The Following May Eat: Part One (2005)

1 At the end of each semester, my dear friend and colleague, Cowboy Mitch, (1) offers his class a choice. Standing before the classroom, he lifts his arms and opens his hands, palms up, and assumes the image of a balance scale. Bending to one side and raising one palm he queries: Final and then lowering the raised palm and elevating the other, he offers, party? After a slight pause, he repeats the choice with identical movements: Final exam? Pizza Party? And again: Final exam? Pizza Party? Among the many things that intrigue me about Mitch's choice is the opposition he makes between food and learning. In Mitchell's formulation, the two, eating and learning, are mutually exclusive: we may partake of one or the other. Of course, this may be only Cowboy Mitch's distinction, but we know that classrooms are for the most part, except on rare occasions--usually holiday or birthday parties--completely void of food, save, of course, for the mounds of gum furtively stuck on the bottom of seats and desks. At the River Heights Elementary School in Menomonie, classrooms sometimes maintain snack food for children to partake, though not necessarily when need arises, but rather, at pre-established times. Morning and afternoon milk is also made available. During these meal-time breaks, books and classroom materials are usually put aside, presumably to avoid spillage and property spoilage. Older students--middle and high schoolers--sometimes bring their book bags into the lunchroom-my daughter tells me this is rare--but the converse is not also true--that lunch is carried into the classroom. Gum, candies, beverages, all are usually forbidden in the classroom. The guiding wisdom suggests that there is a safety factor implied in the prohibition, but the separation has a long history in the schools that precedes much of the modern technology which is food phobic. Certainly, the sizes of student desks do not afford space for anything other than the traditional text and notebook that often consume the entire working space. Thus, Mitch's suggestion that one can either engage in education or in eating, but that somehow the two are mutually exclusive, suggests something about more than a particularity of Mitch's classroom. Here, I want to consider the idea of eating in the classroom. More specifically, I want to consider a connection between consumption and working in the classroom and between eating and learning in the classroom in the light of a similar discussion among the Rabbis of the Talmud, who, too, were concerned about a certain relationship between eating and working. For some years now education has been understood from a constructivist perspective. According to this ideology, knowledge is constructed, and our students, like Levi-Strauss' bricoleurs, take building blocks from various and sundry locations and construct their worlds: that construction was deemed education. American schooling (a process quite separate from education) was the attempt to determine and organize the means and matter of that construction. To ensure a certain shape and integrity to the edifice, specific bricks were provided, and certain techniques were valorized--hence, curriculum was invented. To validate learning, testing was implemented ensuring an element of measurement and accountability to students' learning. Each brick could now be identified, counted, and measured and assessed. I would like to offer another metaphor for education today. I would like to suggest that education might also be understood as a consumption. My Webster's Unabridged Dictionary says that 'to consume' means 'to devour' or 'to use up;' and that 'consumption' is a consuming, a wasting away, or a using up [of goods], as compared, say, to the production of same. My OED suggests that 'to consume' and 'consumption' carry destructive connotations: to consume is to use up, to destroy, to burn up or reduce something to invisible products. …