At Singapore American School, your table at lunch seems to define your place. You have a fixed group of friends, and a fixed location—a single piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the school community. But are the cracks between pieces given? Or are we unnecessarily carving them out?
In Singapore American School, lunch is a class of its own—complete with attendance requirements.
For forty-five minutes every day, every high school student voluntarily parks themself in an isolation chamber. Whether it’s the insanely long table of senior girls in the middle of the cafeteria (affectionately dubbed “The Last Supper”) or the “birdcage” tables that the same two friend groups squabble over every day, everyone is expected to show up at their clique’s designated table.
Where you sit defines who you are: Seniors gather in the cafeteria, gamers sit on the green steps in the library, and freshmen congregate in the perch. Even the library and art room all have unspoken rules dictating who’s “supposed” to sit where.
A table should just be a place to put our lunch tray. So why has it become a marker for our social status?
If you walk into the cafeteria at any other time, you see what our senior class is actually capable of: people joking about things that happened in class earlier, tutoring each other for AP Gov, or coming together to help each other cram for the upcoming AP Calc quiz. In these moments, we aren't locked into rigid, fixed circles or shapes; we act like a real community that's connected and loves each other.
From a distance, our senior class forms a complete picture. We’re like a jigsaw puzzle: from a distance, a cohesive community that fits together well; up close, however, the picture isn't actually smooth—it's held together by separate groups, cracks, and ridges. When the bell rings at 11:20, we automatically snap back into our isolated, pre-molded slots.
I’ve heard the whispers: “Guess who sat with us today?” or “I don’t know why they joined us.” I get it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting quality time with your close friends. Yet, we can spend the whole day laughing with someone, talking to them in the hallways and during class. Yet, sitting with them at lunch is something out of the ordinary.
This weird instinct to fit in our own little puzzle pieces kicks in no matter where we are, whether we're in school or not. During the ATES trip to Tioman, we picked seats randomly on day one. By day two, everyone wordlessly returned to the same seats. This happened every day for the whole week.
Why do we act like this when we're all actually friends?
A single puzzle piece isn't meant to be alone, and lunch tables are not meant to be a tool used to separate us. By treating lunch seating as an unwritten contract of group loyalty, we voluntarily limit our high school experience. We trade the open, diverse community that we've been gifted for self-imposed segregation, emphasizing the grooves and cracks of our puzzle instead of patching them over.
Wanting to sit at a different table shouldn't feel like ditching your friends or imposing on another group. If we can be friends and talk to each other without consequence during the school day, why can’t we share a meal? The borders of our puzzle pieces only exist because we keep drawing them. All it takes to erase these imaginary lines is choosing to pull up a different chair and ask the question, “Hey, can I sit here today?”
