Quandry

So a funny thing happened today. As you know, I teach 6th grade, and if you remember anything about sixth grade it is an incredibly akward age where kids are all over the place maturity-wise. I have kids who act like they're in college...to kids who still cry at the drop of a hat because somebody stole his favorite new highlighter. I also have kids who are still wearing toddler clothes to kids that are almost as tall as me!

Anyway, so on MWF, I open my classroom during lunch for tutoring. The kids can bring their lunches into my room and eat before they start working on homework. About halfway through lunch, one of my boys comes up to me and asks if he can go to the lunch room to get lunch. I could have sworn that he had just been eating, so I asked him if he'd already had a lunch. He (with NO volume control) said, loud enough that everyone in the room stopped to listen, "my dad thinks I'm too fat and that I need to go on a diet, so he only packed me a salad for lunch and I'm STARVING."

So do I honor his father's wishes and make him eat what's in his lunch only, or do I let the boy eat??

I let him eat and he came back with a gigantic plate of food. I guess that I'm guilty of contributing to adolescent obesity. It's just that he was STARVING!