On
Thursday, about twenty minutes before I learned the reason one of my 4th
period students was switched into my 3rd (due to a no contact order
resulting from a classmate mugging him outside school the day before), I also learned
that another kid in the class was expelled for a third offense of possession in
as many months.
I had in fact spent part of the night before and that morning preparing to talk to this guy about marijuana use: the last class we had together, while the rest of us were discussing Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Well, I Have Lost You,” he was overheard spending the hour trying to score pot for the evening. He was failing the class with a 12%, but he was smart, but he was a pot-head, but he was winning and courteous, but he distracted everyone in class (but his mother had shot herself in the head a year and a half ago after calling her two boys repeatedly from a hotel room and saying goodbye).
The school’s social worker helped prep me to talk to him, after which I created eight bullet points of things I would say when I saw him next—that he wasn’t in trouble; how worried it made me that he so casually and publicly spent class time pursuing something illegal and harmful; that it raised red flags, and that I needed to share what I’d overheard with his father—did he want to be there when I did it; that it might not feel like it but this was done out of care and concern; how was he doing; and the hardest part, about his mother, and how he was coping, recognizing how hard; I’d ask him if he had people he talked to, and if he thought he’d been self-medicating; and if he wanted to talk to someone confidentially about any of it—about school, family, grief, marijuana.
But he came to school reeking and security got to him first.
I’ve been thinking a lot about marijuana this year. I’d already lost a different kid to a drug expulsion, and another to a plains-state wilderness detox camp. And I’d tortured two others over the course of first term, meeting with them after school to help stretch their thin summaries into analytical essays, day after day, watching them breathe in extra oxygen for any small burst of smarts that would help them explain to me how one sentence connected to another, the grass growing straight out of their heads in a patched meadow of broken logs and candy wrappers. They are 14 years old, 15, in ninth grade; my 14 year old daughter is writing stories about heroines retaking whole countries while her class mates laugh off the civic and familial and corporeal lines that make them human beings in the care of and charge of other human beings, like it’s funny that anyone cares.
Two weeks, ago, our principal sent home a letter about the spike in marijuana use in our ninth graders. When I distributed the letter to my ninth graders, I spent a good 20 minutes talking about it. I told them how I regretted our state vote on marijuana legalization, because Colorado and Washington have sent unintended messages to kids that marijuana is safe. But I’ve seen things in this ninth grade class I’ve never seen before, including the number of kids blithely failing and bullying each other, and kids I’ve overseen struggling for thoughts that wouldn’t come. I talked about the neuroscience of the adolescent brain, and showed them a story from NPR detailing how the teenage brain rewires itself for maximum efficiency, and marijuana fundamentally messes with the wiring. This is no time to be mucking around in there, I told them.
I’ve got more than the usual number of kids who could care less what I think these days. It’s an imbalance of regard that leads to the problem Millay identifies in her poem—that sometimes it’s our very desire to invest that keeps us from being able to connect: “If I had loved you less,” she writes, “or played you slyly / I might have held you for a summer more.” But Millay doesn’t end there—quailing at loss; she counters it with the passions she wouldn’t trade:
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
I too want to assert the worth of untempered, unsmoked emotion.
Here are the words I value highly: devotion, solidarity, duty, love.
I had in fact spent part of the night before and that morning preparing to talk to this guy about marijuana use: the last class we had together, while the rest of us were discussing Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Well, I Have Lost You,” he was overheard spending the hour trying to score pot for the evening. He was failing the class with a 12%, but he was smart, but he was a pot-head, but he was winning and courteous, but he distracted everyone in class (but his mother had shot herself in the head a year and a half ago after calling her two boys repeatedly from a hotel room and saying goodbye).
The school’s social worker helped prep me to talk to him, after which I created eight bullet points of things I would say when I saw him next—that he wasn’t in trouble; how worried it made me that he so casually and publicly spent class time pursuing something illegal and harmful; that it raised red flags, and that I needed to share what I’d overheard with his father—did he want to be there when I did it; that it might not feel like it but this was done out of care and concern; how was he doing; and the hardest part, about his mother, and how he was coping, recognizing how hard; I’d ask him if he had people he talked to, and if he thought he’d been self-medicating; and if he wanted to talk to someone confidentially about any of it—about school, family, grief, marijuana.
But he came to school reeking and security got to him first.
I’ve been thinking a lot about marijuana this year. I’d already lost a different kid to a drug expulsion, and another to a plains-state wilderness detox camp. And I’d tortured two others over the course of first term, meeting with them after school to help stretch their thin summaries into analytical essays, day after day, watching them breathe in extra oxygen for any small burst of smarts that would help them explain to me how one sentence connected to another, the grass growing straight out of their heads in a patched meadow of broken logs and candy wrappers. They are 14 years old, 15, in ninth grade; my 14 year old daughter is writing stories about heroines retaking whole countries while her class mates laugh off the civic and familial and corporeal lines that make them human beings in the care of and charge of other human beings, like it’s funny that anyone cares.
Two weeks, ago, our principal sent home a letter about the spike in marijuana use in our ninth graders. When I distributed the letter to my ninth graders, I spent a good 20 minutes talking about it. I told them how I regretted our state vote on marijuana legalization, because Colorado and Washington have sent unintended messages to kids that marijuana is safe. But I’ve seen things in this ninth grade class I’ve never seen before, including the number of kids blithely failing and bullying each other, and kids I’ve overseen struggling for thoughts that wouldn’t come. I talked about the neuroscience of the adolescent brain, and showed them a story from NPR detailing how the teenage brain rewires itself for maximum efficiency, and marijuana fundamentally messes with the wiring. This is no time to be mucking around in there, I told them.
I’ve got more than the usual number of kids who could care less what I think these days. It’s an imbalance of regard that leads to the problem Millay identifies in her poem—that sometimes it’s our very desire to invest that keeps us from being able to connect: “If I had loved you less,” she writes, “or played you slyly / I might have held you for a summer more.” But Millay doesn’t end there—quailing at loss; she counters it with the passions she wouldn’t trade:
If I
had loved you less or played you slyly
I might
have held you for a summer more, But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
I too want to assert the worth of untempered, unsmoked emotion.
Here are the words I value highly: devotion, solidarity, duty, love.
