T.J. B.

D.A.R.E. Essay 

This year in fifth grade we learned about D.A.R.E.  DARE stands for Drug, Abuse, Resistance, Education. Officer Mark was our D.A.R.E teacher and would come in from his work day to teach us about DARE for 50 minutes in Ms.Calhoun’s class. I looked forward to my Tuesdays with Officer Mark.

One of our lessons was about stress. Stress is a strain, or pressure, that is put on you by your friends, or any other people around you. If someone is putting stress on you to do something like smoke a cigarette, drink a type of alcohol, or do something daring, you can use different strategies to say “NO”. Walking away or making up an excuse are two of my personal favorites. We learned that this is also referred to as Peer Pressure. Peer stands for people, and the pressure is when someone is forcing you to do something. There may be a time when your friends dare you to  “throw the ball through the window”. What we learned is to either change the subject, say “Hey I think my mom is here, I have to go!”, or to simply walk away.

There are about 400,000 alcohol related deaths a year. There are 75,000 people who die from alcohol alone. An example of a alcohol related injury could be a family just going to enjoy Ice Cream, while there is a drunk driver who crashes into the car and causes serious injuries. Alcohol is a drug, but I did learn that it is one drug that you can choose to use if your 21 years old or older. The damage alcohol can do, no matter what age you are,  can still damage any organ in your body.

There are more than 200,000 smoking deaths in the U.S.A. There are more than 300 known chemicals in each cigarette. The drug that is in a cigarette is called Nicotine. It is illegal to smoke a cigarette if you are under the age of 18. Cigarettes can damage your lungs, cause yellow teeth, and can cause bad breath. You can eventually die from years of smoking, no matter what age you are.

In DARE class, we also talked alot about bullying versus what it means to be “mean”. Being mean is doing something unkind to a person once or twice. Bullying, however, is doing something mean over, and over again to the same person. Where bullying usually happens is at school in the cafeteria, recess, or where there is not as much adult supervision to stop the bullying. There is also something called cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is bullying on the internet, or social media. These can be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I think this can be just as harmful, or even more harmful than physical bullying because on social media, there is a much larger peer audience.

Officer Mark taught us DARE but made it lots of fun! We even played  DARE baseball. When you are up to bat you would ask for a single, double, triple, or homerun question. For each hit, you earn the amount of bases, by giving the correct answer!. Soon, we have the DARE baseball World Series. I really enjoyed having Officer Mark as my teacher!

Pledge:

I promise to stay drug free and make thoughtful decisions about all drugs.