I Stopped Eating in Front of the Marking Pile and Lost the Afternoon Slump
For years my lunch was eaten one-handed over essays. Moving it to a different room turned out to matter more than what was on the plate.
Teachers have a strange relationship with lunch. Ours lasts thirty-five minutes on paper, but most of us spend it supervising, answering emails, or doing what I did for about twenty years: eating a slice of bread with brown cheese with one hand while marking essays with the other.
By two o'clock every afternoon, I felt like a phone with five percent battery. I blamed age, the dark winters, the students. Last year I tried something small, and the afternoons changed more than I expected.
The experiment
The rule was simply this: I would eat lunch away from my desk, in a different room, without marking, for one whole term. I did not change what I ate. Same packed lunch, same coffee. Only the place and the attention changed.
The school has a small, rather shabby room on the second floor that used to be a music practice room. It has two chairs, a window that looks out at the mountain, and a radiator that clanks. Nobody uses it. I claimed it.
The first week felt wasteful
Sitting and only eating felt almost indulgent. I kept thinking of the forty essays waiting downstairs. On the first day I lasted eleven minutes before going back. On the second, fifteen.
By the end of the week I was sitting for the full twenty-five minutes, looking at the mountain, eating slowly, and occasionally just closing my eyes.
What I noticed
I am describing only my own experience. But within about three weeks, the afternoon slump faded. Not completely, but noticeably. By two o'clock I still had energy for my last double lesson, which is always with the most restless class.
I also realised I had been eating more than I thought. When I ate while marking, I would finish my lunch and then, without noticing, eat the biscuits from the staffroom tin. Eating with attention, I felt full sooner and the biscuits lost their appeal.
My marking did not suffer either. In fact it got faster. Doing it after a real break, I was quicker and more decisive about grades than when I had been half-chewing and half-reading.
Bringing others in
After a month, a younger colleague, a maths teacher named Eirik, asked where I disappeared to at lunch. I showed him the music room. Now he comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we have an agreement that we do not talk about work. We talk about mountains, his new baby, the book I am reading. Sometimes we do not talk at all.
What I keep coming back to
There is no special trick here. I did not discover a superfood or a technique. I just stopped treating a meal as something to get through while doing something else.
It is easy to think that the efficient thing is to combine tasks, and in many parts of life it is. But my body seems to know the difference between being fed and being refuelled on the move. I spent twenty years running on the second. I have no intention of going back.
