The Heresy of Assigned Lunch Seats

The first quarter of my sixth grade year was okay. I don't remember a lot of it. Most of the memories come from the lunches. My entire sixth grade class was the biggest. Of course we had the horrible boys who made everything hell. There was this one boy. He and his gang of croonies always threw food at people. So they(the teachers) separated the boys and the girls. The girls on one side of the lunch room, the boys on the other. We were pretty okay with this. Then it got worse. Because everything always gets worse when boys get together with each other. So then we got assigned lunch seats. I mean, on every table, there was a list of six random names. You had to sit with those people until they changed it. It was hell. The whole point was to get us to talk to different people and find things in common with each other. Nope. That didn't happen. Ideas that come from teachers that never had kids never do. So I ended up never talking to anyone at my table. I had other friends. When it was discovered that we could get up and go to another table to talk to our friend at the end of the hour, we did, and we were much happier. They switched names about every two months. I never made any friends that way. Then rolled around seventh grade. We were put in alphabetical order. I was stuck with the two biggest idiots in the entire grade. One was stupid enough in fifth grade to make fun of me by saying to me, "Hey, look! I'm singing the Chinese National Anthem! Ching, Chong, Ping..." And so forth. I told on him. He got in trouble. I've despised him ever since. The other was just an idiot. But I didn't have anything against him until this one day. He was telling me I was eating dog. And just going on and on about it. The other guy joined in. I was so furious I started crying and had to go tell the principal. I wrote a long letter about why I was crying. All he had to do was go sit with the teachers. He didn't get suspended or anything. Now that I'm in high school, we don't have that. We do, however have a Friends of Rachel club. Every Thursday, they try to make us sit with people we have something in common with. For instance, they tried to have us sit at tables with our favorite color. Then it was birth month. Since it wasn't reinforced, we didn't comply.

Look, my point is, teachers don't get that some students aren't comfortable outside their comfort zone. Most students loathe sitting with people they don't know. I know I do. I'm asian, and I was known as the shy asian kid who didn't talk much. I didn't talk much because I know that the people I sat with will make stupid assumptions and judge me by how little they know of where my ancestors lived, and what they know of me. They say I'm an angry person. There's a reason for that. I've had so many people ask me if I speak Chinese. Yes, I do. I'm not going to perform for you like some pet that can do tricks. My bus driver asked me where I came from. I knew she wanted to hear something like "I lived in Beijing, but then I came here, and there are SOOO many opportunities..." Tough luck. I was born in the good ol' U.S. of A., old lady. Not everyone who's diffrent was born somewhere else. These lunch seats just symbolize stuff that people think can do good, but really does more harm. I guess I could say I'm stronger because of it, but that would be a lie.

Now, in my high school, they're trying to force us to make friends, I think that's ridiculous. We form our circle by seventh grade. Where I live, the elementary, the middle, and the high school are all in the same area. You can walk from the high school to the middle school and elementary school and vice versa. Honestly, we all made our friends and our judgements BEFORE high school, and no one is going to break out of that circle to please the teachers. It's like communism. Or dictatorship. These people need to butt out of our lives and get one of their own.