Because I’m one of the teachers whom a lot of students are comfortable talking to, sometimes the things that are the most exhausting about my day are one-on-one conversations with students that have nothing to do with the subject I’m teaching. Here are a few snapshots from the past week:
M. works part time in a shop owned by a relative, who is a terrible manager, and needs help doing the social engineering to quit her job without alienating her family. I’ve offered to help her write a letter of resignation.
S. (who is actually not my student) just lost her grandfather, who was very close to her. S. is the one person everyone else in the family is on speaking terms with. She’s coping fairly well–she mostly just needed someone to vent to, both about her family, and about her other teachers, who are prying when she really wants to be left alone.
C. lives with her mother, a recovering drug addict who suffers from depression and self-medicates with alcohol. Her father lives out of state, and her only other close relative (an uncle) is in jail. C. is the responsible “adult” in her house, using her part-time job to supplement her mother’s meager income. C. is a straight-A student who keeps a safe distance from drugs and alcohol (largely because she has lived with parents who don’t). She’s a strong kid, who never lets anyone put themselves out on her behalf. This morning, she came to school late because she was on the phone with her dad for several hours, but she lied and said that she was in school but cutting classes so her mother wouldn’t find out that she was talking with her father instead of being in school. She will need to skip the resulting detentions because she can’t afford to miss the work time. She won’t tell the school what’s really going on because the disruption from being taken out of her home by DSS would end up causing more trauma than she’s currently experiencing in her dysfunctional living situation.
D. is a former student from two years ago, who has just dropped out of college because of a combination of anxiety and depression. I met her at Starbucks after school today to offer a sympathetic ear.
There are more students, plus a couple of colleagues who are also using me as a sounding board. Their stories are similarly full of angst, though with less plot.
This is all on top of the fact that it’s the last week of the quarter, and several of my students are frantically trying to make up a quarter’s worth of work and re-learn the subject matter and re-take a test they failed two months ago.
