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.