PrepTest 107 · Section 2 · Passage 4

What Really Happened to Second Graders at Lunch

Until last year, anyone hoping to write a full history of how the cafeteria rules at Maple Street School really worked out for second graders would have found almost nothing based on the cafeteria's own tray logs. That is a big gap, because the tray logs are the surest way to learn what truly happened to second graders at lunch, rather than what the rules were meant to do or what grownups believed happened. Those last two puzzles can be solved using the menu plans, the principal's memos, and the rule poster, and those papers are what earlier writers of school history mostly read. But those papers can't show how often the second graders' special extra-fruit rule got skipped because older kids grabbed the fruit first, or how often second graders slipped past their no-dessert rule. And beyond the special rules, the papers can't show how second graders fared under the everyday rules everybody shared, like waiting in line. Only counting through piles and piles of logs could even begin to answer that, and hardly anyone has tried.

Why not? The obvious answer is that the logs are a mess. They are in the cook's secret shorthand, there are over four thousand sticky notes, and many are smudged on both sides. But that mess, though it seems to explain the gap, has scared off very few. The truth is that few people ever wanted to write about second graders at lunch at all. Most who wrote about cafeteria rules started out curious about a recipe, a rule, or the menu committee, not about the second graders. So what we know is still patchy, though it is slowly getting better.

The Case of the Unread Complaint Box

The town claimed nobody had studied park-bench complaints because the complaint box was stuffed with soggy, scribbled cards. "Too hard to read, Your Honor," said the town's lawyer. Mr. Whitfield stood and snapped his suspenders. "Hard? Sure. But Mrs. Dabney here read two hundred of those cards in one afternoon, with a magnifying glass and a sandwich." Mrs. Dabney waved her sandwich. "So the mess did not stop anyone," Whitfield went on. "The real reason is simpler. Every report the town wrote was about the benches: the wood, the paint, the budget. Not one started with the people who sat on them." Judge Okafor nodded slowly. "So the box went unread because nobody cared to ask." "Exactly. And we are only now starting to catch up."