The ‘magic’ tray we used in our Young Writers’ Club

There once was a class of writing students who were terribly behaved around food of any kind. After school they acted as if they’d been starved for days, rushing up and edging one another out-of-the-way so they could get at the table laden with bags of Oreos, Chips Ahoy, and Synder’s pretzels. One would imagine they had just come off a 10 day trek on the Gobi desert by the way they ripped open the plastic loops holding the Deer Park water bottles. As they gingerly negotiated the classroom desks getting back to their own, their 13-year-old hands overflowed with eight or ten cookies (Were they hypoglycemic?), three or four pretzels (Were they salt deprived?) Then once seated (and that was a tricky business if they’d pushed their chairs back under their desks) each child stacked and sorted their loot in his or her own way upon the napkin I’d placed there. Some stacked their cookies six high, some in short stacks of two or three. Either way they wiped out the snacks on the snack table within minutes. It was a frantic and chaotic business at the start of each and every club meeting.

Reminding them to share and slow down made absolutely no difference. These young writers were deaf to me and to the other two teachers who coordinated this Young Writers’ afterschool program for middle school adolescents who actually love to write. This love of writing made them anomalies of their Title I middle school. They were the smart ones, the ones who lived and loved to read and write and talk about fiction and poetry with one another. One often overheard them discussing their latest work, “I based this story off the Anime series Sazae-san”. They were a polite and serious group of over-achievers so their uniquely sensitive behavior juxtaposed to their Darwinian behavior when it came to cookies was hard to fathom. Why did they greedily and without regard for one another attack the snacks I brought each week? Were they truly that hungry? Or was it something else?

We teachers tried sending them to the snack table one or two at a time, but this strategy left the last students with the broken bits and only one or two whole cookies a piece. We said over and over again, “Remember your friends are hungry, too. Only take two cookies and two pretzels at a time.” This sort of worked. But as soon as our attention shifted to working with the student writers individually, their club-mates stealthily made their way to the snack table and grabbed as many cookies and pretzels as they could without our noticing. When at last we did notice, we saw that the original two cookies and two pretzels on each student’s desktop had suddenly been replaced with Oreo cookie towers ten high and mountains of fifteen Synder’s thin pretzels. Empty containers tipped sideways their crumbs spilled out on the floor were all that was left behind from the snack invaders.

After many months of watching this weekly drama unfold and our attempts to contain and modify their attacks failing each and every time, I decided to come up with a plan. I wasn’t sure what this plan would be, but I was determined to change this uncivil and uncivilized behavior. But how?

That very weekend of my resolution, I was going to visit and help my father sort out and clean out closets and drawers at his home, the home in which I’d grown up. The home that was crammed full of 50 plus years of stuff. My mother had died a few months earlier, and I was helping my dad sort things out. His desire to ‘clean out’ was his way of mourning and moving through my mother’s passing. They had been married for 60 years. As we worked together on the kitchen cabinets, we came upon the tray cabinet which held 3 dissimilar trays, one circular plastic coated gold leaf, one chipped painted metal, and one clear plexiglass with the initials “SVCC”.

As we worked, my dad often asked, “Do you want this vase?”; “Do you need a cookbook?” “Should we throw this away or give it to Good Will?” So as we looked at the trays, he said, “I want to keep the gold one, but you can have the other two if you want them?” “Okay,” I said, “I think I’ll take both. We could use them at home.” And so I left that Sunday afternoon with two trays, one with chipped paint and the other a brand new looking plexiglass.

The metal cream-colored tray with a chipped scene of red and blue winding flowers and two black unicorns was ancient. When it was new and un-chipped, my mother had used it as our ‘sickroom’ tray when she brought me toast and tea after a night spent with a fever or vomiting or both. We never saw or used it at any other time. The plexiglass tray, on the other hand, was a prize won by my mother at a golf tournament. My mother was crazy about golf and had played for 50 years. Although she was never a great golfer, she was an impassioned one, playing and practicing several times a week. This prize was from the country club at which she had played hundreds of times. It was one of the very few golf prizes she had ever won. In fact, it was one of the best prizes she had ever won.

And so that next week when I awoke as usual at 4:00 AM thinking about work or children or both, it suddenly came to me, an epiphany, “Use a tray for our Young Writers’ club”. Yes – I would serve them their snacks, water, and napkins on a tray. In this way, they would be honored and taught at the same time. I was so excited to try it. But which tray to use? The ones at our home were in constant use, and I wanted to leave a tray at the school which was an hour’s drive away. Surely not the chipped one; these children didn’t deserve a battered looking tray. That left the plexiglass with the initials SVCC aka Saucon Valley Country Club. As an otherwise unmarked, simple rectangle with 2 inch sides (those sides would help eliminate things falling off as I moved about the classroom), it was perfect. I couldn’t wait to try it.

The other two teachers thought the tray was a good idea too and were eager to try it. So that Wednesday, I brought the usual Oreos, Chips Ahoy, pretzels, and water along with the unusual, my tray. As the teachers and I unloaded the snacks, I explained to the children that I would be serving them their snacks on this tray. They watched as I opened the cookie containers and the pretzel bag and placed them in the middle of the tray. Next I stacked the napkins in one corner and lined up the water bottles in the other. It all fit, perfectly! With the two slotted handles, it was easy to carry the tray around the room stopping at each child’s desk and asking, “Would you care for a snack?” That first time, they looked questioningly at me as they stretched out their hand to the cookie container, asking out loud or silently with their eyes, “how many?”   In response, I said, “Let’s take two cookies now, and I’ll be around again a little later.” The effect was instant. These grabbing, gobbling children became 19th century drawing room aristocrats, ever so slowly and carefully taking one or two cookies, a napkin, a pretzel, and water. As if we’d always had our snacks in this way, they spontaneously said, “yes, please” when offered the tray and “thank you” as I moved on to the next student. It was magic to see and hear their transformation from ruffians to refined gentlefolk.

Now eight months later, the tray has worked even better than I’d imagined. It brings out the best parts in our young writers, the civil, caring part. They love the tray and being waited on. Now when the students want more, they ask if I’m coming around again soon. And so this tray won by my mother at a golf tournament at a fancy country club has traveled to a very different place, a place filled with children who love to write. Each week as I set up the tray with snacks, I thank my mother for giving me this great idea. Because of an afternoon spent cleaning out her kitchen cabinets, I discovered a simple and elegant way to change our student’s weekly snack attack. Who’d have thought it?