Lessons in healing

The start of a new school year inevitably brings with it a new round of hand-wringing and finger-pointing.

Test scores are too low. Classes are overcrowded and facilities falling apart. The budget is inadequate and standardised curriculums are woefully irrelevant.

But for most teachers, as they trundle back to school after summer vacation, these concerns are rarefied and remote.

Note to self

A friend once sent me an e-mail. He teaches at a public school in San Bernardino County, California, US. As he was getting ready for the start of a new year, he found, tucked into a folder, a note he had scribbled to himself in the middle of a previous school year.

The words were inspired by one of the more mundane bits of class management, but as he began the work, the reality of the task began to sink in.

"Here I am — another month of teaching gone by — contemplating our school's monthly awards: Perfect Attendance, Outstanding Citizen, Outstanding Scholar, Superior Writer ... [and] all I can think of is: How about an award for Psychological Survivor, Emotional Duress Survivor? In other words, awards for just coping with life.''

When my friend wrote his note, he was teaching a class of 30 fifth graders, and it was easy for the lives of the students to overshadow any consideration of monthly achievement. Here are a few of the descriptions he wrote:A girl who was once locked in a dark closet for eight hours by a baby sitter. The child talked longingly of her dad, who was in prison.

- A girl still coping with her grandmother's near-fatal car accident. She brought newspaper clippings of the accident along with shaved hair of her grandmother.

- A boy with facial anomalies who had endured several surgeries. He was constantly teased, yet, he delighted students by blowing milk bubbles through his nose.

- A girl who took care of her single mother, a quadriplegic, and who listened to her distant father make promises he never kept.

Telling their story

Such stories must be difficult enough to hear, let alone assuage and, as I went through his list I imagined each confession — the child blurting out his story or playing for sympathy — I had to remind myself that my friend does not teach in a special class for troubled children. This was a class of typical fifth graders.

In classrooms across the US, some form of psychological trauma in children's lives trumps whatever cards educators and politicians are trying to play. Some of the trauma is the result of poverty, to be sure. But poverty is only part of the problem, which is really more about the complicated existence that children all over the world lead. So why do school boards spend so much time just discussing budgets and accountability?

No doubt they are easier to talk about than the emotional lives of children who are often left to struggle by themselves through matters of grief, abuse, divorce and special needs.

When I asked my friend how he managed to keep himself from being overwhelmed, he wrote back: "I feel that I make a difference in the lives of these children.''

And now, the new year has begun. A few days after school opened, my friend described his first day: parents with separation anxiety; others just as happy to not see their children for another ten hours.

Soon enough, the confessions will begin, as they do every year.