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ADDICTION
Good Grades, Bad Choices: The Hidden Challenge of Substance Abuse in Successful Students
Blinded by stereotypes, we can miss the red flags
As a young teacher, I was convinced that I knew which students were using drugs and which ones were not based on the grades they earned in my class. How naive, right? I came by this attitude honestly.
Administrators hammered it into us that test scores were the be-all-and-end-all, and they constantly put pressure on teachers to push kids harder and harder to max out those grades. If grades were strong, then the kid was likely squeaky clean and A-ok.
If only it were that simple.
In my opinion, kids’ grades show how well they test. Nothing more. Once drug and alcohol use and abuse enter the picture, all bets are off.
As teachers, we were taught that the hallmark for noticing that a student was using substances was a drop in grades, and sometimes that was true; however, our bias of seeing academically achieving students as “good kids” often blocked us from seeing when kids were in serious trouble.
