What lies beneath?

Watching human beings eat is as good as any means of gaining amusement and insight...


Some ten years ago, a wise (but not so old) teacher captivated his admittedly captive audience of teenagers with a tale of ... plastic lunch trays.


The school provides its students with a cooked lunch each day. The routine is: they shuffle through the door, take a clean plastic tray from the towering pile, then proceed to fill it with cutlery and food. What's interesting to observe, as Mr E did at that long-ago assembly, is that students are fussy about the state of their plastic tray.


If the tray has been through a few too many washes, the dark brown leaches out, leaving a paler, less desirable version in the stack. Almost without exception, that washed out tray is passed over in favor of a 'normal' one. As if lunch would taste any different ...


I wish I'd thought of this metaphor myself. Wise Mr E drew a clever analogy between lunch tray choices and the 'bigger picture' idea of  acceptance of other people, of avoiding making judgments based solely on appearances.


I told this story to my class of 17 and 18 year olds, as an illustration of how to turn an anecdote into an opinion piece. 


The immediate response was what I least expected: my students were most surprised that - so long ago - OTHER teenagers had behaved in exactly the same way as themselves. As if they were somehow the first to initiate this routine. But that's to be expected, I guess. It's a truism that each new generation of teenagers acts as if it is the first to discover ------ (fill in the blanks)!


But did they get the 'bigger picture'? I'll be hoping for more of those over-washed, under-appreciated trays on the tables next week.

Defiantly so

So, what does a 55 year old school teacher have to offer to the sum of human knowledge? I'm not sure but the temptation to share the occasional thought is too strong to ignore...If nothing else, this will be an exercise in mastering 21st century technology.


I'll start with the basics: Spelling. 


Does it matter? Is it important? Are teachers doing a good enough job? You've probably already seen this:Cn U Read This?

For sure, the brain tells the eye what to see...


The majority of my students, aged from 12 to 18, are not strong spellers. I'm not sure what the answer is, BUT life in 2012 has evolved remarkably from life in the 1950s. I;m not sure that we should be too hung up on the decline of good spelling.


What IS important is to teach students how to use 21st century tools to present their writing at a high standard. Such as word-processing and spell-checking.


One word that consistently causes my students difficulties is DEFINITELY. So, what's the problem, use Spellchecker, you might say. 


The problem with this is the first drop-down option that Spellchecker offers for the mispelt definitely is defiantly. Most young writers will take the unthinking option.


So, "Shakespeare is defiantly one of the greatest writers of all time" or "The character of Atticus Finch is defiantly important in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.


Maybe it's not such a bad word choice after all!