A Mallard duck (Mom Mallard to our students) took up residence on our campus this week. Mallards, or anas platyrhynchos, are also known as "dabbling ducks," and this particular duck has apparently been dabbling in Aristotelian philosophy, because she's presented our students with a real-life lesson in the core virtue of temperance.

Her nest, made from feathers she's plucked off her own breast and filled with ten eggs, lies about eighteen inches from the entryway to our main building, a path our students take in out of school at least six times a day. Mom Mallard doesn't seem too worried about our students' feet...as long as they keep moving. However, the second those feet stop and one of the children pauses to take a good, long, look, she quacks angrily and abandons her nest. Her first day in residence, she spent more time off the eggs than she did on them, and we realized we were going to have to find a way to teach our students some self-control.

It just so happens that this month's virtue is temperance; stopping to think about our actions before we enact them, giving the best of ourselves, and saying "no" to our weaknesses. The middle school students use the term "temperance," and the lower school kids use the term self-control, but tomāto, tomăto, it's all the same idea.

In Stanford's famous experiment on self-control, children were faced with the immediate reality of one marshmallow versus the promise of two marshmallows if they can just wait for fifteen minutes. The children who were able to resist temptation and wait fifteen minutes for that second marshmallow had better life outcomes in the form of lower obesity rates, higher SAT scores, and higher levels of education. Self-control itself does not make a kid smarter, or fitter, or more proficient at test-taking, but it's the essential skill hidden within all of these positive outcomes.

Character education is not old-fashioned, and it's not about bringing religion in to the classroom. Character education teaches children how to make wise decisions and act on them. Character is the "X factor" that experts in parenting and education have deemed integral to success, both in school and in life. Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, calls that character-based X factor "grit," while educational consultant Dr. Michele Borba calls it "moral intelligence."

When I asked parenting expert Borba to explain why she thinks character education is so overlooked as a vital part of children's success, she wrote, "That's what parents don't seem to get, the hidden values of character traits for success. They see character education as fluff, because that's often how it's taught -- posters and worksheets. Character education needs to be relevant. It needs to be woven in curriculum, not tacked on. We are such a trophy-, SAT-obsessed society, but if parents would recognize the value beyond the humanness, civility and ethics, they might get it."