Thursday, September 21, 2006

Chemical Indiscretion

My writing class has been reading Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, and the other day, we talked about the section where she tries to find a "cleansing" program before she gets her urine test so that it won't reveal what she calls her recent "chemical indiscretion."

One of my students said that part of the book surprised him, because he doesn't think of old people, you know, 40 year olds and stuff, doing drugs. I made a joke about yeah, people like me are WAY too old to be chemically indiscrete!

Then someone else said that they weren't surprised because their friends' parents were "chemically indiscrete" and high "all the time."

"Chemically" or otherwise, "indiscrete" became the catchwords of the day.

Sadly, these days, caffeine after 10am marks the heights of my chemical indiscretions.

3 comments:

  1. My students got a kick out of that passage too :)

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  2. Heh. This reminds me of when my students asked me, right flat out in class, if I ever smoked dope -- which I am NOT supposed to say yes to, b/c it's written into our contracts here (Arkansas, you know) that we can't encourage students to drink or use drugs -- but OTOH, what am I meant to do? Lie to students?

    "Not anymore," I said, which does happen to be the truth, because of the smoking bit, and which they found hilarious.

    I'm afraid it didn't fulfill the spirit of my contract, though.

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  3. Wow, not supposed to say yes? Could you say, "yes, but it wasn't the smartest thing I could have done"?

    Or, better yet, "Yes, but since you don't follow my lead in devoting 12 hours a day to school stuff, I don't expect you to follow my lead in anything else."

    It seems to me that being honest is way better than BSing our students. But I'm betting there are times when my administration would wish I weren't.

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