Why go to high school when you can go to school high? In an anonymous piece on the Radio Free Exile website “Bob Smith,” a 59-year old former science teacher, describes how years of getting high while planning his lessons provided him with “insights into the educational process” and other “truly important things about teaching.” Take, for example, his solution to the problem of how to explain the concept of density to middle schoolers.
Suddenly, a flash of the legendary insight: I just won’t teach density. Not at all. Never again. Now, as first year teachers learn, you teach what they tell you to teach. But as some teachers soon learn, you can teach what you like if everything you do works. I had been pretty successful in all the other areas of science I was teaching, and I realized that I would be doing everyone a favor if I unilaterally declared that piece of the pie dispensable, which I did, and I’m sure that no one ever missed it.
Believing he was at his most inventive and insightful while stoned, Saturdays became the day when Smith ruminated on his teaching, wrote curriculum, made plans, and got high. “I sometimes laugh to myself when something I’ve designed has gone over well with the students. They would be amazed at the conditions under which the ideas were hatched,” Smith writes.
In fact, I should go so far as to confess that when discussing drugs with students – a requirement of science curriculum in those grades – I have presented to the students the positives as well as the negatives of marijuana use, including ‘reports’ that people often feel more creative and insightful, and that people smoke it because it’s fun. This is an important part of the drug education piece that is always omitted: telling kids why people use drugs.
If you’re concerned about having a teacher like “Bob Smith” giving his fair and balanced view of recreational drug use to kids, fear not. He’s no longer teaching middle school. He’s now an ed school professor.
Higher ed, indeed.
My Latin teacher senior year actually boozed it up during class (he kept it in a travel coffee mug). We were supposed to be reading “The Aeneid” but about half the time he let us do whatever we wanted- even leaving our closed campus to hang out at Dunkin’ Donuts. When we actually did the translation work, it was as a group.
Our grades were based on tests that basically were a memory exercise. The teacher would tell us that one of 5 or 6 passages would be on the test. We would memorize the first sentence of each in Latin so that we could recognize it and also the corresponding English translation. Then we would just write the translation from memory. Memorizing portions of “The Aeneid” may not be a bad thing, but it didn’t help us improve our Latin skills (the supposed goal of the class).
We should’ve complained about this but being seniors we thought it was great- an easy A in a course that looked impressive on our college applications.
I heard that eventually the school forced the teacher into rehab.
I don’t think Mr. Smith should flatter himself so. The students probably learned by teaching themselves.