Rachel's Challenge: Practice Positive Gossip

In my son's 2009-2010 yearbook, I noticed the school had an assembly entitled "Rachel's Challenge." Rachel was one of the students murdered at Columbine High School. In the ashes of this tragic event, rose a national effort challenging middle school and high school students to exercise kindness instead of being mean, forgiving instead of hating and caring outside of their own self interest. I was moved to see how a criminal, mindless and terrible act was being used to get students to be honest, kind to one another and think outside the box in expressing respect. 

As a performance art piece to open everyone's eyes to the importance of being nice, students made a long paper chain, in which each link had writing from a student describing his/her own act of kindness to themselves, others and towards the planet. Positive gossip was encouraged (online and offline) to get students to say nice things about each other. WOW!

Middle school for me in the 1970s was one of the cruelest and saddest periods of my life. We were terrible to one another because we were all afraid.  Today, I'm glad people have shown the courage to turn a nightmare such as Columbine into a positive goal setting experience that makes a difference.