DANETTE GOULET -- Reporter’s Notebook

The best piece of advice I have ever been given was also the simplest.

“Smile,” my mother told me. “When you walk down the hall at school,

just smile at the kids you pass. They’ll smile back. And if they don’t,

they are the losers, not you.”

Her theory was simple, you see. Everyone was feeling the exact same

way I was. Everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move

because, of course, it’s easier to let someone else take the chance.

“But,” she said, “is a smile really taking a chance? It’s a mere

pleasantry, not a cause for ridicule.”

She told me this when I was in middle school -- unquestionably the

roughest time in a child’s life.

I was so miserable -- so awkward.

Children are at their very meanest during those years, as parents of

Corona del Mar Middle School students will attest to.

But I figured, by God, it couldn’t make things worse. So I gave it a

try.

She was right. That was all people were waiting for.

People smiled back. Then it became “hellos,” then conversations.

Suddenly, things weren’t quite so miserable or awkward.

I was reminded of this advice and the profound effect it had on my

life when I visited a classroom at Newport Harbor High School this week.

I went to hear from students how vile outbursts of violence by

teenagers might be prevented.

A junior who had returned to Newport Beach after spending a year

abroad suggested that the simple kindness of a smile might go a long way.

“People are so cold here,” she said.

It is the same thing we heard after the Columbine shooting.

A 16-year-old football player named Evan told Costa Mesa High School

students last spring that his life was spared because he had been nice to

Eric and Dylan, the boys who went on the rampage that day, killing 12

classmates and a teacher.

It cost him nothing. It wasn’t even an effort. But it saved his life.

Simple human kindness -- that is the solution. Is it so much to ask?

Is it so difficult to instill?

Instead of condemning the youth of America, and saying, “God, we never

would have done that,” which I too have been guilty of, we need to talk

to them. We need to give them whatever it is that’s missing. Maybe it’s

still as simple as a smile.

* DANETTE GOULET covers the education beat for the Daily Pilot.