The fifth graders, Mrs. Bass (our assistant principal), teachers, and I had a little conversation at the end of lunch today regarding some unfortunate incident reports of 5th grade friends using really inappropriate language at school.  While I won’t go into the details of specific word choices, I did specifically address the fact we do NOT use bad word choices while at school.  While I’m respectful and mindful of the tolerant levels of parents at home, school is NOT the right place to curse or use derogatory slang words.

In a moment of complete divine intervention, I looked up to see one of our regular dads, Mr. M., enjoying lunch with his child and a friend (enjoying, at least, until I started my lecture at the end).  🙂  I asked him (while putting him on the spot because I knew he would “play this out” with me), how he felt knowing this kind of bad language is used and heard at our school at times.  He shared these pearls of fatherly wisdom with all of us:  “Is what you say kind, is it truthful, and is it necessary?”  Three simple yet profound words:  kind, truthful, necessary…Thanks, Mr. M!  Here’s hoping we ALL Stand UP to heed the opportunity to ask ourselves these very questions the next time we are tempted to use mean words of any type.