Prom Thoughts
May 4th, 2007While all my students are filled with anticipation for Prom, all I can do is wonder how much pain will come out of it. How many mistakes, shattered dreams, and hopes will end a little over 24 hours from now?
And, God forbid, what if it’s even worse?
May 4th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Prom thoughts…holy cow. Why so depressing? A prom is a dance for heaven’s sake. Many years ago it was a much more important rite of passage for students. Now it’s just a more dressed up version of what they do every weekend anyway. And expensive. On Monday we’ll hear all about everything (because they don’t think we listen) and we’ll shake our heads and carry on because that’s what we do. Okay, now you have ME depressed. Let them have their night.
May 5th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I feel like we’ve had this conversation before. Are we becoming repetitive, or is my memory starting to fail?
I guess part of my hope is that it’s not just a dressed up version of what they do every weekend. I like to think—actually, I firmly believe—the bulk spend their time on weekends bored out of their skull, doing homework and convinced that everyone else is having more fun than they are. I don’t think they party nearly as much as they would want to or we think.
Then prom comes along and we as a school spend weeks leading up to it, making it a giant deal. We talk endlessly about drinking and driving, with the message underneath it all of “We know you’re going to do it anyway, so just be careful.”1 I’m sure it’s my quiet faith in humanity (who knew I had any left?) but I feel like we’re telling a great many kids, “Yeah, whatever you do this night is okay.”
I’d be more comfortable if we told them the truth. If you need to get drunk on a night like this to have fun, then you’re in trouble. If you need alcohol to have a good time, then there’s a problem that’s starting when you’re just a senior or junior in high school. Finally, no not everyone is going to go get smashed, get high, or fulfill stereotypes involving cheap hotel rooms. The right and proper thing to be doing is having the best night possible with people you’ve spent twelve years with and a year from now you most likely will not see again.
I’m not sure “obeying the rules and the law” is too high a standard to be setting. I’m even more appalled that after all the time and energy we spend trying to make sure kids don’t do anything stupid, I can sit down at a table in the library ten minutes after a drunk-driving presentation and hear comments like, “I’m still going to drink.”
“Don’t touch the stove.” “Ouch!” “What the heck did I just tell you!?” I like to think that education can help ward off future mistakes by showing what’s happened to others—whether fictional or real. If not, why am I here? Why read literature? And yet we turn around and see that people only seem to learn through pain.
Makes me want to be more liberal in my use of the bat…
And then, of course, there’s all the attendant suffering that comes just from going to an event like prom. Maybe I’m surrounded by a set of particularly vapid minds, but I see so many kids who believe that the evening will somehow be some magical event they’ll never forget. It is just a dance, and it won’t change anything about anyone—I wish we told them this as well—and they believed us. 2
Maybe I should go teach tenth grade, where you don’t have to worry about this type of thing. Because I would very much like to see it as happy as it should be…because apparently I have a habit of bringing people down.
Of course, we are told to do what we’re good at…
1 I actually had a kid say she was insulted by one of the speakers at Project Crash who stated something to that extent. She was bothered by the fact that everyone around her—even the adults—assumed she was going to be doing the wrong thing.
2 I feel the same way about weddings. It is a sad, sad thing to see a sixteen year old girl who can’t wait for her wedding. She doesn’t care about the marriage—you know, that thing that will last forever and be difficult and require effort and love and sacrifice. No, she just can’t wait for the wedding, thinking it will somehow transport her out of her existence into a magical Barbie-world where everything is pink and wonderful. It doesn’t—you wake up the next morning and the person you married is the same, no magical transformations from a beast to a prince (or princess, for that matter).
May 18th, 2007 at 9:14 am
The TRUTH is always a depressing thing. There will still be kids going out to get “smashed,” kids will still ignore adults, people will still get hurt, and people will still die. The sad thing is not what you present here, it is that each year more and more teens die nationwide through this cause.