Dinner hall duty is not a pleasant task. Plus it comes around far too often. It’s a total bombardment of
the senses which is dulled by poor acoustics and general fatigue. Scraping cutlery and chairs, screeching
voices, slammed-down trays, burnt toast at break time and chip fat at lunch, rubbish and left-overs blatantly
dropped, and the quick strides needed to reach tables before they are abandoned and left covered in crumbs
and unidentifiable (possibly regurgitated) remains of food. For pupils, the dinner hall is the place to eye
up older boys if you are a Year 9 girl, gossip with your mates, play fight if you are a boy, spend every
last penny on provisions in an effort to last the two hours before the next feeding time, and of course the
number one challenge of splatting the teachers on duty with custard or sticky gunk without them noticing. A
close second favourite activity is to time the teacher’s pacing well enough to desert your table and avoid
taking your tray to the scraping zone or having to wipe down your table.
Although dinner hall duty only lasts 15 minutes or half an hour, this is one of those times that Stephen Hawking needs to investigate, as time stretches painfully into unfathomable dimensions. It’s never this long when you have a cup of tea to drink, and the scorched skin on my tongue is testament to that. And when you’re in need of a desperate dash to the toilet / photocopier / stock cupboard, the time disappears in a flush of a chain or the flash of a photocopier light.
Another problem with dinner hall duty is the effect that it has on the rest of the day. It may just be 15 minutes but the knock-on effect can be felt over and over. Without the respite from the noisy argumentative kids, waves of tiredness begin to lap around during the following hours, and by the final bell of the day the extra strain has caught up. Some schools organise their duties by allocating staff members to days of the week, so you know that every Thursday is Duty Day. Other schools have rotas for the entire year, where your duties are scheduled for a week at a time. Those in the know consult the duties rota as soon as possible and arrange courses or hospital appointments to coincide with duty days or weeks. This is especially tough on colleagues if the duty is done in pairs, as supply teachers forget more often than not to cover duties, or more usually no replacement is scheduled.
Ideally, teachers would be relieved of all duties and a crack team of security experts would be drafted
in to patrol during breaks and lunchtimes, looking menacing in heavy duty food resilient uniforms and slapping
batons into their palms as they marched around the dinner hall. The hall itself would be left sparkling,
meaning that the kitchen staff could concentrate on proper cooking rather than sweeping up after hundreds of
littering hooligans. And I’d have time to grab a cup of tea and not see or hear a child for a whole blissful
ten minutes.
added 1/10/05
© Copyright laws apply to the contents of this website. 2003-2005