Old School (plays)

Earlier this week, my nephew featured in his primary school's play, called "Showtime At Sea".
It was everything you'd expect from a bunch of junior school age children, and more! The funniest part was a little number with a classroom dressed up as fairy penguins, complete with little tuxes and top hats (meanwhile I hope the wardrobe department managed to fix it so that their hats actually stayed on for the whole act)!

It made me think back to some of the beautifully tragic plays that I featured in back when I was around his age.
I remember one year that was particularly awful. All of the kids in Grades 5 and 6 were allowed to put on little plays in honour of Nutrition Week. We were given "carte blanche" to perform whatever we wanted, so long as it had to do with nutrition. The two classes each broke up into groups of six and set to work. It took us about two or three weeks to set it all up (scripts, costumes, props, etc.) and at the end, we performed them in front of the rest of the school.

Well.
Instead of about a dozen different plays, we made the school sit through the SAME two plays, over and over again. Why? Because everyone copied what the rest of the classroom was doing. We saw what they had, and thought, "Hey, why bother with original ideas when what they are doing sounds much better?"
I can only imagine how disappointed our teachers must have been (especially the person who came up with the whole idea in the first place). Needless to say, we didn't have to do anything like that the next year!