Recently, I was speaking with a teacher about what we can do to help some of our higher-risk students succeed. We’d had struggles in the classroom with cell phones and outbursts. What was clear was that our students had difficulty coping to various challenges, most of them coming from outside of the school hours.
Throughout the dialog, one teacher wondered, “Is it too much to ask our students to just leave their baggage at the door? They’re here for only a few hours.”
It’s a sentiment I’d felt many times.
My inclination was to nod along.
Throughout my 13 years of teaching and coaching, I specifically remember telling students, both in the classroom and on the athletic field, “You just need to set your struggles down and focus. I need just a few good hours from you.”
Who knows how often I’d given that bad advice.
Recently, I read the book, The Loneliness Epidemic, by behavioral scientist Susan Mettes. Although specific to church culture, the book has a ton to say about how to deal with loneliness and mental health struggles.
Including what to do with our baggage.
We, as educators, need to learn how to teach through the trauma and struggles of students, not expect them to come into our schools pretending like everything is OK.
Is this going to require more patience? Absolutely.
Will we have to listen more? Of course.
I had a special education professor once share with me that “Every action is an attempt to communicate something.” I’m not sure I ever heard more profound words in all my training to become a teacher.
But oftentimes, we make student behavior about us.
“What does this outburst say about me?”
“Why is this student acting out in my class?”
“Is it the way I teach?”
“What can I do to keep this from happening, so I don’t have to deal with is?”
Instead, it’s important to remember that students are coming with anxieties that extend well beyond what we know or can help with.
Students shouldn’t have to lay that down when they enter our schools.
Because, when the day is over, all they can do is pick it back up again and carry is home, from where, oftentimes, the source of their struggles comes.
On a podcast recently, I heard the hosts describe abandonment. And one comment in particular stuck out: When we try to fix someone’s problems, it’s a form of abandonment. What we’re really communicating is that we don’t want to sit with the person in their struggles, to feel what they feel.
I’m still wrestling through that idea. But I do know that, when we refuse to acknowledge the validity of what someone is feeling, either by ignoring it or trying to fix it, we leave people alone.
Imagine going to the only safe place you know, and hearing, “There’s no room for your baggage here.”
After a long, hard day at work, your spouse / partner / roommate tells you, “Leave all that at the door. Take it back to work with you tomorrow.”
You’d feel abandoned.
Lost.
Hopeless.
School may be that safe place where students can unload their baggage.
Let them bring it in with them.
Help them unpack.
It might be the only chance they have to do this.