Your Behavior in High School Matters: The Past is Never Really Past

This week’s Supreme Court hearings are appropriately the subject of a great deal of discussion. They should be. The issues are weighty and important. One of the smaller lessons to take from this event is that what happens in high school does not stay in high school. What happens in college does not get forgotten.

Whether it is “boys will be boys” or “the best years of your life” or “you only live once” or any other rationalization for problematic choices – or worse – being young does not give you a free pass.

It should not.

I am not the person I was in high school or college, and I am happy about that. It is my strong belief that, as people age, they get better. However, that doesn’t mean that high schoolers’ decisions are without weight or should be casually excused.

Parents are concerned about academic behavior and place great importance on them. I have heard ad nauseam that a single B in a class could be a life sentence. Not getting into a college, earning a poor test score, or being closed out of a course are often viewed as life-altering.

There are many other choices that are life-altering. Sometimes, these choices are the means of discovering and creating our senses of self. Some choices reveal ourselves. This process of navigating decision-making is critical to the process of becoming adult. 

I have written about the car crash on October 13. While such events are many feel extreme, they are no more extreme than what happened to Dr. Ford. Attempts to minimize the power of teenage misbehavior may be an attempt to excuse or explain away its weight. This fails to recognize that, once we have some degree of independence, we must accept some degree of responsibility.

When I was in high school, very few people were carrying cameras all the time. Certainly, the photographic records of my classmate’s deeds and misdeeds were not posted publically. Social media makes this lesson all the more critical. What if Brett Kavanagh’s high school experience was chronicled by more than his calendar and yearbook?

I want my students to hear clearly: what you do today affects your future and the future of people around you, some of whom you may not even know. No one has a “get out of responsibility free card.” Or no one should.

I want my students to understand that the choices they make today, for better or for worse, will ride with (and within) them forever. What they choose to do about those choices, how they deal with them, confront them, or address them is a critical test of their maturity.

I want my students to be able to recognize problematic behavior in themselves and others and deal with it in a healthy way. When they make mistakes, I want them to learn to own those errors, and then recognize and repair what they have done to the fullest degree possible – and to work to make sure such things do not happen again to them or anyone else.

Teenage drug use, pregnancy, sexual assault, and other adolescent issues are not minor because those doing them are young. We often debate if individuals under eighteen should be “charged as adults.” When the crime is serious, we often argue that youthfulness does not save them from adult accountability. It certainly doesn’t save those whom they have hurt.

Hopefully, a small positive effect of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings is that it helps kids recognize their power and responsibility. I hope they hear the message the past is never really past. The choices we make  - and how we grow up and deal with them – become the substance of ourselves. 

Homecoming Ghosts: The October 13th Crash Ten Years Later

I see ghosts in the halls of my high school. Most of the time, they are ghosts of the living. I look down the hall and say, “there’s Sarah!” And then I remember that Sarah graduated.  She is at college or medical school or married and living in Los Angeles. That isn’t Sarah at all, but a student who reminds me of her. I turn a corner and remember how Kevin made me laugh as he imitated a teacher’s walk down the hallway. Several times a day, I am reminded of students from two or twelve or twenty-five years ago. They may have graduated, but they are still with me.

Some will never come home. There is an area in the front of the school with plaques dedicated to students who have died. I pass it several times a day and, each time, I mourn them. Sometimes, if it has been a particularly difficult day, I avoid that hall.

Most of my time, of course, is devoted to the students in front of me. My memories are fleeting, but my classes are not. I silently wish for my students what I wish for my own two children. Even after my students have left my classroom, our school, and moved away from our community, I want to remind them that they matter: that I remember them, and I am waiting for them to come home and tell their stories. I don’t tell them that I will probably “see” them in the hall anyway.

Ten years ago, on homecoming weekend, a car carrying several students sped past my home. A roaring engine awakened me briefly. The kids had been to a party, left, and were returning. They were intoxicated and collided with a tree at high speed. The driver and the young man sitting behind him were killed.

I go past the site of this crash daily. There is no plaque or memorial. The sign used to say, “Dead End.” Now it reads, “No Outlet.”

Taking a different route or changing the sign doesn’t change the past. There was a great deal of blaming and finger pointing after the crash. Lawsuits, criminal charges, and media coverage diverted our attention for a while. New parent groups were created. New legislation was passed that held parents more accountable for parties in their homes.

Then everyone moved on. Too many other young people died in the intervening years, some shortly after and some only a few weeks ago. Some due to the awful randomness of medical misfortune, others as a result of drugs and alcohol.

They haunt me.

A recent survey suggests that we are making some progress in the prevention and treatment of teenage substance abuse. I am eager to believe that such surveys give us useful, albeit incomplete, information. We need to act on that information.  

What has changed in the ten years since two boys died at the end of my street?  What must we do differently after students die from overdoses, are killed in parking lots, take their own lives, or die suspiciously?

Almost thirty years ago, it was funny when Julie Brown sang that the homecoming queen’s got a gun. The song is grotesque in a post-Columbine world. It is more that not funny; it feels horribly prophetic and wrong.

Seven years ago, I wrote that I was remembering but not surrendering. Times change, but the legacy of that horrible homecoming continues to haunt me. I remember students who struggled and succeeded. I remember students who graduated hoping for success later. Many found it. Some come home and talk about their journeys. The kids who never got a chance to grow up are still with me in the halls of our high school.

Some I can only hold in my heart and memories. They join my classes. I see them in the halls. They remind me that the important lessons go far beyond reading, writing, and preparing for college. They urge me to reach out to every student and make sure they know how much they mean to all of us: to do whatever I can to make sure that every child comes home.

Street Smart or Street Stupid?

When we say, “street smarts,” we are usually talking about practical knowledge. People who are street smart, as opposed to book smart, have practical knowledge and can handle themselves in rough and tumble situations.

I want to talk about street smarts in a more literal way. I am concerned that people are not smart in the street. In other words, that their behavior as the drive and bicycle makes me wonder if we need a new term: street stupid. My daughter is a brand new driver and is often shocked at how poorly many people drive. I told her, “Not all people are poor drivers, but most of them are.” I think too many of us are street stupid and it could be deadly.

Yesterday, I saw a dad riding bicycles with his two children. Both children were wearing helmets but Dad was not. I can see the situation: Dad hits one of the many potholes in our streets and is incapacitated. Now what do the kids do? Perhaps dad is either so hardheaded or stupid that a helmet won’t make a difference. If we want our children to take proper safety precautions, what message do we send them when we fail to take those precautions ourselves? Unless there is nothing in your head worth protecting, why not wear a helmet? We need to model street smarts for our kids!

As I continue to teach my daughter to drive, I instructed her to always assume a bicycle will ignore the traffic rules. It is such a wonderful and rare exception when a bike stops at a stop sign. It is my experience that many bikes don’t even stop at traffic lights. Forget about riding in a single file line, many bikes are all over the road. Too many times, I come around a curve or turn a corner to find a bicycle heading directly toward me. Usually that rider has no helmet. Duh!

Street stupidity by bikers is liable to get them hurt or killed. When car drivers are street stupid, they are more likely to kill innocent people. How hard is it to turn on the headlights of your car? The car creates electric power, so there is no cost. The bulbs last for a long time. In my state, the law requires motorists to use their headlights if they have their windshield wipers on. Wait a minute. Isn’t that common sense? Next time it is raining or there is fog, count the number of cars without headlights on. Stupidity is rampant.

However, the place where street stupidity is an epidemic is the use of cell phones while driving. There has been a great deal of coverage of this issue in the popular press - using a cell phone, even if it is with some kind of hands-free device, is a driving distraction akin to drunk driving. How many times have you passed a driver going too slowly, driving dangerously, or not paying attention only to see that driver talking on a phone? But of course, we are better than that. We can talk on our phones and drive safely. Can we? Really? Always?

Driving while texting boggles my mind. It is in another universe from any of the other forms of street stupidity. According to the New York Times, people sending text messages will look away from the road for as much as five seconds. Think about how far a car going only thirty miles an hour can travel in five seconds. Think about the damage it can do. According to a Pew Research Center report, 27 percent of all adults and 26 percent of teens report sending text messages while driving! That means that one or more of the drivers near you on the road is probably looking at the phone and not the road.

So here is the gambit: is the cell phone call or text message worth an accident? Is it worth someone’s life? That is a loaded question. I thought about starting this posting with a quiz on each of these issues. But everyone knows the right answers. No sane, reasonable person would say that a text message or phone call was worth the pain an accident, even a minor one, would cause. Then why are so many people street stupid?

We can only hope that they don’t hurt people close to us.

Remembering But Not Surrendering

On the morning of October 14, 2006, my phone rang at 7 in the morning. It was my wife’s aunt, “Was that car crash on your street? It’s on the news.” I had a vague memory of hearing the Doppler sound of a car speeding past my bedroom window in the middle of the night. Soon our phone was ringing every four or five minutes.

An intoxicated graduate of Deerfield High School had sped down our street and hit a tree. He was killed as was the DHS senior sitting behind him. Three other young people survived.

For some in our community, the world changed that day. Unfortunately, it feels like there was a brief period of shock and sadness that passed all too quickly. There is the old truism that says a stoplight doesn’t get put up at an intersection until someone is killed; it cases like these, it takes much more than that.

I walked to end of my street on that October morning. The news crew was there and so were a few of my neighbors. There were no skid marks; the car never braked. The police had marked the pavement with colored paint. The mark on the tree was the only concrete indication that anything had happened. Unfortunately, this was a sign of things to come.

The next day, my eight-year-old son and twelve year old daughter had questions. They wanted to see what was going on at the end of their street, so the three of us took a short walk. The crash site had become a memorial and there was a small crowd. Signs, notes, pictures and tokens had been placed around the tree. Soon, one of the kids who was in the crash came out of a nearby house smoking a cigarette. My children were shocked to see him smoking. They thought that smoking at the site of a crash caused by substance abuse was disrespectful. I agreed. It was another sign of things to come – or rather, things not to come.

As the community grieved and looked for answers, it became clear that there was plenty of blame to go around. There was the pointing of fingers, filing of lawsuits, and forming of parent groups, but not enough progress. At one community meeting not long after the crash, some parents were far more concerned about their liability when hosting a party than their children’s well being.

Here we are three years later. It would be cliché to ask, “Has anything changed?” Are these deaths the price for teenage irresponsibility and recklessness? Do we have to sacrifice teenagers periodically in order to wake up the community? Is this unavoidable? Are there always going to be parents who enable and kids who misbehave?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, I will not surrender our children because some believe these events are inevitable. I will not give them up without one hell of a fight. When I ask kids, “what will it take to change behavior?” they do not have an answer. They don’t know. There are countless examples of how our attempts to stem the tide of teenage blood is ineffective. Yet, none of this excuses us and permits us to lay down and do nothing. No matter what our odds for success, we must not give up the struggle.

On the Friday before homecoming this year, my students and I talked about having a safe celebration. I woke up late on Homecoming Saturday. My phone didn’t ring. That doesn’t mean it won’t tomorrow or the next day. In fact, I know it eventually will, even while I am hoping it will not.

They are all our children and they are our responsibility. And while we cannot prevent every horror, we can try. We must try, and we must keep trying. Our children’s lives depend on it.