This year Wednesday lunches are five minutes shorter than all other lunches throughout the week. The five minutes taken from lunch have been added to Wednesday mentorship, making our travel mentorships an hour and five minutes long.
With change comes opinions, so here’s what Lincoln thinks about longer mentorship and shorter lunch.
Several students brought up the use of lunch as a time for homework and teacher consultations. Emma Simmons (12) said, “With Wednesday being really short, sometimes people want to go talk to a teacher or something and I feel like it’s not enough time to do [so].”
When discussing the longer mentorship, Nell MacGregor (10) said, “I don’t think five minutes [more] really does much, because you already have an hour. And if you had to do something you could always just do it during lunch too, because you can go anywhere.”
Her statement was echoed by several other students, who felt five more minutes of mentorship wouldn’t have a big impact — but five minutes less of lunch would.
Adawnte Holmes (10) mentioned that longer lunches — even just by ten minutes — would be beneficial to students “We put all this time and work into these classes, and they cram a bunch of things in anyway. So having more time to just think and socialize, I feel like that’s better.”
When asked if he thought shorter lunches may have repercussions, he said that he thought clubs might be affected. “[BSU] had a potluck this Tuesday, and we [set] things up, and then we had people come, and people were eating and having fun. But it’s just such an insignificant amount of time to do something that’s meant to be so community building.”
“It kind of hurts a bit when you put a lot of effort into things and then you’re not really able to express it and get 100% out of it, when you only have thirty minutes and it takes fifteen or twenty minutes just to get everything situated.”
Dan Wallent (12) also felt that longer lunches would be beneficial. “I would much rather have it as part of lunch because I feel like I can have more freedom with my time during my lunch break.”
Wallent’s sentiments were shared by many. In a poll taken as to whether students would prefer those five minutes to be a part of lunch or of mentorship, only 3 of 28 students (from an even distribution of each grade) said they would rather keep that longer mentorship.
So how do Lincoln students feel about those extra five minutes? Well, they wish they were a part of lunch. Though many students appreciate travel mentorship, they feel that an hour is long enough. They would rather have five more minutes of lunch, to use for studying, clubs, time with friends, or, well, eating lunch.
