I was at a hotel in Carlsbad, CA on Sunday and aside from amazing weather and really good food, there was something else notable in the air.

NFL Rookie Camp. A mandatory seminar for all NFL rookies.

I saw scores of stud football players just lounging around. (Their workday began Monday… Sunday was check in.)

No need for me to name drop because, truth is, none of these guys have done one darn thing in the world of professional sports… yet. Though a few of them are already multi-millionaires based on their college exploits, draft status and so on, the land of NFL dreams, stardom and so on had not yet hit in full stride in their lives.

But it was cool to see.

And why does the NFL have a Rookie Camp? It’s for the “life” side of being an NFL player. This had nothing to do with weights, 40 yard dash times, 225 lb. reps or any of that. This was where the NFL put all of its rookies through mandatory session on life skills such as…

• managing your money
• watching out for gold diggers
• gambling protocol
• talking to the media
• getting ahold of counseling services for drugs, emotional/psychological issues

… stuff like that.

I saw scores of beefy, idolized young men on their way to having a variety of mentors illuminate for them the traps and pitfalls of becoming a professional athlete.

Now, for the NFL, this makes good business sense. Fans pay big money for Super Bowl tix, jerseys, season passes and luxury boxes. Matter of fact, as a tv franchise, the NFL seems immune to any sort of recession whatsoever. Football has always been big yet these days, it’s bigger than ever.

And keeping its players out of the news for jail, arrests, drugs, battery and so on, well, it’s good for the health of the industry. Billionaires know this, which is why they spend a few million teaching these kids some stuff.

Now do the kids learn it? Not all of them. No. But I got to speak to a few and could see that the gravity of what was upon them was already beginning to reframe their thinking.

It got me thinking, what if we put all our young men in this country through some sort of “mentorship” program that was mandatory? A place where they’d get a taste of Scared Straight mixed in with a few “watch out for this pitfall” chats complemented by a “Call this phone number if __X__ happens” and so on.

Would it not make good sense for society? Fiscally, morally, and so on, so may of our young men are just cast adrift and when I looked at how these coddled college athletes were being hand-held all the way through to the doorway of adulthood it made me realize that 1) those that do end up on the police blotters have got to be real klonk-heads because the NFL is going all out in its own way (even if it is just to protect their own investment) and 2) if society showed as much smarts about shepherding ALL young men from boyhood to manhood in a more overt, direct and thoughtfully guided manner, our entire nation would be better served.

NFL Rookie Camp… it’s so, so smart. Society… not so much.

So for those of you who do not know, 420 became a slang term for smoking weed back in the 1970′s. There’s actually a really interesting – and funny – article here for those who want to learn a bit about the “history” of the invention of this name.

Tuesday was April 20th… i.e. 4-20.

Colleges struggle with students showing up at 4:20 p.m. on 4-20 to smoke a blunt and then go back to whatever it is that college kids do at 4:21 when they are stoned out of their minds.

Thousands and thousands of college kids do this, mind you… all across the nation.

But attendance on Tuesday was down in my classes/at my school on Tuesday, April 20th. And why?

When I innocently asked Tuesday, after taking role, “Where is everyone today?” one of my kids said, “Do you know what day it is?”

I do… but I didn’t put it together until then. (It was still early in the morning and I don’t really think like a 420 disciple.)

And being that we are on block schedule, I see my kids every other day. That means that on Thursday I will see the Tuesday absentees… and when I do see them, won’t I also be seeing them in a new light? I mean, I know kids smoke pot – I smell it in the halls quite often. However, ditching school to honor the Gods of Ganja?

For those kids on the fence for grades, don’t I now become all the more less likely to “cut ‘em some slack”?

Of course, I might end up wrongly assuming that Kid X was off getting high on Tuesday when they were home with a sore throat (from too many BONG LOADS!) but the fact is, how can my own assessment lens not be at least slightly tainted by such blatant ditching to go get blazed?

Besides, I took role well before noon. 420 doesn’t begin til 4:20.

Don’t pot smoking teens even know how to tell time anymore? School ends at 3:00 p.m. Why miss a class that ended well before 10:00 a.m.?

I know, I know… 420, Dude.

420

Arrrgghh!

So everyone realizes that virtually every Human Resources person worth their salt at almost any decent-sized organization in this country checks the internet as a means of doing a background check on potential future employees, right? I mean this is something I talk about with my high schoolers. Putting pics of yourself doing beer bongs, smoking out of real bongs, taking off your clothes or being absolutely SMASHED out of you mind on the internet is a bad idea. (Note: I am not naive enough to pretend that my students don’t/will not “party” at some point — especially before they are of legal age to do so — so I warn them about this. However, if you want to debate the “I should be wagging my finger at these kids, not teaching them how to avoid paying the price if they should behave this way” aspect of things, that’s for a different blog post. This one here is zipping off in a different direction.)

And since the internet seems to have a better memory than even the most keen elephant, it’s more important than ever not to do stupid things when you are young that might jeopardize you future ability to be hired for a job even as much as a decade or two later after you have engaged in the stupidness.

Now trust me, I have done stupid things before. Lots of them. But (thankfully) they were before the age of digital cameras/ cell phones with video and YouTube/FaceBook/MySpace and so on. I mean even if those rumors are true about me and the mastodon in the taxidermist’s off back in 1987, there are NO photos to prove it. (And I am not saying they are true, BTW — it’s pure conjecture and there’s no proof!)

So essentially, it’s more important than ever for young folks to try and make sure they don’t do anything that is going to automatically show up as a “top hit” on google when a potential employer decides to do a little “unofficial online bg check” on ya.

And if I could think of one sure way to cause any future employers to NEVER EVER WANT TO DARE HIRE ME, it would probably be because they’d be scared that if they brought me on board, I’d end up getting them embroiled in an expensive, potentially calamitous, possibly frivolous lawsuit. I mean you just don’t want to be young and start looking for jobs in this day and age with the monkey of a, “WARNING: Hire me and I might sue you for absolutely no legitimate reason” sign on your back.

But that doesn’t seem to have stopped this young lady. Meet Trina Thompson, 27, a recent college graduate who is suing the college from which she just graduated because she can’t find a job and feels as if, in some way, it is the college’s fault.

Now I don’t know if Trina is gonna win or not — the college certainly seems to think these allegations are without merit — but doesn’t Trina realize that she just ID’d herself as a person who, if you do hire her, is one of those folks who might slip on a banana peel somewhere in your office and end up trying to bring down your entire business… even if she was the one who ate the original banana in the first place and failed to discard of it properly?

Trina, Trina, Trina, I am not sure what they taught you in college but you do seem to have one thing going for you: your sense of how the real world works appears woefully deficient. You just identified yourself as one of those “suer” types… and folks in HR work long hours not so much to find”great rock star employees” as much as to avoid hiring human train wrecks that are going to do real damage to their business.

And guess which category your top hit on google just put you in?

When I was named Teacher of the Year for the state of California in 2007 I was given, among other things, a free trip to Princeton, New Jersey to visit the HQ of ETS.

Talk about georgoeus. I mean this place was Shangra-la.

And all I kept asking myself was, “This place is non-profit?” No freakin’ way. They gotta be hauling in money by the truckload.

The SAT. The PSAT. The AP tests. The GRE.

Holy smokes… is anybody doing the math on these guys? That’s all I could think about my entire stay.

Well, someone did do the math.

Read this and tell me that that something isn’t reminiscent of a famous quote from the play Hamlet.

Here are some highlights:

Last year, the SAT cost $45 for the basic test, which 1.5 million U.S. students took. The College Board does not comment on how much revenue each test brings in, but once you factor in the nearly 222,000 students who received fee waivers from the College Board, you can roughly estimate that SAT revenue was at least $58,360,365. I say at least because many students take the test over and over again, trying to refine their scores to get into better colleges. That’s not to mention the litany of extra fees the College Board charges if you get your scores by phone ($12.50), rush the results ($36.50), or ask for a refund ($7). The real revenue is likely to be millions more than $58,360,365, and that’s before you factor in the foreigners who want a piece of an American education ($26 international processing fee; $23 more if you’re taking it in India or Pakistan).

In 2006—the most recent year for which the College Board’s tax returns are available—the College Board brought in a total of $582.9 million of revenue.

Over a half a billion per year for the bubble test industry? When people cry out for change, we have to realize the forces which are in opposition to this change.

And the forces of opposition will always be the folks who are raking in the serious cash. Heck, I’m scared that I’m gonna get a poison blow dart in my neck simply from typing this type of post.

You think Wall Street is worthy of investigation and re-thinking? Might I suggest… twwwppp!

There’s the blowdart!