Breakfast Duty

One of the requirements of the internship was to spend at least two weeks being totally in charge of the class. Whatever my mentor teacher did, I was supposed to do, on my own, without her help. Sounds hard, but it wasn’t. I love to teach. What was hard was getting to school early enough to do “breakfast duty.” Breakfast is served at 7:00 am sharp to about 175 students. Several teachers take their turn monitoring and guiding the children through the breakfast experience. Here are my top three observations:

1. Southern dining traditions are learned early. Though each meal met the basic food groups, one breakfast meal stood out: Grits with cheese, sausage, and biscuits. I chuckled when I saw the meal being served. Don’t worry if you don’t serve grits at home, your children will learn to eat them at school! And eat them they did, it was one of the most popular breakfast meals. Only breakfast pizza can compete with grits!

2. We throw a lot of trash away. My tour of duty at breakfast fell during Earth Week. How interesting! For quick serving, every food item had its own cup or container, and it all went into the trash can. The Styrofoam trays, the paper containers, the plastic bowls and cups and spoons, the milk cartons all went into the trash. I wonder what we can do differently. Though it may be cost effective to have every thing disposable, wouldn’t it be better to wash the dishes and deposit less trash?

3. We throw a lot of food away. I was simply hurt by the amount of food that hit the trash can. Fruit with one bite missing or even no bites were thrown away. Sometimes unopened milk was thrown away. Not to mention the pounds of leftovers. Now some children ate every bite, breakfast was important to them. Others took a few bites, or played with their food, and then tossed it all away, it wasn’t that important to them. There must be a better way.

When I was in elementary school, and granted it was a long time ago, nothing was disposable. Dishes were washed, milk cartons were turned into crafts and flower pots, and the leftovers were sold to the local farmers to feed their hogs. There was trash, but not as much. We are wasting a lot of resources to be efficient. We are taking shortcuts that make food service easier to operate with less people, but is it being effective?

So it goes with church life. We have become very efficient, and I suspect increasingly less effective. What shortcuts are we taking that might make us less effective? What resources are we wasting in order to be efficient? We must be careful that we do not become so efficient that we forget how to be personal, how to build relationships, how to invest ourselves into others, and therefore miss the God sent opportunities to share our faith in a real way.

Recycle something this week,

AL