I often speak to my students about choice and habits. So many kids have such ingrained reactions that they’ve brought into the classroom from various environments — home, the street, the community center — which simply do not work in a comparatively-formal setting like a classroom. Perceived slights or insults must be avenged, for lack of a better term, and often very little thought has gone into the decision. These habits, I tell them, are going to get them into some serious trouble at some point in the future. “It won’t just be a referral from some teacher who’s fed up. It will be dismissal from work.”

Hanging on my wall is an almost-cliche but very succinct expression of the principle I’m trying to explain:

Be careful what you think, for your thoughts become your words.
Be careful what you say, for your words become your actions.
Be careful what you do, for your actions become your habits.
Be careful what becomes habitual, for your habits become your destiny.

Yet even when some of them try to break their habit, even when they begin thinking before speaking, there’s something in them that just compels them, despite the newly-formed warnings and whistles, to go ahead and say it. That’s the habit part, because hidden in every habit is a bit of an addiction. And so these kids are aware of the choice, but in many ways, by the time they’re aware of it, they’ve already made the decision.

Certainly, to a greater or lesser extent, the same is true for almost all of us. The awareness of this tendency, though, like the awareness of an addiction, is the first step toward correcting it. Or so we tell ourselves.