Monday, September 10, 2007

Lunchtime!

In japan, most smaller schools have the students serve the food to each other. They also have to wear an apron, head scarf sort of deal and a mouth cover so's you don't get ya stanky breaf on the food.

Student lunch ladies!

The boys certainly helped out by carrying the food up the stairs to the class room, but i think girls usually serve the food.
Even the boys help

Lunch was soup, rice, pickles and NATO, blech. Nato is some kind of gross bean stuff. Smells awful.
Serving Lunch

So the students sit in their classrooms and arrange their desks in groups according to their social groups and munch on their rice and nato.

This is my lunch uniform.
Lunch Garments

I love this setup for school lunch. Even if the food is bad, you don't have to smell that disgusting cafeteria smell I'm so familiar with. Cafeterias in general are gross, and this way, a teacher only has his or her own class to deal with.

3 comments:

Shaun said...

When you say that students organize according to their "social group" do you mean that they break up into clusters of friends or do they cluster around certain themes? Meaning - if they were all friends the "social groups" could change from day to day but if they grouped according to themes like "we're the techno geeks" and "we're the sports lovers" then these groups would largely stay the same. Obviously the latter groups can be "friends" just like the earlier set I mentioned, so if they broke up into themes then they are much like American schools and American culture. But if they were more like friends in the broader, earlier, sense, then they'd seem kinda different. What are your thoughts? Do the kid's culture over there mirror American youth culture in some common ways? Or do they differ in some important and interesting ways?

Paul Hebert said...

The groups are mainly kids who are close friends. But interestingly no one is left out. This is both a result of teacher intervention and student action. I honestly don't think they would be comfortable if some kid was sitting and eating alone, it would weird them out. So even that weird kid who eats his boggers is sitting with people.

The kids culture is very different from american kids culture. I can't quite describe it yet, but I may do an entry on it later.

Anonymous said...

Paul this is amazing. i miss the poop out of you but i'm excited to hear about your adventures! i love you
love, your sister