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
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 physiological and safety needs are met (e.g. food, housing, safety from bullying and other violence, etc.). We let shameful numbers of our children rot away in school all day, while horrified but largely helpless adults attempt to offer them something helpful. It’s maddening shit, soul-crushing shit. It’s low graduation rates, high teacher turnover, increasingly dangerous staffing shortages, but somehow more police in the hallways. Children living in communities that have historically been targeted by state violence bear the brunt of it.
Anyway, here we are, three months back in the buildings full-time: School and district administrators are doing a bad job at the work public health administrators do, and teachers are doing a bad job at caring for children’s mental health. Predictably, kids are failing a lot of classes because they can’t figure out why they’re not motivated to do anything at all. Often they’re skipping classes and getting into all kinds of serious trouble. Some folks are calling for admin to hire a private security force to patrol the school… which is a whole other essay of NO.
Teachers aren’t therapists.
Of course schools are failing to address students’ mental health needs. First of all, our schools have never, on any kind of mass-scale, even tried to care for children’s mental health. Come on. Though the pandemic is obviously a significant stressor, this need for therapeutic initiatives for children has been pressing since before public schools even existed. Education and mental health have developed as two separate (if connected) professional worlds, and we work in separate buildings.
In addition to not having the right experts at school, we don’t have our money right. The financing particulars are also not my wheelhouse, but from my perspective in the classroom, I wish the folks who get to make the big money decisions would also make big changes in how they manage children’s time. We need to figure out how to give children a lot more time in the physical presence of clinical and non-clinical mental health care workers. Therapists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, life coaches and mentors, trusted community volunteers, Restorative Justice coordinators, social workers, crisis teams, etc. School district and public health administrators need to coordinate better. Maybe the kids only come to school for four hours a day. Maybe they only come to school on certain days of the week. We could keep them for the full eight hours but have non-clinical folks move right into the classrooms with us.
It’s too much.
In the absence of funds for additional staff, teachers sometimes attend professional development on integrating social and emotional learning into our academic instruction. I recently asked some colleagues and students how many teachers at our school they thought could probably manage a serious restorative conversation with thirty kids. Not enough teachers can. Like reeeeeeally not enough. It’s not because teachers don’t want to keep kids safe and nurture their healing; it’s because not enough teachers have even close to the amount of know-how (never mind time) required to do it well. I’ve worked alongside teachers with widely varying levels of skill in addressing the complex grief and trauma that our children (and our families) experience. Teachers with varying willingness to even try, too. But even if more teachers developed trauma-informed instructional strategies, having hours with a good teacher every week is not the same thing as having a hours with a good therapist. We meet different needs.
For the last fifteen years, I’ve been teaching children and adults in schools, prisons, and teaching colleges. In truth — and with deep respect for those who Covid has taken and for those who loved them — I’m having my best teaching year ever because the year and a half we spent at home afforded me a lot of time to read, think, and connect with my teacher-friends from across the years and the country. I’m excited to write about my new wisdoms* and the new, IMHO dope things happening in my classroom this year that are making some of my kids feel a little better about life — me too.
And still it’s waay beyond the scope of my expertise to know what to do when a child runs away from home in the midst of a psychotic break. I don’t know how to initiate a child’s healing in the aftermath of a brutal rape on campus. I’ve had to respond to both, and honestly countless more, traumatic events in my students’ and former students’ lives in the last three months. Twice in the last week, students have walked out of our school en masse to protest admin’s lacking responses to rampant sexual assault.
I’d desperately like to stay in my lane and let a whooole other field of professionals do what they do — because they devoted years of careful study, research, and practice to subjects like psychology, community organizing, and mental health care when I was devoting mine to subjects like literature, language, and curriculum design. I’m so cosmically tired, and it’s only November. I’ve been getting these migraines with nausea and vomiting every week or so. The migraines are debilitating, but there aren’t enough substitute teachers (anywhere), so it’s difficult to take time off with confidence that an adult will be with my classes while I’m gone. I need to make a few doctors’ appointments, but I’m so depleted by everything else, I’m not getting around to it.
My colleagues who share my knack for listening to kids are exhausted, too. From the moment we get to school, kids swamp us to tell us stuff. Newer teachers are not going to stay in the classroom as long as it takes to get good at it. Watch all the trusted teachers burn out. This is not sustainable.
Children deserve to have food, housing, health care, and safety from physical and emotional violence. Children also deserve to be challenged intellectually and creatively in a community with other kids and adults. Children need us adults to allocate their time (and our money) accordingly. Not to do so is lowkey mass homicidal. As a species, we literally cannot live like this.
- Especially from organizers adrienne maree brown and Myles Horton; writer Kiese Laymon; astrophysicist Neil De Grasse Tyson; botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer; Baltimore public school teacher Jay Gillen; and my own dear friends and senior colleagues, Anne Haas Dyson, Darrick Smith, and Katrina Kennett.
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