Hi, It’s Lisa again and I’m back. Jacob’s featured again this week. He gives some good advice and also talks about how he’s an influence on some of the younger kids around him.
There are a lot of kids at high school. There’s probably at least two or three times the number of kids that there are in middle school. So, for all the freshman that are coming in, they’re quick to want to find a social group, some people to fit in with and if that leads them to make bad decisions, there are always other people that they can be friends with. They shouldn’t have to do something they don’t want to just to have friends.
If I were a freshmen going into high school again, the best thing that I could do is just not worry about what other people think and not worry about not having friends at the beginning of school, because you’ll meet a lot of people in high school and every single semester you’ll meet new people because you’re in a bunch new classes and you’re in a new lunch, if you just wait it out, you’ll find someone who feels the same way as you and can be a reinforcement who can keep you from falling into peer pressure then that’s the kind of person that you need to be with and it’s worth waiting.
One of my friends in particular was arrested for having four grams of marijuana and he had officers come to his class and they arrested him in the hall way, right outside of class and he had to go to court and to go to several weeks of drugs classes where he was drug tested every week. He had to bring his parents and he had to sit through a long class and he had to pay a lot of money. And after that he lost his parents trust, and because of that he couldn’t go out, he couldn’t hang out with us, he couldn’t see any of his friends. For a while we didn’t even hear from him because he was cut off from using the phone, the Internet or anything like that. It’s not worth losing all that over something so little.
Even though it may seem like the things you do in high school can be erased or that there’re not going to affect your future, that can be true, but it’s still going to affect who you become because, during high school, it’s a time where you’re becoming an adult and you’re finding out who you want to be and if you have drugs and alcohol influencing that, you may not make the decision that you would if you were in your normal state of mind. When you’re dealing with something as big as, the rest of your life, you want to make sure that you make the right decisions and that you become the person that you really want to be.
Hi, It’s Lisa again. I hope you liked that quick piece from Jacob. I really can relate to what he said about not worrying about what people think. It’s harder than you think, but really important. And in another week, Jen will be back with more thoughts for us, so don’t miss it.