Public School and Bad Words

One thing that happens when you put your sheltered younger kids in public school is that they learn some new words, and we are not talking about the ones they learn for vocabulary in Language Arts class.

We have had no problem with our kids actually using or repeating these words at home, but their awareness is suddenly there. When they hear them now, they react. I can see in their faces that they know, "That's a bad word!" They occasionally tell on their friends, telling me who says bad words and who doesn't. Last week, B7 showed me, in the sandbox, how one of his friends had used the curved green plastic sandbag walls that come with every cheap army man set to spell out a 3-letter word that requires two S's.

"Well," I responded, "We don't have to leave it there, do we?"

I remembered B17's story about his one year in public school, back in second grade.  "I learned all the bad words in one day," he told me. "It was on a field trip. It was the only time that whole year that I was in a school bus, and there, on the seat in front of me, someone had written a list. It even had a title:  'Sware Words.' "

I was horrified.  But all I can say is, it doesn't seem to have ruined him for life.