Chris was leading the meeting. The middle schoolers always paid close attention when he spoke.

"Tonight," he started, "we're going to talk about a topic we all deal with each day. Who can explain whether sarcasm is right or wrong?"

For a brief moment, there was silence as the students processed the question and began to formulate their answers. Starting hesitantly to speak, and then often cutting eachother off in their rush to get it right first (even though we rarely have such "right and wrong" question and answer sets in our group), they replied. Some said what they thought we wanted to hear -- despite having a group of fairly sarcastic leaders, these students tended to say it was wrong; others regurgitated what they'd been taught all their lives -- which was either that it was wrong and unloving, period, or that it had its time and place; many students, recalling specific instances when their teachers, leaders, role-models, parents, and heroes had employed sarcasm were assuring eachother that it was ok. As might be expected, there were plenty of sarcastically-toned comments exchanged as well.

To our surprise, though, one particularly sarcastic eighth-grader planted himself firmly and seriously on the "sarcasm is wrong" side. Being a dynamic young man people are forced to pay attention to, he then had the floor and began expounding on the evils of lying or insulting people in the guise of sarcasm. Several of the seventh-grade girls gave various replies (often sarcastic, of course) to his arguments, but would only speak out so much against the guy they all had crushes on.

As some fellow eighth-graders chimed in against his viewpoint, though, he became very passionate.

Standing up and flinging his hate to the ground, he loudly proclaimed "Look, people! Carsasm is just wrong!"

There's nothing like a healthy dose of dyslexia to humble even the proudest teen-aged boy.