Connecting the Dots: Drugs and the Web of Truth

By Rick Brooks

The American Journal of Public Health reports that it's likely the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) may have had it all wrong for the past decade. Testing and counseling for AIDS, a recent article stated, might well be contributing to the spread of the disease rather than its containment. The same article asserted that the testing/counseling approach promoted by the CDC was a lot like many of the anti-drug strategies of the 70s and 80s, which have been proven ineffective, even counterproductive. Trying to scare kids, providing them with detailed information, or simply trying to get them to feel better about themselves and their peers are all strategies that, by themselves, have failed.

Ask thoughtful adults who have been teaching or counseling for more than a few years and my hunch is that you will get some pretty straightforward answers about what works in prevention. From the wisest of them you'll hear something that's pretty hard to quantify.

In the classroom, the more formalized name for it is "webbing." Find a topic or an idea and build a web around it, a web of interrelated concepts that rely on history, science, language, art, civics, and other disciplines. Find places to attach the web. Help students make the connections with their own lives, and you can build a marvelous structure of understanding.

Here are some values for "webbing" around concepts that will help your students learn what they need to know about life and drugs. Attach your teaching to these points and see what happens:

1. Tell the truth. Teach and model and explain and support the important truths. Why? Because children and youth can detect inauthenticity better than you think. They get so much of it that, even though they have powerful forces urging them to believe things they know are untrue, if they have the time to reflect, they know what's right. Reinforce their truth-detecting and truth-telling skills.

2. Provide time and places to reflect. Make those safe places; peaceful places. It's said that an elementary school in Oakland, California, that had a highly effective peace curriculum also had a significant calming effect on the dangerous neighborhood surrounding it. Kids learned how to handle stress better. They shared more, told their parents about it, involved them.

3. Call students by their real names. Don't call students "those kids" (or those white people, black people, LD students, loudmouths, druggies, jerks, minorities, misfits) or whatever other derogatory handle that comes to mind. Imagine each student in a category of one. Watch each one light up when you look him or her in the eye and speak the name that says you know who he or she is.

4. Help each child build a positive relationship with at least one caring adult other than his or her parents. Offer the children another point of connection, another person who has enough emotional distance to be less judgmental and more supportive than the people who pay the bills.

5. Help each child reach out to help someone else. Psychologists who set up mental health centers to help depressed people in Sarajevo are saying that this is one of the few techniques that works. Help people get a commitment to something positive besides themselves. Amidst all the fear, hurt, anxiety, frustration, anger, and resignation, children and adults alike can find hope by focusing on others' needs rather than their own.

If you have followed this so far, you're probably thinking this is very familiar stuff. The point is, all these things are interrelated--like a web. If you look as much at the connections as the points that are connected, the web becomes complete.

Copyright © 1995:

Midwest Regional Center for
Drug-Free Schools & Communities


North Central Regional Educational Laboratory

Contact: info@ncrel.org

Posted on March 27, 1995

URL: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/sa/4-1dots.htm