Just say no!

A couple weeks ago (actually, closer to a month ago) was Red Ribbon Week. What I remember of RRW from my own elementary school years consisted of drug sniffing dogs showing off their skills, various competitions among classes for a pizza party, and copious amounts of thin plastic red ribbon tied to the fences, randomly or by design.

Considering that, RRW hasn't really changed all that much. Here's a breakdown of the activities my school participated in:

Monday - start of RRW; pass out those awful, scratchy, "red" but really orange, plastic bracelets that I always was relieved to take off at the end of the week; assembly by a puppeteer/magician with catch phrase "Too smart to start!"; beginning of prize give away at lunch time for students who have their plastic bracelets (each bracelet has a number on it)

Tuesday - nothing related to RRW (except the lunch time give away) because yesterday's assembly was so freaking long that teachers spend all of today catching up on academics.

(I'm not at my student teaching school after Tuesday of each week, but they informed me about it anyway)

Wednesday - students spend some class time working on "Too smart to start!" themed activities; depending on grade level, these activities ranged from drawing pictures of different ways to be "Too smart to start" through the physical, emotional, psychological, and economical effect of drugs.

Thursday - another long-ass assembly, this time a presentation from the local police force, sans drug sniffing dogs (boo, the dogs are cool); murmurs throughout teacher population of doing away with RRW in lieu for teaching actual content; the smarter, more savy, and thus better teachers breathe a sigh of relief (or a smirk of arrogance, depending on the personality of the teacher) for planning ahead and integrating RRW themes into academic content.

Friday - last day of RRW!; competitions in K-3 and 4-6 categories of who drew the best pictures/wrote the best essays about being "Too smart to start!" judged and prizes handed out; the entire school population can finally cut off those plastic bracelets and feel the blood circulate through that hand again.

The funny thing is, most kids at this school probably have more first hand experience with seeing the effects of drugs than any of their upper-middle-class, mainly white teachers. I saw some of the drawings they did; a blind person would have been able to detect the fakeness in some of those illustrations.

Which leads me to ask: are we really teaching students to say no to drugs, or are they the ones playing along, pacifying the adults? Who, for many inner city students, is the sole steady grown-up role model they have and thus want to impress. Because these are the people, maybe the only people, who have higher aspirations for them. Who view through jaded-but-still-rose-colored glasses, hoping that their students will reach that full-ride scholarship to a prestigious 4-year university, unscathed by the environment they live in. Most of these students know, at the bottom of their hearts, parts that they don't even know they have, that statistics are against them, as is practically everything else on the face of the planet.

But they still pop out with pat answers, play acting the dream for the adults who care so much for them and wish them so much better, because these kids know what it feels like to be disappointed.

Wow, I didn't mean to make this entry so angst-filled. On a brighter note, the essays by the older grades were less contrived. A few were quite good. Maybe it's just the natural tendency for younger students to please their teachers that make them do the fake-answer thing. I hope so.