I’m a Teacher, and I Can’t Live Like This

Teachers are not mental health professionals, and I desperately want to stay in my lane

From Oaklandside | Hundreds of Oakland Tech students took to the streets Wednesday morning to protest sexual abuse on their campuses. Credit: Amir Aziz

I don’t think I’m the only one whose quarantine afforded me some epiphanies. Two of mine:

• Time is an incredibly important resource to all of us as mortal beings, children included, and, ultimately, it’s just a made-up thing. We’re cute with little calendars and schedules and other markers and measurements we use to wrangle time, but ultimately, it’s gonna do its thing and pass — and also it’s not real.
• Physical presence, too. We don’t survive on this planet without getting physically close to one another. We need connection to thrive because that’s the nature of our species.

In the United States, we have mandated that our children are physically present at school for a massive chunk of the time they spend awake. Children spend almost as many hours at school as they do at home. For the first two years of this pandemic, opinion columnists warned that we better get our children back into the school buildings for the sake of their mental health.

The problem is teachers are not mental health professionals, and schools can’t or won’t budget for kids’ mental health needs. Nonetheless, children won’t thrive academically until their…