Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Hiram Is Here, and He's Baffled By All the Bakers.

Well, I hardly don't want to start this. Because I was a full on stoner in college. I went to lots of classes baked and failed some and took my punishment and got my shit together to finish in 5 years! Hooray! At a state school!

Anyway, during most of the 2000s, I just didn't have many students like that. I sensed they had their fun on the weekends, and found enough beer cans around campus on Monday mornings to know they were partying.

But in the past couple of years, I'm catching a whiff of weed in classes. Am I crazy? Is there an uptick in pot smoking in the 2000-teens?

I have a 9 am class and it's a little cramped. (We don't have Yaro's yawning windows!) We've had some cool mornings recently and I can smell weed on the jackets and sweaters of some students. It's not overpowering, and nobody is like Spicoli, but at least a few students seem blissful and peaceful and ready to listen - but not talk - as we cover some bitching Walt Whitman.

What's it like where you are? Is pot making a comeback? Do you have boozers? Do cokeheads still exist? Do meth kids even GET to class?

I'm baffled, and I knew right where to turn!



PS: To the RGM, please note I sent this in on Tuesday; that used to be my day! Oh, the new kids don't care.

13 comments:

  1. Haven't noticed any bakers - or butchers, for the that matter. But the Candlestick-makers! Don't get me started on the fucking candlestick-makers!

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    1. I occasionally wax nostalgic about my candlestick-making days in college. I was younger then and could live dangerously, burning the candle at both ends.

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  2. I have always had a lot of burners, but I think there are more recently. Nobody will buy the fucking textbook, but they always have money for an 1/8th.

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  3. Much more common these days are drugs to make them smarter, such as Adderall, and look where that gets them.

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    1. Ah, but don't you remember it's *your* job to make silk purses out of the you-know-whats?

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  4. Don't know, don't care. If they are doing their assignments on time and reasonably well and they are not disrupting class, then I do not care if they smoke weed outside of class. Or if their shirt still smells like weed from a previous puffing session. Or even if they are stoned in class. Oh, yeah, I know I'm supposed to be teaching them values or morals or how not to do drugs or whatev, but I just want them to be good students. If they are poor students, I can address that, but if the only issue is that they smoke weed, not much I can say about that. Of course, my attitude is no doubt due to the fact that I was a big-time college stoner and yet I graduated with a respectable 3.4 GPA after 4.5 years (not sure the extra semester had anything to do with it - it was a long time ago). I don't think it's impossible to be a decent student as well as a stoner, though it probably makes it a bit harder. Class participation is no doubt the sticking point, but I have a few students who never participate and don't appear to be stoned.

    Anyway at 9AM I wouldn't be able to tell the stoners from the other college students as they all seem half-asleep at that hour.

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  5. A few have been so aromatic that I was tempted to hover for the contact high. I'd much rather smell that than the other student aromas.

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  6. And here I thought this was going to be a post about colleagues who bake goodies for their classes, and why in the world they do that, and so on. My vocabulary just expanded a bit (in my defense, I do recognize at least one synonym: stoners. Maybe it's regional? Or maybe I just hung out with the wrong crowd in high school/college/grad school? Actually, I think the drug of choice in my college days was cocaine, which only a few could afford. That was probably a good thing; one of my classmates dropped dead of a heart attack on a street corner, apparently after partaking).

    I'm afraid I don't have a very good nose (seasonal allergies have taken their toll), and I'm generally not terribly good at identifying sources/levels of impairment. This goes back to high school, when apparently every member of my freshman history class *but* me was completely unsurprised when the kid who kept nodding off in class got expelled for smoking pot in the library bathroom. I just thought she was sleepy. That said, I'm under the impression that the most widespread source of impairment among my students is insufficient sleep. But I could be wrong about that.

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    1. Also, I'm sure Hiram already knows this, but in case there any newbies out there: never, ever let a student write a paper about marijuana legalization. It doesn't matter that the topic is in the news; or that legalization may well be (probably is) a good idea for a number of reasons; or even that it's entirely possible to write a smart, analytical, carefully-thought out paper on the subject. The student who tries to pick the topic (especially in freshman comp) won't write any of the possible variations of that paper. In fact, he (it's almost always a he) probably won't write the paper at all, or, if he claims to have done so, there's a better-than-usual chance that he'll have plagiarized it (and also a real chance that he won't remember doing so, because, well, he doesn't remember much of anything from the period during which he was producing the paper). So don't let a student start down that road. It never seems to end well.

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    2. Sorta-kinda, Cassandra. I had a student write a half-decent paper about marijuana legalization and the subsequent problems that store owners were having due to the cash-only nature of their businesses. But, I did say half-decent...the other half devolved into the common "weed is, like, so groovy, man..." tripe.

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    3. Now that sounds like a nice, narrow, focused topic related to the larger issue. It can, at least theoretically, be done. But, as you say, the devil is in the follow-up.

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    4. Sleep deprivation is a serious problem among college students. "Any college student with a poor sleeping habit may want to correct that soon, as a new study suggests it has adverse effects for academic performance on par with marijuana use and binge drinking.According to a new study, published in the journal SLEEP, getting to bed too late and not sleeping enough both caused students to get worse grades and to drop out of classes. The researchers took data from more than 43,000 students included in the 2009 American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment (NCHA)." http://www.universityherald.com/articles/9746/20140604/sleep-deprivation-in-college-students-as-detrimental-to-gpa-and-class-participation-as-marijuana-use-and-binge-drinking.htm

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  7. Storytime, kids... As a grad student, I was teaching a freshman comp class and talking about possible research paper topics. Of course, I listed out the Forbidden Topics Of Death, which included such all-time classics as The Death Penalty, Euthanasia, Abortion, and, of course, Legalizing Da Herb.

    After class, one of the guys who sat in the back row ambled up to the lectern so he could ask an important question... "Heeeyyyy...Mister Mindbender... I know you said not to write about legalizing marijuana, but could I do it anyway? I mean, you can make paper out of it, and...um..."

    I cut the guy off firmly but politely and sent him on his way, but I found it difficult not to say, "Dude... I got two words for you: Febreze. Visine. Look into them." The stank was just rolling off the guy in waves, and his eyes were as red as the Devil's.

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