I was on lunch duty today. From my perch at the front of the classroom I watched second and third graders wrestle with Caprisun packages, ziplock bags and themselves.  One emerged the victor.  Make that two.

It all began when a cluster of third grade boys called Kathy “chicken nose.” Kathy laughed at first.  She rolled her eyes, giggled and whispered with a friend.  “Chicken nose with chicken legs,” the boys continued until Kathy’s giggles were smothered by her shame.

Fortunately, third grade boys have the attention spans of chihuahuas on speed and quickly moved onto to other amusements.  Unfortunately, second grade boys do everything they see third grade boys do.

A second grader in a blue shirt, sitting at a rectangular table, put down his sandwich and leaned over his neighbor to have a word with a smallish kid at the end going to town on a box of Lunchables.  “Go tell Kathy she’s a chicken nose,” he said.

“No,” the boy in white answered, laying a small circle of ham on a cracker precisely.

The kid in blue, a little annoyed that he’d been disobeyed, gripped the shoulder of the boy in white and insisted again, more firmly this time.  “If you don’t go tell her you’re never coming to my house.  Ever.”

The boy sandwiched between the two, a pale lanky kid in all green, interrupted.  “If I go tell her can I come to your house?”

“Yes.”

And with that the boy in green slammed his drink down on the table, stood and walked over to Kathy.  “You’re a chicken head, Kathy,” he seethed.  And went back to his seat to collect high fives from the boy in blue.

Then I watched the boy in white stand without saying a word. He walked over to Kathy, knelt down beside her and spoke the most miraculous words for a second grade boy. “I won’t call you a chicken head,” he said, “You’re a good person, Kathy.”

There were no high fives offered back at his seat.  But Kathy smiled.