So apparently high school is more of a hotbed of sex and stupidity than I had thought.
I work in a lovely and homogeneous district: suburban, squarely middle-class, mostly young white families. It's not the horror of inner-city hell where kids bring guns to school everyday (although we had a few fights and knife incidents this year) and care less about graduating then they do about surviving the day. District administration like to tout the numbers, which are impressive - 96% of our graduates go on to two- and four-year colleges. However, some of them go with bumps in their bellys and an impressive hangover, because it seems like every other child is drinking themselves sick and screwing everything that breathes.
This year the administration imposed stricter rules at school dances because they could no longer get any chaperones. Teachers complained that they couldn't effectively teach after they'd bleached their eyes out of their heads.
I chaperoned a dance last year. I still have nightmares where I wake up screaming, images of my female students with their asses surgically attached to the guys' crotches while their breasts spill out of their tight shirts reverberating in my poor abused brain.
They had a rule about no dancing with their hands on the floor. I honestly couldn't imagine what this meant. No breakdancing, whut? Then I saw it in action. I can never unsee that horror.
Before Christmas, my seniors were dillegently working on a flowchart. It had colors, keys, lines everywhere, and an impressive list of over fifty names and relationships. I asked what they were working on.
They were charting the supposed spread of genital herpes among the students.
Awesome.
Now, I went to a single-sex Catholic high school, very small, private, and expensive. Hooray for scholarships, yo. And I can attest to the shennanigans that a bunch of teenage girls can get into with the local boys from the nearby co-ed or brother schools. I'm not going to go on a rant about the dangers of teenage sex - I was fifteen the first time, and I remember how dangerous, exciting, and ultimately unsatisfying it was - but instead I'd like to focus on another aspect of this growing tendency to bump uglies in public places: sheer stupidity.
The new rumor is that two sophomores were caught in flagrante delicto in an elevator on Friday afternoon by the Assistant Principal. I can't imagine the AP's reaction. Did he haul them, flapping in the wind, down to detention? What did that phone call home sound like?
My repulsion here is centered not around the complete squickitude of 15-year-olds banging in the elevator, but the amazing idiocy of the act. Were they so overcome by each other's Axe body spray that they couldn't hold off until they got home? Did they honestly think someone would not walk in on them? Our school only has four floors. What were they hoping to accomplish? The elevator is slow, but damn.
This is just the latest example of the lack of forethought demonstrated by my students. That sophomores were the ones caught with their pants down doesn't surprise me at all - I teach sophs, and I can personally attest to their complete lack of common sense, critical thinking skills, or even an EEG with peaks on it. I love my students, and it wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't want so badly for them to succeed, so it especially irritates me when they demonstrate astoundingly poor judgement. A girl has a spangly piece of belly-button jewelry that must weight eight pounds. She took it out one day because the hole was infected, stuck it in her mouth, and put it back in. I give a review for an upcoming test where I'm dynamically gesturing and writing (with a sprained right wrist, mind you) on the board all the information they'll need, and all twenty-five kids stare at me throughout the class period. Not one of them takes notes, or even has a notebook out on the desk. I send a boy out of my classroom for throwing a book across the room, when I come back to my room after writing him up, I find he's taped my pens to my stapler. He thought I would laugh. This is the same boy, by the way, who thought it would be the height of humor to place a tack on my chair. I'm sending his mother the bill for the tetnus shot.
Kids these days - like a remarkable number of adults, notably the astronaut who drove cross-country wearing diapers to kill her rival - don't ever seem to think before they act or speak. I don't think students are less intelligent or capable then they were ten years ago; I think they are less willing to consider the consequences of their own actions. Why should they when Mom and Dad will call the college to explain why their cherub can't possibly write that paper on time, or will fill out a job application or even go on an interview with Princess to be sure she has the best opportunity and those evil corporate baddies aren't discriminating against anyone with ADHD. Kids don't have consequences for their actions, they simply have excuses. I'm not going to blame parents for this, because the blame lies on many shoulders. When a teacher in this district does not recommend a kid move up to honors level, the student's parents can simply override that and bump the kid up. When Jimmy then gets a D in a class beyond his ability, whose fault is it? The message this sends to kids is loud and clear: it doesn't matter what actions you take, because someone will be there to smooth your ride and cushion your fall; if at first you don't succeed, whine loud enough and you'll get that pony.
This atmosphere makes it ridiculously difficult to teach a novel like Catcher in the Rye - all about making choices and accepting consequences - with a straight face. Besides, all they want to talk about is the elevator gossip. Which is fine, as I can turn that into a teachable moment about the quality of the decisions they make, but in the end, they're all too busy staring at one girl's bare-to-there legs to really pay attention. And while my students reliably vilify Britney Spears or even the amazing elevator lovers, they don't see the correlation between dancing lewdly and outright intercourse in the school. Maybe I am being a fuddy-duddy, but damn, if you can't control yourself at a dance, no wonder you're all groping in the back stairwell, and don't think I didn't see you clutching your shirt to your chest as you ran off!
I have no solution to the problem of Elevator Nookie, except to post a guard with a crowbar at every corner of the school. I could discuss today's oversexualized environment, MTV, and Girls Gone Wild available on Bittorrent. But really, what it all comes to (bad pun, sorry) is that despite our best efforts and Decisions class, kids think hootchie tag in a high school elevator or on a public dance floor is A-OK, and that adults who rule differently are oppressing their basic right to poontang. Because, as my co-ed-school-educated friend recently reminded me, school is all about the flesh market, duh. That learning crap? So unnecessary. Everyone's totally ready for a career in porn - hey, it's working well for Jenna Jameson.
At least we'll all soon have porn-ready bodies; I think since the incident, everyone's been taking the stairs.
