The Burdens My Students Carry - Part 1

In considering the classes I substituted in last year, one theme returns again and again. It is the theme of how many of my students carry with them immense burdens that make their functioning effectively far more difficult for them than it is for many of the rest of us.

For instance, I think immediately of one young Vietnamese girl I met who all the time seemed tired in class. Usually she could scarcely keep her eyes open. When I asked her what was the matter, she opened up to me. Yes, she was tired, she said. In fact, she was exhausted. The reason was that she lived with her mother and father, and her father, who tended to be authoratarian, abusive and violant, remained jobless. Why ? He just didn’t want to work. He had set a rule for her and her mother. Her mother was to work and earn enough to pay half the monthly rent plus other expenses. She, the student, was to work and earn the other half rent. If she didn't, he said, he was going to kick her out of their home.

When this young lady left school at 3:30 p.m., she went home briefly, then went on a long bus ride to a job where she started at 8 PM. She finished at midnight, then had to take a long bus ride home at a time when connections were very bad. Usually she didn’t get to bed until 2 a.m. She had to leave home early enough in the morning to be at school for her first class at 8:30 a.m., which meant that she had to be up to prepare breakfast at 6:30 a.m. With everything else she had to do, this didn’t leave much time for sleep.

I have developed a tendency to look carefully at my students to see if any of them are in serious depression. I am psychologically-oriented. Based on my having lived for a year doing fieldwork in psychological and photographic anthropology in a Samoan village, I have written a book and a number of shorter pieces on aggression, its displacement and its expression in traditional Samoan culture. Three or four times Dr. John Spiegel and I offered tours for psychiatrists to areas in the South Pacific and Indonesia. Before I met him, Dr. Spiegel had been president of the American Psychiatric Association, and was one of the most famous psychiatrists in the country. While I have not been trained as a psychiatrist, I learned a great deal from him in our travels. Visiting other cultures with John made me a great deal more observant than I might otherwise have been.

Perhaps because of his informal tutelage, I watch all the students in my classes. I try to observe who is working or gossiping or listening to an iPod, and to notice who is staring off into space. You may be shocked to read that students spent a lot of time listening to their iPods. I’ll explain this in another entry so you better understand what I as a teacher find myself pitted against.

When I find a student whom I believe is in serious clinical depression, I normally try to do something about it. My first step is to try to talk to them. Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t. If I could bond more easily with them, this would make the job easier. But as I've been told a number of times by students, "You’re only a substitute teacher." They're telling me severa; things when they say this. They're telling me that I'll be around only for a period or so, and then I'll be gone, which implies that having any sort of relationship is useless. They're also trelling me that if I am a substitute teacher I am not certificated, and therefore I am inferior in education and worth to their regular teachers.

When trying to talk to a depressed student gets nowhere, then I make more serious moves. I let someone know so the student can get psychiatric help. Not doing this risks the student attempting suicide.

I should say here that whenever I have identified a student as being seriously depressed, I have never been wrong.

Tomorrow I'll write about some actual case histories.