“Are we actually doing this?”

I’m sitting in Johnny’s Year 9 Science class (a perk of living on site) with his six Chinese students, and it’s just dawned on them that this is not a simulated project. They’re really creating change within the school. I love this moment. As Johnny launched the project one of the first comments was “oh yeah, they do this every year” in response to the Science Health topic. Nope, not like this. Slowly they begin to get excited, they’ve been given the challenge of making the school a healthier place for the students and boarders. The big advantage of having six kids in a class is team meetings take on a whole new level of authenticity. The team quickly broke the investigation into two parts – investigating the school canteen and developing an exercise program. One of their deliverables is also a very cool image task, but we’ll get back to that.

In the interest of keeping this concise, lets focus on the former. Skip forward a few weeks and the students have arranged to visit the kitchen to witness it for themselves. This was a very cool moment, walking in behind the scenes and seeing how the kitchen prepares everything on mass: feeding staff and students three meals a day. A quick huddle once we were back outside revealed we were all pleasantly surprised: they bake the bread fresh daily, no MSG is used and everything appears to be prepped on site from scratch. Not what we’d expected. However, the students still feel there is too much oil in their food and not enough vegetables. These are the two aspects they want to pursue and will arrange to meet with the manager to present their case for change.

I just love this project, we all live here and get most of our food from the canteen. What could be more authentic than the chance to control what goes into your body? Healthy body healthy mind, right?