School portraits / Lunch in the Castle
At Nobles, Lunch Is in a Castle, at the Quesadilla Bar
A Massachusetts school serves lunch in a building called the Castle. The tour is about the architecture. The students are thinking about the tortillas.
The Castle at Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts, has a quesadilla bar. It is worth knowing this before a visit, because the word "castle" can send a parent's imagination somewhere with tapestries, while the child is already wondering what goes in the tortilla.
The school's dining page lists the full lineup: a hot entrée and sides, soups, composed salads, fresh fruit, and a salad bar, a sandwich bar, the quesadilla bar and dessert, every weekday in the Castle dining rooms. It is a menu designed for a teenager who has opinions and twelve minutes.
More interesting is the clock. "We don't have traditional lunch periods," the school says. Lunch runs from 11 to 1:30, and students eat during free periods in the middle of the day, when they choose. Middle schoolers get a more structured version, with rotating study halls.
Deciding when to have lunch is a real skill. I am forty-eight and have not mastered it. I eat at 10:45 out of anxiety or at 3:20 out of neglect.
At some point the Castle stops being the impressive thing your parents showed you on a tour and becomes the place you left your water bottle. That is when the school is yours.
Nobles also starts the day together, in assembly in Lawrence Auditorium: a song, an outside speaker, a funny video, or a NEDTalk, the school's own version of a TED Talk. "If you miss assembly," one longtime math teacher told the school, "you don't feel like you were at school that day. That's the truth." A graduate from the class of 2018 said that the first time she got up on stage and told her own story, she felt she had made Nobles hers.
For students staying late, there is dinner Monday through Thursday, $5, sign up in advance on the app. Breakfast is $3.
A three-dollar breakfast in a castle. I would enroll for that alone, and I would be the student who signs up for breakfast, sleeps through it, and is charged anyway.
We toured a school with a grand building last fall, with the eldest. The guide pointed out the stained glass. My daughter asked where they ate. The guide pointed to the cafeteria. My daughter looked at the stained glass for the rest of the tour with the face of someone who had already chosen, and the choice was the sandwich bar.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Nobles dining arrangements nobles.edu
- Nobles assembly: graduate perspectives nobles.edu
- Nobles public alumni reviews niche.com