Spooning is to Sex as Marijuana is to Crack: Spooning, the Gateway Drug

Spooning is to Sex as Marijuana is to Crack: Spooning, the Gateway Drug
As Erin pointed out today in class, marijuana has become the gateway drug that lends itself to the ease of its users to experiment with other more “hardcore” drugs. It’s not just in the drug scene that we encounter this cause and effect relationship, though. Start small with anything and there’s no telling what consequences could lie ahead. The same is true for public displays of affection (PDA). One day the kids are holding hands and next thing you know, they could be partaking in spooning, which as we know is very suggestive of the phases thereafter. The ever so scholarly and reliable UrbanDictionary.com defines “spooning” as: “A horizontal hug where the friends/lovers lie back to chest, and fit into each others nooks. Like little spoons in a drawer.” (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spooning)

For those visual learners who need a picture, look no further:






Of course I’m exaggerating on the aftermath of what is to come from spooning, but I think the realization is that students start out very shy when it comes to experimenting, but once they find something that brings them pleasure, rarely true happiness, they have little difficulty in expanding their experimental procedures. A key for us teachers is to realize the importance that achieving “happiness” is to our students, especially the upper grades.

It has become so natural in this materialized culture to accept the flawed view of happiness that is present in all of the typical areas such as media, music, etc., and to see this slowly become more highly and quickly accepted is just sad. It seems as if students lack a way of reasoning that used to come as second nature to previous generations. Instead of analyzing any situation, they’ll take the opinions and promptings of others at face value and adopt the beliefs as their own without thought of any consequence. This can have a lasting impact on the level of their true happiness.

Some may say that the level of true happiness of our students is not the responsibility of the teacher. I will not say whether I agree or disagree, but if it is, some very practical measures should be taken to try to teach happiness to our students. I firmly believe that pleasures such as drugs, alcohol and sex can take away, or at least cloud or cover up the happiness that students could experience. They can form a mask that, after a period of experimentation, the student is not easily able to take off. We as teachers need to be able to recognize the subtle yet prevalent signs of these abuses and take practical measures to counter act the lost feelings that students experience.

How are we to accomplish this goal to an extent that we can impact the lives of the students? Like I stated previously, I think we need to find the problems at the root and take necessary measures to fix them. I know I'm being kind of vague and jumping around the ideas of exactly how to do this, there's a simple reason as to why- I just don't know. Maybe there are some sort of intervention programs that can be implemented in the schools or maybe it's to be taken case by case. I think in private schools, specifically religious schools, it can be easier to take a wide spread intervention approach to teach the fundamentals of what brings happiness and how they are different from the false happiness that our culture promotes. In a public school, this may be a more difficult feat to accomplish. In class meetings, if appropriate, teachers and students can address the issues that the students encounter everyday and how they affect their daily lives and if it makes them more "happy."