A few years ago, my family took a trip to California during spring break to visit relatives. While staying with my brother-in-law’s family in Davis, I realized just how long a high-school student’s school day really is.

In the morning, my wife and I would wake up at 7 a.m. to chat with our nieces - one a junior, the other a senior - while they shoveled down a quick breakfast. When the girls left at 7:10, we’d go back to bed for an hour or so, then wake back up and make breakfast for our own kids at maybe 8:30. 

Since we were on vacation, we’d enjoy a rare unhurried meal, maybe even read the morning paper. Then we’d take the kids out for a long walk, glorying in the milder weather after enduring a harsh Michigan winter. We might hang out at a park for a while before heading back for lunch at around noon and after that - still exhausted from months of sleep deprivation - I cherished the chance to crash on the couch and take a not insubstantial afternoon nap. 

I’d wake up at three o’clock or so, play with the kids some more, maybe read to them for a while, and my nieces still would not have returned. Shortly after four, they’d finally make it home and then wind down for maybe half an hour before heading upstairs to begin cracking their homework. They’d break for an hour for dinner at around six, then resume working until they went to sleep at about eleven.

Brutal.

I guess when I’m at school and churning through the hours, strategizing from moment to moment about how to best transition from one activity to the next, I don’t really think about how long the day might feel from a student’s perspective. It took getting away and experiencing how much time actually elapses while my nieces are at school for me to really understand the length of their day. When I returned to teaching the following week, I did so with a renewed sense of empathy, a little more sympathy for that kid whose eyelids start to droop when I grow enchanted by my own marvelous insights and run my mouth in excessive lecture mode.

I bring up this mini-epiphany because something similar happened last Friday when I met a couple of students for lunch. We’re currently working on writing group poems in class and, having inserted myself into a group, I thought my groupmates and I could bond a little if we shared a meal off-campus and that we’d then trust each other in a more meaningful way, allowing for greater risk-taking in our writing. 

We agreed on a burrito place not far from Pioneer and we ended up being the first people at the counter to order food in what was in that moment an empty restaurant. Within seconds, 30 to 40 other kids from Pioneer had crowded in line behind us. After paying for our meals, we sat in a booth and I dug into my chicken quesadilla.

I’m not a slow eater, and I didn’t feel like my quesadilla-chomping pace was particularly lethargic as we hashed out a few ideas amid a boisterous atmosphere as the other Pioneer kids got their food and also began to eat. The burritos my students ordered disappeared almost instantly and, after I spent a couple of minutes quizzing them about their college plans for next year, I looked down at the remaining third of my quesadilla and realized we were now once again sitting in a quiet and empty restaurant. All the other Pioneer students had already plowed through their food and left.

The Pioneer High School lunch period is from 10:46 a.m. until 11:27. Forty-one minutes. Subtract a dozen of those minutes to account for getting from class to car and from car to class and you’re talking roughly 29 minutes for a kid to drive to a local eatery; order, receive and inhale his food; and drive back if he doesn’t want to be late for his next class and suffer the consequences of a tardy sweep. Car accidents are not infrequent.

From my standard perch at my desk, or at the photocopier in the English office, I knew the lunch period at Pioneer passed quickly, but it took my experiencing what the students go through for me to really understand the insanity of the situation. From a digestive standpoint, it can’t be healthy to cram food down one’s throat so hurriedly and it’s certainly not relaxing, certainly not conducive to inculcating the kind of life-long wholesome eating habits advocated by people like Alice Waters.

The obvious solution is to simply stop allowing students to leave campus for lunch. That’s the direction Pioneer appears to be headed. But the matter deserves more thought. The school day is long and it makes total sense to me why kids would relish the chance to escape campus in the middle of it, even if it’s only for a whirlwind half-hour. Isn’t it possible that a longer (safer and healthier) lunch period would allow greater opportunity for kids to rejuvenate themselves, thereby leading to enhanced learning in their afternoon classes?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I know it’s worth asking. I know I still feel cheated because I suspect that chicken quesadilla probably tasted pretty good, but tearing through the last third of it was such a blur, I honestly don’t remember.

** NOTE ** Speaking of rejuvenating … The Ann Arbor Book Festival is offering a special fall Writer’s Conference on Saturday, Nov. 14 at Pioneer High School. A spectacular slate of instructors includes Eileen Pollack and Michael Byers from the University of Michigan's #2 nationally ranked MFA program in Creative Writing, as well as local poets and incomparable workshop leaders Keith Taylor, Scott Beal and Susan Hutton; and I’ll be offering a seminar on how to present/perform your work in public. The day’s a great value at $95, including three workshop sessions, lunch, a panel discussion on publishing options and a participant reading. $50 for students. To register and/or glean additional info, go to aabookfestival.org.

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.