Campus Dining Options Leave Students Unsatisfied

by Ashlee Green, Ross Fox, Brandon Borque, Megan Hawkins and Catherine Langley Hungry? Why wait? Well, if you are on a meal plan then you just might have to. Here at Louisiana State University, if you live in the dorms you are required to have a meal plan. Students are experiencing difficulties satisfying their dining needs with a ranging variety of problems. Students have voiced their concerns for these problems. We have taken a survey to analyze this phenomenon. Through these surveys we have been able to obtain and conduct a probable solution. A potential petition, as well as a strong student voice, to the LSU administration could help rectify the problems associated with the meal plan and dining hall system. Louisiana State University offers an array of different meal plans. Most of those offered are for students who live on campus, whether it is in the dorms, or on-campus apartments. There are definitely some problems in this system. LSU students, particularly freshman living on campus, are required to have a meal plan. Most students have experienced problems. In a survey taken of one hundred on-campus freshman, 41% found major flaws in the LSU dining system. The average cost of a LSU meal plan is $817.09, ranging from $500 to $1,300 per semester. Most of these plans contain a certain number of meals at the dining hall, as well as Paw Points to be used in the union. There are a number of problems that students complain about including: time availability, closed on the weekends, too expensive, run out of food, and not much variety. The two biggest problems found were time availability and the fact that the dining halls were closed on the weekends. Dining Halls operate from Monday morning to Friday morning. Freshman Andra Hode says, I can never eat lunch or breakfast at Highland dining hall because I have class straight through 10:30-1:30. I dont think it is fair for me to schedule my classes

around the dining hall. Many students surveyed said they had problems with going to a dining hall, and it being closed at a normal operating hours. Highland, one of the three dining halls, closes for dinner at seven oclock, while many classes run until eight. Also, so me people are not ready to go eat dinner at 6:30 every night. Weekends seem to cause big problems for on-campus freshman. All dining halls are closed on weekends, not even serving dinner on Friday nights. Some meal plans transfer over to Tiger lair, where you can vouch for a limited meal or use your Paw Points. There are limited choices at Tiger lair; usually only 3-5 places are open. If you choose not to eat at Tiger lair, you are forced to purchase seven meals from Friday to Sunday night. This can become quite expensive for an unemployed college freshman on a budget. It can be worse for those students who do not have transportation. What are they expected to do? Another issue is the fact that many restaurants near campus, such as Roly Poly, are being torn down. This limits our choices even more considering those who were once able to walk to buy food wont be able to any longer. Students paying over a thousand dollars a semester should have more options. For almost $2,000 a year, students sho uld eat at their leisure, not the universitys. There have been complaints that sometimes the dining halls will run out of food, or stop serving food before the specified time. Jordan DeFrank said, I go to Highland for breakfast, but many times I have gon e at nine and they are out of everything. It is so frustrating. Meals can become quite redundant at the dining hall. They mainly serve the same foods: pizza, tacos, hamburgers, jambalaya, and a salad bar. These problems are a large concern for on-campus students. We are here to learn, the last thing on our mind should be Where is my next meal coming from? The solution to this problem is quite simple and very obvious. The hours and availability, as stated earlier, are not sufficient, so our group has come up with some solutions that could

possibly solve or at least better the situation.Extending dining hall hours on weekday nights, opening the dining halls on weekends, allowing take-out/doggie-bags, and having the campus mini-mart open 24 hours a day, are all potential solutions. With these improvements, students have more flexible eating times and the ability to have more food available without having to go elsewhere to spend their much needed money. Take-out would be a great addition to meal plans. Students could get food to go when time is limited, and they would be able to take food back to the dorm for later consumption. These possible solutions could greatly improve LSUs dining services and make them more convenient for students. We have come up with many ways to put our solution into action. The first thing to do is survey the students. The survey however needs to be much larger than the one we made. Our survey was only of 100 students. For the Universitys survey to be effective they would need to survey almost all the students who live in the dorms or have meal plans. They could ask the students for their input, and they could develop a dining system that would benefit both the school and students. Another way to put our solution into action would be for the students to form a petition and have people sign it. In the petition, the students could state the problems they have with the dining system and their ideas to change it. Like the survey, the students would need signatures from a large number of people. In the petition, the students could suggest that the school hire more people to run the dining halls so that they could stay open longer. The students could also propose that a 24hr mini-mart be opened on campus so food could be purchased all of the time. Another suggestion in the petition would be to allow the dining halls to have take-out boxes (limited to one box per student). This would help the students who dont have time to go sit down and eat; it would allow them to at least run in and grab food to put in their rooms for later.

It is obvious that LSU meal plans suffer significant flaws that narrow students options of when, what, and where to eat. In order to eat on weeknights, students must make it a priority to be in the cafeteria fairly early (before 7:00 p.m.) to eat. Worst of all, on weekends students are abandoned by the meal plans, and left to find other means of food. What these students need is a proposal that will allow the cafeterias to stay open longer on weeknights and open for service on weekends. This proposal will not be easily met; it will take strong numbers of students voicing their concerns for this current problem that plagues them. This problem can be dissolved if LSU students collaborate to better the meal plan system.

Works Cited DeFrank, Jordan. Personal Interview. 27 November 2005. Hode, Andrea. Personal Interview. 25 November 2005. Horwitz, Jamie. "Following the Food: Where Students Eat." Chronicle of Higher Education 25 Mar. 2005. Academic Search Premier. Middleton. 2 Dec. 2005

A Proposal to Make a Collage That Will Eliminate the Lowest Quiz Grade
In 1912, Pablo Picasso, an avid painter of nature and still life, tore part of a makeshift tablecloth and glued it to his painting, Still Life with Chair Caning, and thus, by adding different items to aid his painting, he began the art of collage making. (Pablo Picasso Still Life with Chair Canning). A collage is simply a group of objects arranged together to create a complete image of an idea, theme, or memory. For example, David Modler created a collage called Big Bug to represent the irony that is the importance of insects to our natural world in comparison to their size. The bug in the image is the smallest feature of the collage yet it is to be viewed as the most important aspect (Modler, David). All these parts of a collage collaborate together to create a unifying theme or message and can be used as a helpful tool in education. I propose that each student make an artistic collage that will be presented to the class and will symbolize the context, audience, setting, structure or any key ideas we have been talking about in class of any one of the readings that we have read this semester. The collage project should then allow the student to drop the lowest quiz grade he has for the entire semester. The students will have one week from the announcement of the project to complete the collage and prepare a presentation for it. Each student must choose one reading that we have done so far or will read in the future, and no two students may choose the same work. Conflict with students wanting to present the same work will be resolved by a first come first serve basis. The students will be given a rubric with the exact requirements of the project and what the purpose of the project is. I will make the rubric myself and submit it for approval, or we can use the rubric that I have attached. After all the presentations have finished, the lowest quiz grade of the semester is dropped. 1. Making a collage would allow the students to think and inspect the readings and ideas visually (Rodrigo, Collage), thus giving them another perspective, or possibly clearing up any misconceptions and confusions they had about a work when we were just discussing it in class verbally. A collage provides the opportunity for revision of a certain work and would certainly help to clear up any topics in the readings that might come up on the final exam or a future test, via a visual and more creative method. If a student received a bad grade on a quiz because they did not understand the reading, the collage would give the student an opportunity to go back to the reading and understand it, or to read ahead and grasp concepts that might be useful to present to the class before the class does the reading. A collage would allow the student to become familiar with the work

2.

3.

in a visual way and give them an opportunity to understand the main themes, topics, and ideas of a work, even one we might not have read yet. Since a collage would be like giving the student an opportunity to go back and review a subject and at the same time would resemble preparation for a presentation, the time and effort required to go back and re-read a work as well as prepare the collage creatively would be worthy of the replacement of the lowest quiz grade. Our course mentor said that this project would be a nice feature to the class because, just like any play is better seen than read, the collage will allow students to get the visual aspect behind a work and help them to grasp the ideas better. Past visuals that we have used in class to describe scenes from our readings such as The Tempest and the Odyssey have greatly helped me to understand some of the ideas of the stories. For example, I always pictured the cyclops as a nasty, vile creature, but after some of the fuzzy drawings on the board done by some of my peers, I imagined and understood that he could in fact be a gentle creature that was just angered by Ulysses trespassing and blinding him. I could not have seen that perspective of the story had it not been for some of the more innocent visuals on the board. Finally, I have discussed with the students in our class about the idea of a collage replacing the lowest quiz grade and the overwhelming majority agreed to the idea. Since a collage will be representing a quiz in this proposal, it will be an optional assignment. Just as a quiz is almost always optional based on class initiation of discussion, the collage will also be optional based on similar student effort parameters. The students who do not want to do a collage can choose door number 2 and take a quiz that would be created by the teachers and/or myself. This quiz can be used to make the total number of assignments for each student in the class even, and may or may not be graded based on the professor's discretion. The first goal of my collage proposal is that it will give students a chance to be creative and step outside the boundaries of classroom discussion. They can use their imaginations to find a way to creatively put together a collage that will help the class as well as themselves to better understand the readings we had to read so far. A second goal of my proposal is that the time and effort put into making the collage and presenting it in front of the class will equal the worth of dropping the lowest quiz grade. Because this collage requires the creator to examine the context, audience, setting, structure of any one of the readings, it is essentially like a quiz itself, which includes questions on similar topics. The literary work that a student chooses create a collage on will determine how much time is necessary to fully complete the project. One week to create a collage should give each studentno matter what reading they choose to doample time to create a presentable and educational collage for the class.

In terms of tangible resources, this project is not very demanding. A simple poster or a series of photographs or drawings assembled neatly together by the student will be about as resourcefully demanding as this project gets. In addition, a few hours of class time will need to be allocated in order to present the collages. If each student takes at least five minutes to present the total time needed for the presentations will be 1 hour and 15 minutes. The presentation day(s) and time(s) can be discussed by the class as a whole. The rest of the resources needed are already available: The readings are all on ANGEL if a student needs to refer back to them Craft supplies are readily available

As a good planner and organizer I made a rubric that is specific enough to give the students a good idea of what they should be doing for the collage. The rubric can be made available upon your request. In addition I can also come up with a quiz if there are students who want to opt out of the collage project. I can talk to the class and come up with a good presentation time and date for everybody. I would volunteer myself to hold an early presentation session a few days before the due date so the others can get an idea of what their collage could look like and why they can benefit from the project. I will make myself available to the class if they have any questions about the proposed project.

A collage will allow students to understand visually a reading or topic in a reading that they may have been confused about. The project is a fun and creative way to get students to think about a reading more in depth as well as review for future exams. As a result of the effort and time put into the collages, the students should be allowed to drop their lowest quiz grade in the semester.

Works Consulted Modler, David. Big Bug. Photograph. Kronos Art Gallery. Web. 12 Oct. 2011 "Pablo Picasso - Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)." Lenin Imports. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. Rodrigo. "Collages." Web 2.0 Toolkit. 11 Mar. 2009. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.