I appreciated this, when I received an e-mail from a student today, thanking me for caring about their mental health and making it a part of class, how I teach, what I assign to them.
True, it has become a conscious part of my pedagogy, especially since COVID, and all the effects of that, with the trauma and collective grief, social isolation and many peoples’ mental health being negatively affected.
I credit my indigenous mentors, their ways of knowing, focus on relationships and respect, accountability and reciprocity.
I gesture toward women of color, like Tricia Hersey and Alex Elle, and many other women of color and BIPOC writers and scholars and educators, who push for the need for community care, as opposed to just individualized “self care.”
Not that self investment and self maintenance isn’t important. It is. But, this sole reliance on it is a byproduct of hyper-individualist American culture, the capitalism, and the patriarchy.
We are all both independent and interdependent beings.
We need to care for ourselves, we need the care of others and we need to contribute to that, not just take from the pot.
I appreciate these “atta girl” moments from students. What educator doesn’t want to feel good at their vocation?
This isn’t the only one I’ve received over the years since I’ve started to advocate for mental health and caring for oneself as part of my pedagogical approach / how I teach.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does feel nice.
But the reason I write this…more importantly, I sit with this:
The sad reality is that this is also true:
These shout outs also mean that many of my fellow educators are not doing this. I stand out in that I do.
I recognize that I have my own embodied history and lived, personal experiences of mental illness and a hefty family history of mental illness that has required me to pay attention to mental health. I do not have the luxury of ignoring it.
And, also.
Our country and world can (or should) no longer ignore our grave mental health crises (that epidemic, that pandemic). The demand for mental health help has never been greater.
It can be incredibly difficult to even find psychologists and psychiatrists, especially in more rural areas, who “are taking new patients.”
Even WHEN you can afford to pay. Even WHEN you have insurance and have a deductible.
Mental health is still stigmatized. We still have a lot of work to do.
I also recognize that I teach a subject that allows me to have smaller classes, to develop more interpersonal relationships with student because I teach First Year Writing. I don’t teach a Intro to Biology or Chemistry, a Calculus course, where the structure of this class often must be different. There may be more material to get through to test (which I don’t necessarily think is an excuse, but I also don’t teach those things. It’s not my area, but, extending the benefit of the doubt here.)
The point is as simple as—are we treating our students as human beings? As a member of the human race? Recognizing their humanity?
Yeah, yeah, I know that education is their work. Yes, they have to prepare for jobs and the real world. And can’t just not show up to work one day or opt out of their work tasks.
And, yes, I am not a mental health expert, counselor or therapist.
All of that is true.
And also—
You can still validate someone’s humanity, their whole selves, not regarding them as solely existing to study or to labor for your class.
Why are these sometimes regarded as mutually exclusive? They don’t have to be.
Does it not happen because holding these conversations take additional effort for professors? That their own mental health isn’t really going so great?
Perhaps.
Or, you could also look at it in that these five minutes or so that I take in class, they create a moment for an actual conversation, a moment of shared humanity, to check in and ask how they are doing.
It can remind us educators that we too should be taking care of ourselves.
These important check in points for me, also make me pause, re-evaluate and reconsider, am I practicing what I preach, so to speak?
As a society, a culture. I look around and take stock of what I see. I engage in my own cultural research.
This is what I notice:
We are busier than ever. We are moving faster, scrolling faster, we have more technology and luxuries to make modern living easier than ever before, yet still, we are overextended.
We think faster and listen less attentively and less carefully.
We are exhausted. We are over prescribed medications. Some of us desperately feel the need for our anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds. But still, we have root causes for them and many require mental health medications to function.
We listen to the news in this country and go through periods of every. single. fucking. day having to hear that there has been yet another mass shooting. Regardless of your stance on guns, using assault weapons in this way, all the slaughtering of human beings, the mass shootings, before taking a gun shot to the head, all of this….none of it is normal.
All of this shows—we are really not okay. We have some severe mental health needs going on that we fail to attend to…I understand why parents feel that we are failing our children in schools that they are not safe and have to do shooter drills.
But we do. It happens. All the time.
It feels hopeless. I feel powerless.
I don’t know much impact I can have on all of that junk. I am not a trained mental health expert. I am not a politician or lawmaker.
I can vote.
But I can also write. I can educate. I can and do talk to students and I mentor graduate teaching assistants to show that I care about their mental health and they can also make it a component of their evolving pedagogy.
By addressing that they have busy lives and work outside of my class, that there are so many other things that they need to do, that college and studying and all the things are stressful and hard, I speak to my students as humans.
In acknowledging that, I remind them to take care of themselves; to have strategies for offsetting their stress; to fill up their cups; to recharge their batteries.
THAT is something that I can do.
And so I do.
I don’t care that some think me “woo woo” or not serious enough about my discipline, not rigorous enough, so I make class time and assignments designated for this.
I know my discipline well enough to know that we also carry in our bodies stories and knowledge. (Embodied rhetorics, rhetorics of embodiment). This is not irrelevant.
I know my profession and have done it long enough to know that when you get to know your first year writing students and really care for them, that these relationships matter and they make a difference in one’s willingness to reach out for help when they need it on an assignment or with navigating life on a new campus community.
I know—from enough years of teaching—that students often find educators cold, aloof, distant, too busy, that they don’t care about students as people, as human beings.
I know that many students comes to us already traumatized. Many see us as grammarian extremists, overly pen-happy with our red ink, eager to spot and evilly and gleefully marking their errors in citation and punctuation.
But we’re more. We can be more.
And maybe so can our students, if we acknowledge them as such from the beginning.
And also, added bonus benefit—they will do better work. They will write better. They will be healthier and happier. They will participate more in class discussions and talk to their classmates as people too.
I see this in action.
And guess what—all of this will make our jobs easier too.
And all of this, it has onward outgoing ripple effects.
They may seem small but these are intentional actions that will create a better world.