School portraits / A cafeteria debate · 2015
The delegation would like some hummus
At UNIS, the cafeteria redesign had reached the people expected to eat in it.
The United Nations International School had rearranged its cafeteria. Philip Kuhel thought the lines were worse, but approved of the extra pasta line. A hungry person can hold both positions without feeling any obligation to resolve them.
You may dislike the system and still wish to be more efficiently supplied with carbohydrates.
It was autumn 2015. Student reporters Aysu Haker and Lydia Leiber were asking people how the changes were working out. Another student, Sarah Blau, thought the lines were moving better.
Imagine being the parent receiving these two accounts. You would like to establish whether lunch is going well. The witnesses have seen the same lunchroom and returned with different lunchrooms. This is good preparation for asking your child how school was.
The reporters also asked cashier Sabita Singh. The new computer system, she explained, required eight steps to process a meal.
Eight. A queue can look like a failure of manners until you ask the person at its far end what they have to do. You can move the furniture. You can explain the arrangement. Somebody still has to get through the buttons before the next hungry person can become a finished transaction.
This is a useful sort of school newspaper to have around. A teenager can become astonishingly thorough when investigating an inconvenience that stands between them and eating. Parents tend to meet this ability when the teenager discovers that “nearly ready” was not an accurate description of dinner.
Theater teacher Kiara Downey liked the salad bar and wanted daily hummus. The report was broadly positive.
A grown-up had managed to enter the discussion with an improvement that could be put on a plate. This seems a promising way to conduct a meeting.
The school’s name can make a parent picture a future diplomat. It is comforting to picture the earlier version: someone who has listened to more than one person, considered the evidence, and would now quite like to eat.
Try to remember this when that same child raises an objection at your own table. You cannot encourage independent thought all afternoon and expect unanimous approval of the vegetables.