The Lunchroom [Sunset Observer #50]

February 10, 2017 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

…By Whitney Farmer
@farmer_whitney (Twitter/FLICKR) or farmerwhitney (Instagram) and whitney.farmer.146 (Facebook)
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Un Pop Culture

Mayra posted a picture from Finland where she is a Fulbright Scholar of a lunch that is served in an elementary school. This darling friend who spoke Spanish until she started kindergarten and now has a Master’s degree in ESL is there through this sunless winter to find out why the Finnish schools are said to be the best in the world, and to learn what – if anything – can be replicated in the unsavory schools of SoCal.

The lunch offered with silverware and a real plate on what looked like a bamboo tray could have been in a restaurant ad: A perfect portion of fresh greens at 8:00 paired with a scoop of a perfectly browned casserole at 2:00, a glass of milk served in glass, and what looked like a thin crisp piece of flatbread. Mayra was told that students are treated like Goldilocks and are given just enough and not too much, and that everything is done with a goal of sustainability. From what I saw, only the napkin would add to the trash heap.

She was also told that teachers eat their lunch with the students, that breaking bread with their charges is part of their job responsibilities.

This alone could revolutionize our public education system. I am convinced that something spiritual happens when people share meals together. At least, we become more like each other through devouring the same food.

I remember needing to talk with my teacher, Ms. Wyatt of Centennial Elementary School, once at lunch. I carefully knocked on the door of the lunchroom, knowing that I was intruding and wanting to be anywhere else. When the door opened, I remember not going beyond the threshold of the darkened cave where the grown-ups looked at me without smiles from the room that had cigarette smoke billowing out, trying to jump into my lungs. Ms. Wyatt came to the door and told me whatever it was that I was supposed to be told, and I gratefully left to go back on the playground and into the sunshine.

During a parent-teacher conference, Ms. Wyatt told my Mr. and Mrs. Farmer that she had corrected one of my reports during lunch in that lunchroom, and that it had made her colleagues sick to their stomachs. It was because of the cover.

The report was on Charles R. Drew, a surgeon who had revolutionized how blood donations were processed and stored which led to hundreds of thousands of lives being saved during World War II. On the cover of the report, I had pasted a full color picture of an open heart surgery mounted on an elegant black border of construction paper. I had found the picture in a medical journal, pulled from a moldy pile of many that were left over when a clinic was demolished in an empty lot near where my sister Holley and I rode our bikes. We would spend hours sifting through the fascinating medical debris before we decided what items we would bring home. It occurred to me just two days ago that we definitely were accidently handling pathogens.

Inside the report, I had also included a miscellaneous collection of diagrams of other surgeries. All of these I clipped from the least-moldy journals, mostly black and white sketches unlike the spectacular full-color prize that I put on the cover that I was certain would earn me a ‘A’. The rest of the sketches I decided to add in case I needed to perform any of the procedures in the future unexpectedly. In that event, it would be nice to have a diagram. The eyeball one looked the grossest to me, but I thought that I could be brave enough if the need arose. The vasectomy was a complete mystery to me because I didn’t know what testicles were. But I included it, just in case.

I only got a B+ on the report and was crushed. It was because I hadn’t discovered the controversy surrounding my subject’s death in the tiny school library where kids used to go and study before smart phones made us forget how to concentrate.

After revolutionizing medicine, Dr. Drew resigned in protest from the Red Cross because of its refusal to treat donations the same regardless of race despite no rational scientific basis for segregating the supply. He was a ‘Negro’ as well as a ‘Surgeon’.

In 1950, he died as a result of injuries from a car wreck near Tuskegee, Alabama. The legend states that it might have been because there weren’t enough Black-donated supplies in the area for a transfusion to help him recover from trauma-induced shock, or that he wasn’t given care rapidly enough because in that area of Alabama there were limited numbers of Negro beds in hospitals. One of the victims in the car crash who survived said that Dr. Drew would have died from the shock of his wounds anyway. But regardless, this controversy wasn’t included in any textbooks in my school. And an education is only going to be as good as the quality of what the kid devours. Like a good meal with fresh vegetables and shared with a teacher instead of something packaged by a corporation: garbage in, garbage out.

Truth in, truth out. It’s the only way any of us can get an ‘A’. And ‘A’ doesn’t stand for ‘alternate’.
Quote of the Blog, from me: BTW, HaPpY VALENTINE’S DAY! Hope that you learn ALOT!

Picture courtesy of the medical journal (sweet!) Medical News Today article “Open Heart Surgery: What to Expect” from Markus MacGill.
For the archive of my previous Un Pop Culture blogs, click here.