Drugs, Sports and High School

I really do like my job. This semester I am in a Government class, which is fun because I haven't had that class since I was in high school, and it's an election year. I get to take notes and get a refresher course on how the country is supposed to function.

The other day I took two students out of the classroom to work together with me on an assignment. They had to read a couple of court cases and write a summary about them, so I read it to them and helped them out. One of the cases was about a high school doing mandatory drug testing on all students who are in sports or any extra-curricular activities. What I like about my job is that there are students I know well and sometimes we get into discussions about things and sometimes we get sidetracked and chat and take more time than we should on something. I asked the two guys if they thought our school should do drug testing. They kind of laughed and said that the football team would lose a lot of players. We kind of joked together about a few kids that we knew were into smoking pot. One of the guys started listing off names of people in class that would fail the test. It was quite a long list, and this is a very small school with a class of around 40 people.

He then looked around to make sure nobody was in the room and leaned forward so he could speak quietly. He told me the name of a student that had been an excellent football player a few years ago. This kid had been on the local news several times and was a fast runner who made lots of touchdowns. Apparently, after that year of school, he had confessed to my student that the only reason he could run so fast during those games was because he was high on meth at the time.

Wow. I didn't know what to think. Obviously it's not a big surprise, we live in a rural area and there is plenty of meth around. But still...I think about this kid, who has now been through rehab, remembering his high school days and maybe even his parents are so proud of him because he was so great at football. It's scary that the shit is so close to us without people even realizing it, and it's scary that my kids are going to be exposed to that someday.

These two guys I was helping that day told me they never did any drugs, and I believe them. But there are plenty of others, even my own students who are not only drinking on the weekends with their friends, but getting high, or worse, and sometimes even coming to school that way. And there's nothing that I can say or do to change that. Hopefully with my own children I will be able to instill in them the strength and intelligence to make better decisions with their lives.