More Truthful Than A Fifth Grader?

On occasion, I find myself in the unenviable position of truth detector. This role is needed whenever there is an unsettled dispute involving two or more people, and I am asked to discover who is telling the truth, who is bending the truth, and who might be lying completely.

I am proud to say that I rarely come across a student who tells complete lies. In fact, the one unalterable fact that I have learned during my tenure as an administrator is that there are always two sides to every story, and the truth of the matter usually ends up somewhere in between the various sides.

More often than not, I discover errors in communication, misunderstandings, and false assumptions. Rarely have I found that students have assumed correctly when they think they have been wronged, and it is these incorrect assumptions that usually lead to all the fuss.

This week, I had a couple of minor incidents requiring my truth-detecting prowess. In both cases, I was pleasantly surprised to encounter students who told the truth, even when it came to admitting that they had made mistakes and acted improperly. Because the students told the truth, I was able to clear the air, elicit apologies, and work on teaching the kids how to change their behavior to lessen the chance of the incidents occurring in the future.

This week’s events made me think about the various disputes I have settled in the last couple of years. More often than not, the process was the same as what I went through this week. For whatever reason, I have overwhelmingly found our Hill City students to be honest. Sometimes they bend the truth, but even in those cases, the bending is often the result of a faulty assumption, and not an intentional act of deception.

Maybe they know, by the time it gets to the principal, that lying or equivocation is useless. Maybe they know that things will go easier on them if they tell the truth. Maybe my reputation as a dogged investigator who will interview countless eye-witnesses to find out exactly what happened has proceeded me. Whatever the cause, the kids I deal with on a day-to-day basis, by and large, more often than not, tell the truth.

So why am I surprised? Why is this fact so remarkable? Something else happened this week to put the relative honesty of our kids into perspective.

My sister Cait, who lives in the Washington DC area, is an editor for Congressional Quarterly, and this week, she sent me a link to a Congressional Quarterly website called “Politi-fact” (www.politifact.com). This is a site that CQ co-publishes to “help you find the truth in the Presidential Campaign.”

In my perspective, this website is amazing. It analyzes hundreds (maybe even thousands) of quotes from or about the four candidates. The researchers rate these quote on a scale from TRUE, MOSTLY TRUE, HALF TRUE, BARELY TRUE, FALSE, and my favorite category: PANTS ON FIRE.

I am not trying to make a political statement, but I urge you to go to this site and have a look. My sister’s colleagues at CQ have gone to incredible lengths to track down a mountain of information and have done an excellent job of presenting the TRUTH. You can sort their “rulings” by candidate, by political party, or even just look at the big whoppers…the outright lies that fall in the PANTS ON FIRE category.

After some truly fascinating and revealing reading, I realized that the people who run for our highest office, or the people who express opinions about them, seem to have a bit of a problem telling the truth. In fact, compared to our students, one could truthfully conclude that there are many adults who are NOT more truthful than a fifth grader.

Politi-fact even has a section devoted to “chain emails,” which I wrote about just last week. Politi-fact analyzed thirty-five chain emails. They found only six to be TRUE, MOSTLY TRUE, or even HALF TRUE. Twenty-nine of the thirty-five chain emails were ruled to be either BARELY TRUE or FALSE with ten of the chain emails earning the distinguished PANTS ON FIRE rating.

So the world is filled with people who are not more truthful than a fifth grader. I have never been more proud to work with our Hill City fifth graders and our other mostly truthful students.