I taught eleven-year-olds for thirty-five years. The children who worried me were never the loud ones. It was the ones who had already decided, at eleven, what they were not good at. I could usually trace it to one sentence an adult had said in passing and forgotten by dinner. So I became careful. Not soft — careful. Children carry your throwaway lines for decades.

Say the sentence you would want repeated back to them in thirty years, because it will be.