To be fair, anything I planted that couldn’t hack it without help wasn’t going to do too well.
At least I kept the local slugs well fed on hostas and tomatoes.
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Sugar maple leaves curl some, as in only somewhat “cupping”. They retain their color for quite a while after falling. Something else interesting to me about living in New England was how different trees release their leaves at different times of the year. Oaks and beeches, for example, hang onto their leaves all winter and shed them in the spring during new growth. Maples, poplars and ashes drop them in fall, and not at the same time.
When my grandma was dying, I went to see her one last time in California and brought her a whole manila envelope full of red, orange, pink and yellow sugar maple leaves, which she completely enjoyed. A good memory.
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The problem is that by the time acceptable evidence to the contrary has been available, too many actions have been taken. The cognitive load is low, but the cognitive dissonance is high.
Imagine, in the drug climate that America labours under, being the teacher that says “Oh, don’t be silly! That’s not a marijuana leaf!”
Suddenly you are ‘the teacher that knows about drugs’! And that must mean you admit knowledge of drugs that others claim cupidity about! And that must mean exposure to drugs that others lack! And that means YOU HAVE DONE DRUGS!!!
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I should have said - if this was done by another pupil as a ‘prank’, which is an idea mentioned in the news article.
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No. Cannabis leaves will hold up and look just fine for hours as long as they’re kept away from extreme heat and direct sunlight.
Fun fact: another great plant that looks an awful lot like the cannabis leaf is false aralia.
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Your arguments feel like concern-trolling, to me.
“But what about the poor stupid teachers and administrators who don’t want to be put in positions of actually having to make a rational decision! The horror! We can’t expect them to be all things to all people!”
Pshaw, that’s ludicrous. They get paid to use their brains, and this situation is no exception.
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I think that is the leaf that I used in sixth grade for my drug awareness presentation…
Along with a bag of random pills/vitamins/etc from the medicine cabinet; dried basil/oregano; and some powdered sugar or flour. Only comment received from a teacher was when another student was daring somebody to take a cod liver oil capsule “unless you are sure what that is, don’t do it”. c. ~1982 (white dude who could get away with anything)
You said Pshaw. One Internet point for you, please collect at the gift shop.
(totes agree with your position)
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Ooooh goody!!!
Upon re-reading the thing I was lamb-baste-ing with my pshaw-baster, it could have been intended as irony. You know how people are ironical but then it kinda loses the effect in the telling, similar to what is happening for me right now, in this very sentence? But it just didn’t work as irony, for me. My laugh-o-meter never got out of Pshaw-shank.
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I’m not arguing that it was the right decision. I’m trying to explain how witch-hunts work, because McCarthyist urges seem to have been channelled into ‘moral issues’ in the US such as drugs and sexual experience. It’s of course convenient to fuck around with schools in this way because kids have even fewer routes to defend their right to be treated rationally than communists or blacks.
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Let’s assume that the authorities here are right (kid had marijuana, and marijuana is bad (m’kay))
Kid does something dumb - treat problem with reduced education
This system is so broken that it fails even when the premises are true.
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Personally, I think electroconvulsive therapy is appropriate in this situation, followed by a stint at Guantanamo.
He should be having panic attacks about college. What do you think the employment picture is going to look like when he gets out of school? I can’t tell you how many people with degrees in “safe” fields can’t find work in those fields.
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Sorry, I wasn’t being serious. I think these zero tolerance policies are foolishness.
I don’t know why administrators and police departments ALWAYS stick to their guns, even when it’s something as stupid as this. The teachers, principals, superintendents could have just said, “Sorry, this was a mistake on our part. Everything will go back to normal now.” Instead, they ALWAYS double down.
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Not quite always.
A certain young friend of mine accidentally took a pocket knife to school about a year ago (which another child saw briefly), and then lied about it (vehemently), and then was caught in said lie.
We had to spend some time chatting with the Principal and others. It had the potential to get very ugly. I’m happy to say that the school administration were cool-headed and reasonable.
Said child won’t make that mistake again. 
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