Doing what's important.

On the fourth day of school, I came down after lunch to pick up the kids and saw one of my students crying. I immediately appproached him and put my arm around him. "You're crying," I said. "What happened? Do you want to talk about it?"
He nodded and said that he did and then proceeded to tell me what had happened. He had been playing basketball and another student in our class had been yelling at him. I asked him if he could tell me spcifically what he had been saying and he said that he just kept talking about how bad of a player he was at basketball.
He kept crying and I told him that when we got inside, I'd try to set up a time for them to talk about it. I kept my arm around him until we got to the building, then let him go so that he could get in line with the other kids.
Once we got in to the classroom, I sat down at the back table with the intent of talking with the student who had made the other kid cry. But then I thought, "You need to do reading assessments. Why don't you have them talk in the transition between indepdendent reading and read aloud?" But I knew that if I did that, they wouldn't really get a chance to talk, it wouldn't really get solved, it would probably just get shuffled around. "This is important," I thought to myself. "The reading assessment is important too, but that little boy is crying, and that's more important."
So I called the other kid over and asked him why he thought the first kid was crying.
"Because of the basketball game?" he asked.
"Why would he be crying because of the basketball game?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.
"Did something happen during the basketball game?" I asked.
"Maybe it's because of what I said," he answered.
"What did you say?" I asked
"I don't know, I just said good game and stuff like that," he said.
Now, normally I would respond to this by saying "No you didn't. I know what you said because he just told me, so you might as well just tell me instead of making something up." But this time I didn't, I just responded to what he had told me.
"Do you think he's crying because you said 'good game'?"
"No," he answered. "I think he's crying because of the other stuff I said."
"Oh," I said. "What did you say?"
"I said that we lost the game because he can't shoot," he explained.
"Oh," I said. "I think that would make me cry too. Do you think we should ask him what would make him feel better?"
"No," he said. "I think I know what would make him feel better. I think I should tell him it wasn't his fault that we lost the game."
"Okay," I said. Then I gave him a big hug and told him how proud I was of him for being honest, for taking responsibility for what he had done, and for coming up with a really good idea to make his friend feel better.
He walked over to the other kid, talked to him, and I saw the other kid smiling at the end.
It was important. It was important that I listened instead of assumed. It was important that I gave them the time to figure this out for themselves. It was important that he got to make things better for his friend. And it was important that the first guy went from tears to smiling- and it came from his friend, not his teacher.