On Marijuana

As a teacher, I often find myself thinking to my students, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

The first time I smoked weed, I was fifteen years old, hanging out at my friend’s party. Her parents were out of town for the weekend and she had a fully-stocked kitchen and a hot tub. Perfect party recipe. Two of my guy friends packed a bowl and taught me how to smoke. And I smoked and smoked, bowl after bowl. Because, you know that first time you’re high, you don’t realize you’re high. Afterwards, my guy friends who’d supplied the goods encouraged me to take off my top. That seemed like a great idea, too. Hanging out in my undies felt nice and free. I felt special upon receiving the compliment that I “had a nice rack.”

Now, having spent years in a relationship with a daily smoker, I have mixed feelings about marijuana use. I have plenty of friends and family who smoke. Yet, there is nothing I hate more than a “weed super-nerd.” You know the type: can reel off the specs of a particularly chronic harvest of herb, knows precisely how to calculate the desired air pressure in a water bong, and the chemical reaction involved in how THC affects the body. These weed super-nerds are fantastic at baking brownies, and understand precisely how the THC separates from the plant and will bond to the nearest fat molecules (such as butter) at high temperatures. This extensive knowledge and fascination with marijuana is obsessive—fanatical, and strikes me as particularly pathetic. Please do not worship at the shrine of weed. It’s just a plant, a drug, like any other.

Thus, I was particularly dismayed by a recent poem written by my student. In my sophomore classes, we have been reading and writing poetry in different forms. We study poets’ use of figurative language, sensory detail and concrete imagery, and try to employ these techniques in our own writing. Today’s lesson was the ode. Jake turned in a poem titled “Ode to Grapes”:

They taste so good
whenever I eat them.
Some are sweet
others are sour.
The green ones are
as green as a $100 bill.
and the purple ones are
like Barney.
It’s even better
to eat them both at the same time.
I feel like I’m on a cloud when I eat them.
The smell is so strong
you can smell them from a mile away.
The fragrance is one
of a kind.

While reading this poem, I was initially pleased that Jake included simile and detail appealing to the senses of sight, touch, and smell. But wait, I seemed to remember my ex telling me “grapes” was slang for purple weed. Urban Dictionary confirmed my suspicions. I like the fruit grapes pretty well myself, but I’ve certainly never enjoyed them so much I felt like I was on a cloud, and I wouldn’t say their smell is particularly strong. I’ve got a weed super-nerd for a student! So devoted is he to pot that he has written an ode singing its praises.

My first reaction was one of annoyance: he thinks he can get away with this and pull one over on me! He thinks he can turn in a poem about weed for credit and I won’t even realize! I’ll set him straight. However, as I told this story to more and more people, most didn’t seem to know that “grapes” is a euphemism for purple marijuana. Turns out this is pretty much an insider, street term. I realized that if I don’t handle this situation carefully, I could come out looking like the stoner. If I confront my student the wrong way, I could come off as knowing too much about weed and its related terminology.

I struggle to define what my student has done wrong, and what an appropriate consequence should be. Of course, marijuana is an illegal substance and my school’s line is one of zero tolerance. But that’s not me, and I have to teach in a way that encourages my students to make healthy decisions and think for themselves, yet without undermining my school’s policies.

I believe weed should be legalized. It is one of the biggest sources of revenue for the state of California, but right now this is all under the table and uncontrolled. College students regularly drink themselves to death, since somehow alcohol consumption has become a competitive sport and the ability to imbibe copious amounts has become a point of pride among youth. Alcohol-related car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the country, and drinking causes belligerence in many and quite violent bar fights. I’ve never known anyone to die of a marijuana overdose, and I’ve yet to meet a belligerent stoner.

However, this is not to say that smoking weed is particularly healthy. Certainly, inhaling smoke and carbon monoxide is damaging to the lungs, THC impairs judgment and clouds the mind, and marijuana has been proven to cause short term memory loss. I will never buy the bullshit line, “I’m a better driver when I’m high,” because weed is a depressant, slowing the nervous system, potentially impairing vision and slowing one’s response time and ability to think clearly. Finally, I have seen plenty of friends become psychologically dependent upon marijuana, perhaps even physiologically addicted.

Yet, cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee remain legal substances. In America, the land of the free and home of the brave, one is free to drink oneself to death, perhaps even encouraged to eat oneself to death (thanks to the government’s support of an agricultural industry that relies on our continued consumption of processed foods). Shouldn’t we have the right to smoke ourselves to death, if we so choose?

So where does that leave me? Here’s what I know: Many friends and I smoked weed throughout high school, and for us it was not a gateway drug. We were bound for success and did not have addictive personalities. We knew how to handle ourselves. However, many people I know have also pissed away their potential smoking weed, literally playing out the lines of the song by Afroman: “I was gonna go to class before I got high/
I coulda cheated and I coulda passed/ but I got high/
I am taking it next semester and I know why/
- cause I got high.” Jake is in danger of doing just that. A strong writer and the rare student who enjoys reading outside of class, Jake never does his homework and will probably squeak by with a D this semester. Is it because he gets high? Maybe. My responsibility as his teacher is to help him learn as much as possible and help him make healthy decisions. Right now, weed isn’t looking like the healthiest choice for him.

Knocked Up

18 years old, full of spring fever, college fever, senioritis, probably all hickeyed up, I received the call from Ms. (let’s call her) “Smith”: “Annie, can I see you for a moment.” I loved her and hated her. She was so intense, smart, academic and opinionated, though she herself told us on the first day of class, “Opinions are like assholes [dramatic pause, eye contact, and circulation of the room]… Everybody has one.” She had a white Cruella DeVil like stripe of hair running from her forehead through the length of her bristly hair.

What could she want to discuss with me? Foucault? Feminist theory? Said’s criticism in Orientalism? It was kind of exciting to get called aside by Ms. Smith. “Can I ask you a question?” she asked me. Of course. Anything.

“Are you pregnant?”

Whoa. That one certainly caught my attention. “No,” I giggled nervously. “Do I look like it?” I smoothed down my shirt. I still remember what I was wearing that day. In fact, I think if I think hard, I could remember every outfit from every important memory of my life. But probably I remember this outfit, a simple tanktop and jeans, because I decided that day that it made me look horribly fat and I would never wear it again.

Ms. Smith went on to explain, without apology, that she merely asked because of some other student she’d had, smart, full of potential, who also had a tendency to embarrass others with her and her boyfriend’s hallway displays of affection. That student got knocked up and didn’t go to college, I guess.

“Oh no,” I reassured her. “I’m on the pill.” I said it without thinking. Instinctually, I trusted her. She was an adult, a representative of the school, my teacher, and she did not communicate with my parents.

“Great!” Smith breathed a sigh of relief. “It makes your period so regular doesn’t it, and it clears up your skin—at least it did mine.”

I smiled uncomfortably, happy she wondered, happy she cared, happy she noticed my life.

****

In retrospect, I wonder at this memory. What gave Ms. Smith the cojones to ask me this intrusive, personal question out of nowhere? Was the question really warranted? Did Ms. Smith think it over carefully before confronting me? If she weighed the options, how did she reach her decision?

I know that I now am many students’ Ms. Smith. I challenge my students intellectually and sometimes I don’t feel like I’m very nice about it, yet they mostly seem to trust me unquestioningly. Ricardo is so relieved to unburden to me the stress of having a 12 month old daughter and another one on the way, simply because I take the time to ask him, “How are you?” Karina told me before writing her own autobiographical short story, “I think I feel comfortable writing something a bit more edgy, risky, and personal.” Indeed she did, writing me the story of discovering she was pregnant while locked in Juvenile Hall. She was transported involuntarily to an abortion clinic where she compliantly signed the paperwork and submitted herself for the procedure. Karen showed me her hickeys, given her by my other student, Cole, and told me about the techniques she’d been using to try and get rid of them. “I’m so sick of wearing scarves!” she said.

What is my responsibility in these cases? Where do I draw the line about what students may share with me? Is there even a line? Perhaps my job is really to mentor kids through these rocky stages of adolescence and sexual experimentation, while also doing my best to teach them a little something about writing along the way. I don’t think I would ever ask a student point blank if he or she was pregnant, though. To me, that seems inappropriate, potentially offensive.

I did have a student last quarter who I suspected was pregnant, but I never considered asking her straight out. That seemed rude and random, grounds for a lawsuit by her parents. But the thought of Mary dealing with this big, real-life stuff as her failure to complete homework assignments caused her grades to dip lower and lower made me wonder a couple of things. What is the real value and purpose behind every piece of work students do for my class? What exactly is my job, and what are my responsibilities toward others, both as a teacher and as a human being?

Gimme a Later Curfew... Or Else!

Those nearest and dearest to me know how much I’ve struggled with my third period class this year. They are all nice kids individually, and I have good relationships with most of them—and with the parents of the rest. Marina loves to read, Alejandro, TJ, Sam and Abdul all play on the football team together, Carlos’s girlfriend is pregnant with their second child, Kora is a refugee from Burma, Lisa is involved in church activities every single day after school. But together as a class, they truly are a pack of little monsters. A typical day with this class involves involves DJ wandering aimlessly around the room throughout my lesson, Bobby alternately yelling, whispering, or gesturing at his friends while staring at me defiantly, Kevin slumped asleep on his desk (he gets really grumpy when I wake him up every day), Tyson doing his very best to ignore me, and general mayhem and chattiness from the rest of the class.

We are currently working on writing editorials in this class. Today, I gave a mini-lecture with a powerpoint presentation on Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals: pathos, logos, and ethos. I asked students to come up with three arguments (one using each type of rhetorical appeal) to convince their parents to make their curfew later. Things started out fine with logos (arguing through the use of logic, reasoning, or facts). “You should let me stay out later because I’m a responsible student; I get good grades, thus I’ll also be responsible when I’m out at night.” We took a turn for the worse, though, with Sarah’s suggestion, “You should let me go so I don’t have to sneak out.” I told her that sounded more like blackmail than reasoning to me.

Things deteriorated further as we began discussing how to appeal to their parents’ emotions (arguing using pathos). Students came up with such persuasive techniques as crying, yelling, and staying locked in their rooms until their parents met their demands. I kept reminding them of our definition of rhetoric—persuasive LANGUAGE, not a dramatic display. The worst was, “A good persuasive technique would be to cry and shout at them till you get your way! It works. I do it till my parents give in.” I am a little horrified.

Finally, we reached ethos (citing a credible authority). Irene suggested telling the parents, “My teacher says I need to do my homework, so I have to go work on a project at a friend’s house,” in order to weasel her way into a later curfew. Again, I tried to redirect our course back towards argument using persuasive language. The point is to convince your parents to agree to let you stay out later, not to trick them into it.

At the end of all of this, Bobby pipes up with a question, and it just makes me grin: “Do you have kids, Ms. Sterling?” Thank god I don’t. And thank god I taught this lesson; I can now appreciate how WELL my students are behaving around me, as compared to what they apparently serve to their parents! I’m so happy to meet them in the classroom and not at the dinner table.