hundred thousand dollars

we are working on historical fiction and the kids are having a tough time using historical events and items to situate their stories. for instance, did you know that ak-47s were used during the civil war, which was a time when black people moved north because they weren't being paid enough in the south? did you know that jews moved from italy to germany during the forties, just to find nice, new jobs? sometimes their confusion make sense. they think the underground railroad was a real railroad underground because they take the subway to school every day. they do not know anything at all about money, then or now.

we struggled with the idea of slavery and work and value and finally i asked how many would take a job paying $100,000 if offered one. only one child raised his hand. i was confused. they were laughing. a boy said he'd make more than that at his current job this year so i asked what he makes. minimum wage. i might have mentioned my students have an unusual approach to the academic world. i tried to make it easy. we rounded minimum wage up to ten bucks an hour and allowed a 9th grader to work 80 hours a week on top of school and socializing, just for kicks. that doesn't get a 9th grader much past $40,000. they were flabbergasted. most of them have not been planning on using the high school-college-job route. they were planning on starring in the nba, nfl, whatever league will take them in baseball or maybe making it big on american idol.

then a clever child who insists that he is a drug dealer claimed that drug dealers and prostitutes make big cash. i have lived in neighborhoods where drug dealers and prostitutes live and work. i can tell you that if they're making half as much as a public school teacher, they're hiding it well. the prostitution argument was easy. do the children know any prostitutes? no. of course they do, i say. do they know any crackheads? yes. i ask them how pretty the crackheads are. i ask about their teeth and hair. not pretty at all. i explain that many crackheads feed their addiction through prostitution. i ask if they think the crackheads are rich. no.

they are willing to fight for the drug dealers, though. this particular class has a soft spot for weed, although i suspect not more than two or three of them actually smoke. but they like to pretend they do because it is cool. i use the argument from freakonomics about how drug dealing is a very highly organized business and it's run much like mcdonald's- lots of poorly paid, inexperienced folks up front dealing with the customer and a smaller number of folks in each of the successive tiers of power and pay. they are devastated. i throw out a tidbit from the book. "where do drug dealers live?" a girl in the back giggles. "at home!" right. with their mamas. not a single one of them knows a drug dealer with his or her own apartment, vehicle, furniture. the drug dealers they know make lunch money.

but the child who wants to be a drug dealer is not yet stymied. what about growing your own weed he wants to know. in the bathtub. just so you know, most teenagers think all weed comes from the bathtub. seriously. the entire country is sustained by guys growing 3 or 4 plants with gro-lites in their bathrooms. because children in the city know very little about plant growth and cultivation. so it is time for math. how many plants can you fit in a bathtub without your parents noticing. for some reason they come up with three or four. i'm pretty sure my parents would have noticed one, but we go with four. how many buds on a plant? they think marijuana is like an apple tree, with hundreds of buds on it, giant. i suggest they imagine something they can fit four of in their bath tubs without their parents noticing. suddenly, they don't have so many buds on these imaginary plants. we go through the figuring, assuming they can tell the difference between male and female buds (they don't know the difference between weed and a maple leaf), can read all the instructions for growing and properly interpret them (they have difficulty with "get out a pen and a sheet of paper," so i don't hold out much hope for this part), and can afford to buy all the equipment required for cultivation. when all is said and done, they make lunch money. again. on top of that, they've had to do work. more than they would at a minimum wage job.

i'm not saying i've found a way to prevent children from becoming small-time, entrepreneurial drug dealers. i'm just saying it's been a long time since i laughed as hard as i did today.