Seconds, please

One of the big changes at my new school is that all teachers and students eat in a lunchroom. This is quite rare in Japan--even at the schools where school lunch is served (at many schools, everyone brings their own), students usually eat in their classrooms with their homeroom teacher and the teachers eat in the faculty room. We do have lunchroom ladies (whom I rank below on the faculty hierarchy!), but students and teachers are still responsible for serving eachother and cleaning up after the meal. Homeroom teachers sit at a table with their classes, most of the rest of the faculty sit at a table together. Usually it is the librarian, the school nurse, the lunchroom ladies, one of the other English teachers, a math teacher, the janitor/office lady, and myself. Being the only male of this bunch, they insist that I sit at the head of the table and always dump more food on to my tray, which already has a generous portion of food. The first few days I politely declined and they put it on my plate anyway, so now I politely accept and eat for fear of disappointing them. Soemtimes the principal joins us, but he always makes me eat more as well. Today after finishing everything on my tray, plus another heaping bowl of rice given by the nurse, the librarian asked if I wanted more fish. Stuffed, I declined; but she said "what? you arent hungry like usual today?" and put the fish on my plate. Hai, Itadakimasu!

Hopefully, they will start inviting me to gym class, too.