Today I was at the gym. I don't go to socialize. I go to work out. Nothing bugs me more than loud personal conversations between "workout buddies." If you want to talk, go grab coffee. Anyway, two teenage girls hop on the elliptical machines next to me and begin chatting with each other. Almost immediately the conversation turns to their recent experience with the drug Ecstasy. One starts talking about how it made people who walked by her look as if they disappeared. The other talked about how she kept asking people how their trip to China was, even though no one had gone to China. I have never done ecstasy so I have no idea if this is a normal reaction or not. Either way, the casual way they were discussing their drug use, which wasn't just limited to ecstasy, was disturbing.
Then tall, dark haired girl turns to short, blond haired girl and tells her that she gave a classmate a blow job in the hallway during the last week of school. This then leads to a discussion about which friend is doing what to which boy and it was at that point I decided to lock my daughter in her room, never allow her to leave the house, and homeschool her until she is twenty-three and a college graduate. She will then work from home until she is twenty-seven at which point I will will pick out a nice man for her to marry and then bear my grandchildren.
As I got off the elliptical and walked behind them to leave I noticed they were both wearing shirts from a well-respected Christian high school here in town, where the student body doesn't really have a reputation of drug using, sex-crazed individuals. It's not that I am naive enough to think that kids who attend a Christian school or Christians in general don't do this type of thing, but it was a little surprising that they attended this particular school and they were talking about behaviors that apparently are common place among many students who attend this fine institution with such a cavalier attitude. I would expect this from students of some other schools; I taught high school for six years. I know more than I ever cared to know about teenage behavior.
I was tempted to say something as I walked out. There were so many things running through my mind, but ultimately I said nothing. I, instead, made a silent promise to myself that my husband now has my permission to buy a gun and make sure that he is cleaning it each and everytime our kids have guests over when they become teens, all the while chanting, "I shoot to kill. I don't like to waste bullets" or something to that effect.
4 comments:
Teaching high school must have been quite an eye-opener! I must tell you, from the things I hear from my daughters on the college campus (they both commute), as well as more and more the things I read in even our local paper, I'm just not surprised. Sometimes it feels that as a society, we're not making much forward progress.
I loved teaching high school, but it was certainly interesting and sad in many respects with regards to what was portrayed as commonplace. There just seems to be a general decline in morals and self-respect. It scares me to think about what our world will be like when my daughter is a teen.
It makes me both sick and sad to hear that. These kids are in SUCH a rush to grow up, not realizing the consequences their actions could have. The fact that they're from a "good" school shows just how prevalent that kind of behavior is.
Absolutely. I guess no school, regardless of its status, is immune to these types of behaviors. It was just so shocking to me the casual way with which all of this was discussed. Sad indeed!
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