silent lunches were so….weird. like the entire cafeteria was expected to be quiet and it usually was a punishment for something super dumb tbh like i remember a bunch of kids popped plastic bags one day so we got silent lunch for a week and everyone was just….sitting there all quiet. it was duuuumb
the only funny part tho was sitting around ur friends and all of u trying VERY VERY HARD not to laugh when someone makes a face or something like that, or trying to sneak into the bathroom so u can talk…even then tho fuck silent lunches
ppl keep going “what the FUCK is a silent lunch why would schools have that” and im like. genuinely so forgetful abt the fact that silent lunches are one of those american public school things that literally dont make any sense
I went to public school in America, and it was always loud as HECK in the lunch rooms, this is not a universal experience, and I’m a little baffled and concerned???
Usually (in my experience anyway), “silent lunches” happened when the teachers and/or lunch workers forced all the students to sit in silence during lunch as punishment for being too loud and “disrupting” the other students who weren’t at lunch at the time. Sometimes they would even turn off all the lights, which made it difficult to eat.
I never quite understood the utter OUTRAGE from teachers and lunch workers when it would get “too loud” during lunchtime. Literally, the reason it was so loud is because the sounds of children talking at normal levels to each other echoed off the walls and seemed to be amplified when you got 50 or more kids together at one time. It’s not like the kids were screaming or even talking loudly on purpose. We were never doing anything wrong – literally just having normal conversations with each other during one of the ONLY times we could (because we would get in trouble for talking during class). Yet the teachers would get SO INTENSELY ANGRY they would literally scream at us to be quiet or face the consequence of sitting through a silent lunch.
Once, in middle school, they made a boy-girl seating chart (to make it so friends couldn’t sit together), forced us to sit in silence, and turned off the lights. They treated us like we committed a crime when we were deemed too loud.
Also, in elementary school, they installed this giant stoplight contraption that detected noise levels. If the noise got to a certain level of loud, the light would move to yellow, and if it went beyond that, it would go to red and blare a really loud siren (so much for keeping lunch quiet…). If the siren went off three times during a lunch period, the lights went off and talking was prohibited.
American schools are a living HELL.
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