3/10 - Meeting with students at Met School
We travelled to the Met School, and started our day with the students. Prior to the start of school, we met with a group of three 9th grade students, to try to get a feel for what they knew about drugs, where they learned it, and what they would like to see in our program. Following this we were introduced to the entire school (or at least a large portion of it) at their morning meeting. We then sat in on Charly Adler's advisory, with a group of 10-12 students. I believe they were also all ninth graders. In this meeting, we tried to ask the same kind of questions we had asked earlier in the smaller group, but the students seemed much less receptive, perhaps because the group was larger, perhaps because their teacher was there. The following is the pertinent information from this meeting:
- Weed - It seems like that if these kids are going to do drugs, the drug of choice would probably be marijuana. One student said that he thought pot was OK, because "It came from God," i.e., it is a natural substance and therefore not harmful. (Oddly enough, the same student thought that LSD was OK as well, and it is definitely synthetic). This student said he would never do "harder drugs" (cocaine, heroin, et al.), although he could not give specific reasons why.
- Misinformation - Mr. Adler posed the question, "Does anyone know what is in ecstasy?" (Apparently E is big in Providence). The answers ranged from rat poison to gasoline. Clearly, a focus of our project should be in educating students as to what various drugs are actually made of, and what their physiological effects are.
- Authenticity - One of the goals of this meeting was to find out where these students go on the weekend and what they do. This will add some authenticity to the narratives we construct. Basically, our guesses were correct (Yay! We're NOT really old!), a lot of "hanging out" (Thayer St. is popular), under 21 clubs, the mall when money is available.
With this information, we now have a better idea of what the content of our project should be and can now work to fit this content into the conceptual framework we had already decided on.
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