Longer Lunch Shifts

Longer Lunch shifts

                                                By: Abbi Danner

Lunch time is what a lot of students look forward to throughout their day they want to munch on the food they brought or bought. Also tons of students use lunch time to talk to their Bffs and ask about how their day is going and if the volleyball team had won the night before, or a T.V. show they all watch. The lunch shift teachers to tell us to use the restroom and whatever we need to do during the 20 minutes we get to eat our lunches.

20 minutes seems like a whole lot but really it is not. If you are the first dismissed to go line up you are fortunate because you’ll most likely to have the most time to eat and visit. But if you’re the last couple of tables to be dismissed to go through the lunch line you only get less than 7 minutes to eat and if it’s a Wednesday lunch is cut short by just a few precious minutes.

“The rush and stress of today's typical lifestyle might have you downing a meal one minute and heading to a meeting or class the next. If you are eating too fast, however, you might not be giving your brain time to catch up with your body, and the result could be that you eat more than you actually are hungry for. Eating too quickly can cause you to overeat in an effort to quell you appetite. This can cause you to feel too full or uncomfortable after eating quickly. Additionally, eating too fast causes you to take in more calories than you need.” The website http://www.livestrong.com states. It is harder for our digestive system to function properly, resulting in poor digestion, including indigestion and heartburn.

To prevent all of those effects we should have longer lunch shifts, but there are some problems like, extending our day, and taking away learning time and etc. I also have some solutions such as decreasing our passing times by 1 minute and adding another lunch line to give us more time to eat. I really hope people consider this option; they are always trying to make things healthier for us students to eat during school.

To make things healthier we need to improve this problem of not having enough time to eat at a correct pace, so I hope that people consider this as an option. Thanks.

Phone Usage in School

By Riley Dotson

Now, before you all write this off as another desperate plea to have our cell phones out in class, text all day, and not listen to a word the teacher says, hear me out. Most Middle School students at our school have a phone, and that’s just a simple fact of life. I agree with you that they should be limited, and ignoring the teacher entirely over a simple “lol :3” is still intolerable, but I mean to say that they should be allowed at designated times.

We all own cell phones for a reason, and that reason is typically safety. I for one, with my Dad busy at work at home, and my mom working at Lewis, my brother rushing from school to home to practice, me to Football and scouts and Science Olympiad and somehow eking out enough time to practice my trumpet, as well as do my Algebra homework for Mr. List, need my phone to provide some sort of order to my incredibly hectic day. Some people need it because there won’t be anyone home after school, and they need a way to let their parents know that they are okay.

The unfortunate-and unavoidable- catch is that sometimes these scenarios can’t wait until after school, and aren’t present before school, and force people to both abandon their family members and leave them worried, or be sneaky. When I say “sneaky,” I mean when people hide their phone under the desk, or in their binders, or even go to the bathroom to text, and this isn’t an appropriate way to handle the situation either. I have a friend that goes to Kearney High School, and he received a text in class, and the teacher took his phone away. No big deal… Right? Well it turns out that the text was from his boss, and when he didn’t answer, the friend lost his job.  So, in my opinion, something should be done about it.

What I’m suggesting isn’t a free-for-all-electronic-heyday-no-rules rule, but a limited usage rule for phones, sorta like the rules about Kindle Fires and Nooks now, but a little different. The rule for eReaders is that they can be used when work is done, and may be only used for appropriate things, and it could be the same way for phones. Maybe the policy could be that they can only be used when work is done, and if it becomes a distraction, then it gets taken away. Or maybe even like the policy they have at the High School, where they can use them in the halls or at lunch. This is just to present a student’s opinion about a problem that has plagued students since the cell phone was invented, and a friendly suggestion on how it could be resolved. Thank you.