Found this in my Facebook crawl, courtesy of a friend who liked it. I messaged the source and snagged his picture. These words take me straight back to my second year of teaching. I was talking with a likable, smiling young man who was in my alternative high school math class, trying to get him to focus on academics. I don’t know how we got to talking, but I’d guess his eyes were bloodshot. A lot of eyes were bloodshot in that school on any given day. That chat woke me up to realities I’d never even thought about.

Ms. Q: What would your parents think?

Student: They don’t care. We get high together. I go home and smoke with them after school.”

Oh.

I imagine he enjoyed derailing my lecture, which he did manage to stop cold. I believed him. He was an honest, likable kid. The alternative high school had a number of kids like him. They had great dispositions and a scary lack of mathematical understanding. Unfortunately, zero tolerance policies had gotten them thrown out of high schools when baggies of alleged oregano fell out of their lockers. Oregano was kind of a joke that year. “I had some oregano, Ms. Q. and they found it.”

I don’t remember exactly how that conversation ended. I am sure I defaulted to something like, “we have a lot of math to learn and it will be easier if you don’t smoke before you come to school.”

But that was one of the moments when I realized just what I was up against in my attempts to help my students. It’s hard to learn high school math when you are high. For some kids, I suspect it’s impossible.

I don’t know how many of the parents meant to see this Facebook post are reading my blog, but probably not too many, if any.  If you are out there, stop that! Don’t smoke with the kid before school and don’t smoke with the kid before the homework’s done. In fact, don’t smoke. This last line might be one of the silliest things I’ve ever written. I know and I’m sure readers know I can hardly begin to manage or control this problem, although I have been known to step into the gap and at least try.

Eduhonesty: I present this post as one more reason why we have to stop “grading” teachers on student performance and behavior. Those rubrics that grade teachers based on their students’ test scores and behaviors will lead some teachers to move into more upscale, easier schools with more dedicated students. I loved that kid in the above post. But he would have been nothing but trouble on a Charlotte Danielson rubric day. Too many kids like my boy — I have had many of them by now — and a smart teacher has to think about filling out the common application for a district where most of the students are college-bound.  If you are going to grade me on my students behavior and mathematical prowess, my best move will be to pick the best-behaved, highest-scoring kids around, and those kids are not usually found in urban and academically-disadvantaged schools.

For more on Charlotte Danielson, see my April 30, 2015 post.