Lincoln Branca ‘30 Shares Thoughts on Honor Code

Middle School students gathered on Thursday, August 28 to reflect on their Honor Code, hearing from a variety of speakers. Lincoln Branca ’30, one of the recipients of the Jan Jacobi Award, shared his thoughts.

Hello everybody, I’m Lincoln Branca, and I hope you are as excited as I am for the beginning of the school year.

I am here today to talk to you about two of the four parts of our honor code: trust and respect. The reasons trust and respect are in our Honor Code is because without trust and respect, we would not feel the freedom to speak up in class, or share ideas with anyone.

Another reason we need trust and respect is because they help us be better humans, and they make people collaborate much better when working together. We can show respect at MICDS by maintaining school traditions like not stepping on the emblem, having a homecoming bonfire, and doing fun things like Spring Fling.

On an individual level, we can show respect in the classroom every day by listening and collaborating with our peers and teachers, even if we may think that our ideas are the strongest, and not want to listen to their ideas, which are most likely great. You can use trust every day at school, and an example of this is group projects, where if you do not trust that your partners know what they are doing and you try to “help” them, then you will not be able to get work done because you will be too busy trying to change your partner’s work instead of understanding their ideas. We get stronger by hearing everyone’s ideas, and five people who collaborate on ideas produce better results and grow more than five separate ideas.

A story from when I needed trust and respect in my life is when I was a new student at MICDS in sixth grade. I didn’t know anyone, so I had to trust these new faces around me, and that quickly made me realize that trust is a very important part of the MICDS community. Also, when I was new, on my first group project at MICDS, everyone in the group was very respectful, and both of these examples made me realize that MICDS is a place where I can express myself and my opinions are valued. Trust and respect are in our Honor Code because they make us better people.

Thank You.