A Teacher Like Me
A teacher had a student attempt suicide twice in two nights by slitting her wrists and trying to hang herself. While the teacher does not think they were directly responsible, it exposes the wide range of issues students deal with and the lack of training teachers receive to address them. Teaching is a difficult profession with low pay despite high importance, but teachers do it because they are lifelong students who want to share their fascination for learning and help students' futures, rising to challenges of helping others through problems. The teacher has supported many students through crises like unwanted pregnancy, abuse, family deaths, and poor grades, doing their best to steer students back to lessons so their education continues during difficult times.
A Teacher Like Me
- 1. A TEACHER LIKE ME Last night a student of mine tried to commit suicide. She slit her wrists. The night before that she tried to hang herself. She didnt succeed either night, and I dont think she was trying to kill herself because of anything I did, and suicide attempts by my students are not a regular occurrence. But this incident does expose some of the many complicated problems my students come to class with; and, therefore, the wide range of professional skills I never received training for; but I, nevertheless, must have. Teaching is a crazy profession. I love my work, but it is a crazy profession. Education is more and more important to our nation, but in several states the janitors who clean the rooms after we leave make more money than we do. We are also asked to prepare lessons for students who in any one class can have second- grade to college-level skills, we fill out endless paperwork, and then we grade papers late into the night. And for our efforts, we are sworn at, sneered at, and laughed at by many of our students, their parents, and the school administration, especially if we teach at the junior high or high school level. So why do we do it? Let me try to explain. To understand a teacher who truly loves teaching, you have to understand that that teacher is really just an eternal studentsomeone who is and always will be fascinated by a million things and wants others to feel and value that fascination for its own sake and for how it will help them in their futures. So throw some problems at this person. We wince, and then we rise to the challenge. We think, Perhaps I can learn some- thing here and help someone at the same time. And only in the calm of our summer breaks do we step back and go, Oh my God, I cant believe I dealt with all that. Consider that Ive had many young girls come to me hysterical and pregnant or abused by a boyfriend or a family member. Ive also had students whose brothers or sisters or parents were murdered in robberies or drive-bys or by another family member. And, of course, there are the runaways and students totally dis- traught over poor grades and what their parents will do when they find out. My response? I do what I can. I grope for something relevant to say to these people who are falling apart. And then I try to steer them back to the lesson at hand, so that when the crises pass, my students will find that they still made forward progress. I smile, I joke, I fume, as the lesson (and my ideas on how to pro- voke students to novel thought) dictate. I cant help it, and neither could you if you were a teacher like me.