Twice in my teaching life, I lost it. I completely lost control. I screamed in those classes, a little woman in a towering rage. Maybe I even cursed, though I can’t remember that, but cursing was probably at the bottom of the list of student concerns at that moment. I’m sure people heard me down the hall and on the floor below. I silenced all my students.

In the first case, some students apologized to me later, but they did not owe me an apology. No one should scream at kids for lack of homework compliance. I took a sledgehammer to the wasp on the wall that day. Across the years, I will always regret that one class.

I give myself a partial pass on the second event. I was addressing a specific instance of racism that had taken me by surprise, and I suspect casual racism never again felt casual to the student responsible. Letting my students know that racism fell outside of any category of acceptable behavior — well, that’s not so bad, although my loss of control remains in my memory. I briefly hammered that kid, and that was far from my best response. I lost a huge, teachable moment.

But here’s the thing: I am actually an exceptionally patient woman. On the patience scale, I give myself at least an “8” and maybe a “9” or “10.” You can push so many of my buttons before I get angry. When I do get angry, I may raise my voice, but I won’t throw the plaster apple on my desk. I won’t overturn desks.

Reader, try a few YouTube searches on topics like “teacher throws desk” or “teacher hits student.” Those videos are out there. So are videos of students attacking teachers. Another sobering search as we discuss arming teachers: “teacher committed suicide.” Sources claim there are 3.2 million teachers in the United States. Even if only a fraction of a fraction of 1% of those teachers have the potential to throw a desk, those teachers are out there, scattered all across our country. Some are even veterans with PTSD.

And then there’s the issue of the student who steals a gun. Theft is a common category on school referral forms. I spent hours once trying to help a teacher recover the new cell phone her husband had bought her, all without success. My strongest memories from that day: 1) My administration blaming the teacher for having had her phone upon her desk; 2) Watching as students who clearly had seen what happened chose to say nothing.

Eduhonesty: We have to pull in the guns. Adding more guns can and will increase the loss of life. And we have to stop talking about mental health care as a solution.

I live in a state where one of the biggest medical networks SHUT DOWN talk therapy a few months back because there were no available therapists. I’m sure a person could bump the line by threatening to kill themselves or someone else, but the idea that increased mental health care will somehow address the problem of school shootings — that idea crosses the line from disingenuous into manipulation and pure evil. Because the politicians calling for increased mental health care are not that stupid. They KNOW that preventative care is not out there. In many locations, crisis care is barely available. They know that preventative care would not stop the shootings, even if that care were available — even if those angry loners somehow sought therapy instead of revenge on their grandmothers.

Sometimes desperate educational leaders simply go too fast. As Lily Tomlin said, “For faster relief, try slowing down.”

What happens when you are trying to fix six impossible things before breakfast, while writing standards and lesson objectives on the board, and helping students with mask anxiety while other students are blissfully throwing their masks-optional face coverings into the waste basket? What happens while you run, run, run to get everything done?

Things get lost. Big things. Little things. Long-term and short-term things. Items on the list that matter simply disappear. It’s math really. If you have 14 hours of things to do and only 5 hours available, then 9 hours will remain undone. And if every day is about the same, the negative numbers will simply pile up. Nothing else is possible.

5 School hours for active learning (which does not include lunch, gym, recess if applicable, positive behavioral interventions, and other weird, random interruptions) take away 14 hours of useful, academic things to do = -9 hours of goals accomplished.

Eduhonesty: If kids have fallen behind, picking up the pace is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do. Lost kids deserve a chance to catch up — and that requires slowing down until they understand the content they missed. In math especially, switching to hyperdrive produces black holes and flattened kids who are spewing out weird numbers to try to make their teacher happy, if they are doing any work at all. And we shouldn’t be giving first graders four-syllable or maybe even three-syllable words on spelling tests. Yes, a number of kids can spell those words. But the fact that we get away with those spelling lists sometimes does not justify those lists.

And now for another post that has nothing to do with standardized testing. In pockets throughout the US, data demands keep triumphing over common sense as standardized tests and test preparation pre-empt instructional time. (Yada, yada, yada.) I’ll keep writing the occasional test post, until I get some indication that those classroom instructional hours are being returned to students — many of whom desperately need them.

But this is another post, meant for both parents and teachers. For a quick breakdown of ADHD facts, see Common Characteristics of ADHD – Santa Monica College (smc.edu). Santa Monica’s list is incomplete, but an excellent start in breaking down this topic. This post is not exactly about ADHD and accommodations either, though, despite the fact I’m overdue at spending more time on this increasingly important topic.

I just want to share a shower thought with readers: As an ADHD person myself, I believe I understand an important fact that often gets skipped in social media posts and other articles about ADHD management: The trial-and-error process of medicating children with ADHD is not nearly the “to-medicate-or-not-to-medicate choice” parents and teachers sometimes seem to believe. By middle school, that choice is no longer entirely in adult hands. Here is what supervising adults are up against:

ADHD Amber or Anthony can easily self-medicate throughout much of America, probably almost all of America. How many houses stock liquor? And even before weed was legal, I guarantee my middle-school students were finding supplies. Some red eyes might have been the result of playing Fortnite all night, but others came with faint odors wafting off hoodies and hair, whiffs that explained Amber or Anthony’s mostly agreeable, if slightly blank or disruptive, classroom behavior.

“How old is the oldest tree in the world?”

“We can look that up later, Anthony. For now, we should be focusing on today’s math.”

Here’s the thing about Anthony: He may not be able to Total Recall his way to Mars, but he can for sure blunt his way to the easy chair in a friend’s basement. I tried to control my own kids’ viewing habits and I was partially successful. However, I could not control friends’ houses. And once we hand those kids their phones, all bets are off in categories across the board.

So the choice is actually between medicating, not medicating and self-medicating. The first time that child with generalized anxiety disorder — often concomitant with ADHD — inhales THC or downs a homemade cocktail, the question of medication may go sideways in mere minutes. Gloriously unafraid, having fun with friends, friends who are having fun themselves watching nervous Amber relax — Amber may have set both feet firmly on a path of substance abuse.

I don’t want to oversimplify this issue. I believe genetic components, personal ambitions, family dynamics and background, actual physical location, degree of anxiety or depression, and other factors weigh heavily in what happens next. I also believe that starting set points can sometimes be critical. How is Anthony doing in school? Does Amber have friends, family or a therapist to help her process her feelings?

Eduhonesty: My thought in the shower was a simple one. Those unmedicated kids who are not managing to navigate daily life somewhat comfortably will frequently medicate themselves. It’s so easy to find those “medications,” so easy to take that edge off, at least once out of elementary school.

Teachers are sometimes accused of pushing for medication in order to make classroom control easier. Parents are sometimes attacked for choosing medication, told they “just need good, firm discipline.” (Or spanking, or no red dyes, or less screen time, or the right vitamins etc.) Too often, outsiders don’t understand that those screens HAVE been limited in houses where nutrition is being carefully monitored and books on child-rearing are piling up on shelves.

All families are unique. Decisions like medication require the voices of trained medical professionals who are receiving robust information from families and schools.

Parents: If your school has suggested that Amber or Anthony might require medication, please listen. Teachers can recognize those kids who are outliers, the kids whose inability to sit and listen is interfering with learning. Falling behind is never trivial; somewhere up the line, a student can reach a point of no return — the point where no math tutor can fill in enough gaps to make success in high school algebra possible, at least on the first try. Academic failures eat away at self-confidence, no matter how many positive messages and participation trophies a child receives.

Parents and schools can control nutrition and medication in elementary-age children. At the doorway to adolescence, though, that control slips away. Middle school kids toss their healthy school lunches in the trash and share a friend’s bag of bright red Takis instead. They stash their bong at a friend’s house, the house with the comfy basement and parent(s) who work the swing shift. They perfect strategies not to be caught. Quote from a high school boy of my acquaintance: “The man who invented Visine should have got a Nobel Prize.”

I wrote this post simply to lay out a truth that can get lost: A too-scared, too-scattered kid is more likely to self-medicate than live out middle school and high school in confusion and fear.

P.S. I’ve done fine in life and so has my ADHD child. I hope this post doesn’t come across as ominous because ADHD has many positive aspects. Hyper people can be amazingly productive once they get to work on their personal passions. And many kids will avoid intoxicants even when they are anxious. Still, what I wrote above deserves consideration. I got all “A”s in my French, Latin and Spanish classes in my senior year of high school, but, damn, I was higher than that proverbial kite some days. The smoke must have been wafting off of me. My very Latinesque teachers just smiled and let me slide by. The world forgives “A” students easily and I think no one wanted to cause me trouble. I honestly don’t know why so many people let me pass, but they did, and it turns out I am not an addictive personality. The problem is: you don’t know if you can slough the monkey off your back until you try. Not everyone is lucky.

I was too young for the war of the sixties and seventies, and also too female, but not too young to understand what was happening. I knew older boyfriends and brothers were slogging through jungles while I did my French and Spanish homework. After a few years, I would know people who had seen the Tet Offensive and Operation Rolling Thunder. I spent a year with a boyfriend who had stories of Vietnam from back behind the front lines, a guy who had been in “intelligence.” Intelligence duties apparently included trying to figure out how to file — or lose — the report from soldiers who had placed an explosive rocket up a water buffalo’s rectum, blowing the poor creature into random chunks.

In December of 1969, the US government instituted a lottery system for drafting men into the army, the first such lottery held since World War II. Three-hundred-sixty-six balls* were placed in a large lotto-like, glass container, each ball labeled with a birthdate, to determine the order in which men between 18 and 26 years old would be called into active military service. This system still exists, waiting to be put back into practice: (See Lottery | Selective Service System : Selective Service System (sss.gov) for details.)

The lottery system sounds “fair,” in the sense that it’s based on luck. But the Viet Nam draft was never fair. During my high school years, my school’s high poverty rate and low college enrollment rate made my male classmates prime draft targets. College offered a student deferment, but many boys in then south Tacoma did not come from college families. They had never had college in their plans — though some changed those plans to include further schooling, while others fled to Canada. Draft discussions ate up time in hallways, lunchrooms, and afterhours gatherings. Draft, draft, draft and the luck of an early or late birthdate dominated conversations during key periods of the war.

Eduhonesty: Flip to 2022. The discussions are just beginning, a low drone so far. Young men in high school are googling draft information. Young women are reassured that women are not included in any possible draft — though some are aware that a law intended to add them to the draft only recently failed to be passed. The courts have also suggested a gender-based draft may no longer pass muster. (Can women be drafted for war? (the-sun.com))

It’s early yet, but as we keep moving to support Ukraine, this topic is likely to gain momentum. I don’t recommend bringing it up. That will legitimize a still nascent fear that most likely will come to nothing. And our kids are so worried. The last few years have ensured a high level of anxiety in already-jittery students.

But I would prepare my “this is why you should not be worried” speech, my “we are a long way from boots on the ground” and “the current army should be able to meet any military needs without instituting another draft” speech. Because the topic has been edging into timeliness for weeks now. In these convoluted times, we owe our kids the benefit of a reassuring adult perspective. These kids grew up with Lone Survivor, Fury, JoJo Rabbit, Dunkirk, and Hacksaw Ridge, after all, not to mention decades of older war movies.

I do suggest we wait for them to bring that topic out into the open. We can create the very fear we are trying to assuage. I don’t believe atomic bomb duck and cover drills of the fifties and sixties made students safer, but they certainly made them much more frightened of nuclear annihilation. As we cowered below our desks with our heads on our knees, waiting for the roof to fall, at least some of us believed that roof might actually fall.

I suggest the draft as one topic we ought to hash out in our minds before it enters our classrooms. Hugs from the Blue Room, Ms. J

*February 29th is the reason why the year does not match the number of balls.