack in the classroom for now; I won't. And when it comes to the larger issue of student nutrition, I'll follow Ghandi's advice: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Over the summer I'll learn some more about this Whole30 idea and come back in September, ready to manage the student snacking in my classroom,  a little more slim and a little less persnickety.