”Will, work with me here. You know the routine. This is getting ridiculous,” the dean had said.

“Yessir, I know. I’m really sorry.” Will replied. “I promise it won’t happen again, it really won’t.”

This last thought crosses his mind as he stalks past the dean’s office, zipping his sweatshirt up to his neck to cover his bare shirt collar. He has already decided it’s a bad day, and his mood darkens further when he spots his Bible teacher walking towards him as he checks his mail. He never turned in the two page essay that was due Monday, three days before, and brainstorms frantically to come up with a palatable excuse for not handing it in with everyone else.

“How’s that presentation coming, Will?” Chaplain Rogers call

I was put on academic probation and placed in a proctored night study hall where my assignments were documented and monitored. Almost denied re-entry because of a C- average, my advisor made an appointment with a local psychiatrist to have me tested for ADD, which I was diagnosed as having “severely.” Though hypothetically this explained a lot, I was still very pessimistic about the legitimacy of ADD. But, I was prescribed for Adderall, and returned to McCallie in the fall a different student. My grade point average in eleventh grade was a 2.2; last fall I managed a 3.8 average. Also, my SAT scores, already above average, jumped more than a hundred and fifty points when I took it again. The same AP teacher that wrote my parents the year before wrote me a brilliant college recommendation.

To treat ADD, medicines have been designed that effectively increase the levels of these neurotransmitters present in the body, thus calming the individual enough that they are able to stay on task longer and do work more efficiently. These drugs have been clinically proven to alter the patient’s behavior and mental capacity, but there is an ever-growing faction of parents and physicians objected to the medication of ADD. Though the drugs can sometimes be addictive or unhealthy, most of the opposition is directed toward the moral dilemma of giving youth drugs to calibrate them to the academic and social schemas of our community. As psychologist David Stein writes in his book, Ritalin is Not the Answer:

This last spring, Will, who teachers called my “partner in crime” at school, dropped a little blue pill on the floor in our Physics class, and I recognized it as Adderall. At first he was embarrassed, but when I pulled an identical pill out of my pocket, he laughed and said the “magic beans” saved his life. At one point in the eleventh grade, he was failing four of five classes and sported a 1.9 GPA. Now, he’s at the Berkley school of Music, and on the dean’s list to boot. For those that knew him in high school, Will’s transformation was truly unbelievable.

In conclusion, it is easy to understand how people would resent the use of drugs to enhance a person’s ability to study and finish assignments. “I just think it’s hard for people who made it through rigorous schooling without Adderall or Ritalin to see others say ‘I get distracted, so I’m going to take these pills that make me a robot’ and not resent them for it,” says a girl down the hall, a junior majoring in Pre-Medicine.

Later on that evening, Will sits down on his couch after dinner. On the way to the dining hall, he vowed to finish both the already-late Bible paper and his class presentation as soon as he got back. Then not only will he have the chaplain out of his hair, he can also revel in the gratification of having completed the two monstrous assignments, even if one wasn’t in on time. As he sits, he mentally scrolls down his list of to-do’s, and chooses to work on a math worksheet rather than the other two. The little numbers and geometric figures fascinate him and he finishes in what seems like a few minutes, though the assignment took him forty-five from the time he sat down. He takes a prolonged look around the room and decides to spruce up briefly for room inspection on Sat

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