in which I got called poo

It's been a while since I've written a blog post. I'm reading plenty of them and they're all so much better than mine that I'm feeling somewhat defeatist. However, just the other day I got called poo and one simply cannot let perfectly good substance as getting called poo go to waste without blogging over it. It would be a travesty.

 So here's the story. I was called last minute to sub for the fifth graders. The sub plans called for me to get them working on an assignment on the computers in the library. Now if you were fifth grade boys and you had access to gmail during class with a substitute teacher, wouldn't YOU write emails to your buddies and call the sub teacher poo? Of course. However, being raised in a school environment which encourages Christian character, one of the boys came clean to me, a moment in which I was made aware of the opinion of myself as fecal matter. I promptly accused,

 "Who sent the email? Show me the email? What did it say exactly?"

 Then I remembered I was an adult and ceased the investigation. I gently but firmly gripped the shoulders of the suspect boys, who were weakly offering feeble excuses like "we were just kidding...", and prompted them to respond with repentance.

 "What do you have to say to me?"

 All at once their faces filled with part mischief, part remorse, and part fear of punishment. They muttered their sorrys and moved on with their fifth grade lives. And I moved on to monitoring the rest of the class. There was no need to say anything else at that point but this is what I was saying in my heart:

 "Boys, you are so loved. You will make a bad choice again. One day you will make choices far more terrible than calling your sub poo. And then you will still be loved. You will be corrected, chided, and made to apologize over and over again and yet, you are still loved. You might grow up to regret the mean things you did and said to hurt others, or you might not. Either way, guess what? You are loved. But you know, all the other children around you are also loved, and when you call them poo, they might not feel so good. Some of them probably don't feel strong enough to ask you to apologize. When you grow up, you be the one who stands up for those who don't speak for themselves. Let's agree on this, okay?"