Drugs into Dialogue

When i was teacher training I sat in on a civics lesson which had a drugs awareness theme. Here were a group of fifteen year old boys (with all the interests that age implies) being sat down by somebody who was basically a well-to-do mum and being asked to create posters which warned against the dangers of drugs. 

One minute looking round at the boys' work revealed how seriously they were taking their project as they chatted away, drawing cartoon reefers and cartoon Rastas with big BANNED signs then going through the work. The whole lesson had the air of a gimme period for all involved and the teacher was ostensibly doing something else. 

For some reason i found the whole thing offensive, mainly because I saw it as an opportunity missed. Surely if teenage boys had anything real to say it would be about this sort of thing, but it seemed that both teacher and students had too much to lose to be honest in this scenario. 

It's a bit naughty of me to want to pursue this with kids of course, but this level of discourse appeals precisely because it seems to describe the grey area where much of the interesting stuff really lies. 

So I asked this bunch of kids what they thought of their task and soon they were telling me about fathers using drugs and how boring this made them, about how they'd tried certain things and how it didn't have any lasting appeal. I believed them. As a trainee I was of course positioned a bit more neutrally than their usual teacher and therefore had a better chance of getting at the truth. But it did leave me with a feeling that you might be able to avoid stereotyping and reductiveness as a teacher if you were subtle and informed.

This is not really the case. If you let yourself go with the drift of the teenage mind troubles await you as you discover or remember that there are in fact no distinctions save the ones you can invent. That's not strictly true - experience counts for something - but as teachers we package knowledge and deliver it much as supermarkets package and deliver foods i.e. economically, sanitary and for the masses.

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I sometimes think i would have been better of as a youth worker in a school rather than a teacher. True they get paid shit but they were always the ones with joking around in the dinner queue with the toughest kids, holding them in headlocks and bantering about something. These were the same youths who would sit at the end of corridors waiting for a classroom teacher, who would be obliged to try to tell them to move on, so they could get you involved in a row and so assert their thug power. 

There is something about the most rogue element which calls out to something in me,as  something i need to try to understand. Youth workers I knew took this to another level. They were the best people in the school. Sure they were messed up sometimes, as if in order to understand some of the kids' problems they needed to be going through them themselves (I'm talking about drugs and violence and illness), but at least they were alive. Teachers seemed dead in comparison. What the youth workers had was integrity. There was no ugly power relationship, no obligation. That's why they got paid so little. They were not peddling curricula for reasons they did not want to think about. 

Most of all I envied youth workers the quality of their dialogue with young people. Dialogue with young people can be disturbing but is often so revealing, so unburdened and addictive.