Cry With Them

I'm really uncomfortable right now. My chair has enough lumbar support, my space heater is warming up my little 100-year garret loft office, and for once, my starting-to-age body isn't registering any weird aches or pains, but I feel... off. I'm in a transitional period, here at a hinge age. Mid 30s. Everyone in their 20s seems to dread turning 30, but at the time, it felt like the most liberating thing in the world. I could finally be myself, and I slowly stopped giving a shit about what old high school bullies would think of the authentic version of Emily. Then I stupidly started a PhD, and my entire sense of self came crashing down into the sucking oblivion of a nervous breakdown. After a few sleepless years, I've climbed out of it. I have many things to thank for this hard-fought battle back up the hill: first it was a healthy dose of antidepressants, followed by an unhealthy dose of anti-anxiety pills, and a therapist who revealed to me the common roots of all my problems, smacked me upside the head with the revelation that I NEED TO STOP DOING, and then told me my anxiety was linked to the lunar cycle (mhmm). Then I found an incredible source of comfort in the most obvious place in the world: guided meditation videos on YouTube (because, duh, you Millennial). My husband has been rock solid in his support, being all at once my cheerleader, my third research director, and my overflowing font of knowledge on how to game the French system. But my saving grace, literally the only thing I got out of bed for after a sleepless night, has been teaching. 

I never would have started teaching if I hadn't had the dumbass audacity as a 24-year-old to move to a foreign country where I barely spoke the language and the people don't smile. People often ask me why I moved to France, and the long answer glazes their eyes over, but the short answer is: love. Plain and simple, I fell in love with a cute guy in college and I followed him over the ocean to the land of baguettes and complaining. What I didn't factor into that move was the head-over-heels love I'd fall into for getting up in front of a classroom and teaching the difference between the present simple and the present continuous, ad nauseam. I never would have gambled on being able to tell you that French is a substantive language that thrives on nouns, and the English language prefers verbs, but here we are. In college, I learned how to perform in front of an audience, and $200,000 and a Bachelor of Music later, here I am performing a different kind of song and dance in front of an audience of 18-year-old French kids. I love it so much it makes my heart hurt. Now, it's not the transmission of knowledge of the English tenses that propels me into the hallowed ivy(graffiti)-covered halls of French higher education. What I was placed on this earth to do is connect with and give guidance to some people a little younger than me who feel maybe just a little bit more lost than I currently do at my advanced age and experience.

So here's why I'm uncomfortable. Education is not valued anymore. It's more important than ever to get a degree (or 5) to be able to compete in an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable job market. Where a high school education used to suffice, a Master's degree barely holds any water. Admission is bloated, funds are dwindling, students are disinterested but feel they have to be there to please their parents and society. Fear and confusion drive them to enroll, and as a result, they come to one class, decide it's not for them, never come back, and then add their professors on LinkedIn for some reason. The students who do continue coming to class are overworked, juggling employment, stressed about their next steps, glued to their devices, and have developed a worrying mass case of TikTok attention span. I don't doubt that they care about their education, but the world as we know it now is doing everything it can to stymie them. Rigorous standards are getting thrown out as quickly as American researchers are getting kicked out of the dystopian hellscape that is the US. It's not fair. In all honesty, it's not fair to the students, it's not fair to the teachers, it's not fair to the administrators, it's not fair to knowledge and to the flowering advancement of the human race as a whole. As a teaching cog in this mess of a system, I'm at a loss, and the precarity of my non-tenured situation means that the threat of job loss is very real. With that prospect comes losing what makes me me: teaching. It hurts, and so I am uncomfortable.

My beloved aunt was an English teacher (an "esteemed" English teacher, as I bragged to one bemused publishing rep at a conference recently), and I like to mine her for pearls of wisdom to pass on to the next round of teaching fanatics. She gave me some advice recently, when I asked her what I should do when a student starts getting emotional while talking to me. I'm convinced I'm the dictionary definition of an empath, and so if a student is having a rough time and starts to tear up, then I can't help but also get misty-eyed. I once sternly asked a student why they hadn't done the homework that week, and when the student started to well up in guilt, I too started to get choked up. In the past few weeks, one student confided in me that they needed to miss class to go home and spend time with their parents before a very extended trip abroad, and they broke down a bit saying that it's difficult to see their parents getting older. Unleash the floodgates because I too am a human person with aging parents who lives very far away and am starting to be confronted with the reality that no one lasts forever no matter how hard you wish and wish and wish that they would. So, reader, what was I to do? It was the end of an 8-hour teaching day, and I had nothing left in my tank. I wanted to get on my bike, in the cold dark, and have some near-fatal misses as I desperately pedaled towards a few precious hours at home before starting it all over again in the morning. But when a student needs you, not as a teacher, but as a human, you stay, you listen. And so this is the advice my aunt gave me when I asked how not to cry in front of a student: you cry with them. 

I think the greatest gift you can give a student is to make them feel heard when they have something to say. Sure, in class I can be strict, constructive, disappointed, angry, excited, all the emotions, but what any of us needs most sometimes is for someone in a position of authority to stop what they're doing and listen with empathy. I spend a lot of time dwelling on the moments where I've failed in this mission, and I have to remind myself that I'm also human, and that they frustrate me as much as they give me joy. But no matter what, I can strive to be a human—not their friend or their peer—and accept my role in the cosmic hierarchy and let them know that it's ok to both feel and express uncomfortable emotions.

Now that I'm uncomfortable, I need someone to cry with me. But where do you turn when you're supposed to be the adult? I don't really have an answer to that, but I will continue for as long as I am able to get up every morning and connect with young people—the next generation—in a way that girds them for making our burning, chaotic, disastrous, violent, beautiful, diverse, extraordinary world a better place.