This quarter, I have hall duty, which means I keep an eye on the kids who arrive early and have to sit for half an hour in the hall before school starts. With over 300 eighth-grade students in the school, it would get very loud very quickly if we didn’t keep them quiet, so we have a whisper-only rule.

There’s only one problem: many of the kids don’t know how to whisper.

“I am whispering!” they’ll protest after they’ve been speaking in hushed tones (but definitely not whispering) to friends.

“No, whispering doesn’t mean just talking quietly.”

Tired of telling kids over and over what whispering means, and knowing of course that they did indeed know (or at least most of them), I enlisted the help today of The Whisperers, kids who I’d called down for talking who had a choice: either take a signature on the school discipline card (the ROCK card), or teach a lesson during advisory on how to whisper.

They chose the second option.