Teaching Where It Hurts—and Heals

Another week has gone by. One-third of the students at our school require special education. But what makes my job even harder is dealing with emotional and personality disorders. Out of the just under 30 students in the entire fourth-grade class, only two are emotionally stable. Ideally, I’d like to understand each child’s unique traits and tailor my approach accordingly, but the same child might be docile one day and defiant and disruptive the next. So, if one child was the problem yesterday, another is causing trouble today… There really isn’t a single day that goes by without stress. Their emotional swings are so extreme that I often feel bewildered and confused about how to handle them, and sometimes I get deeply hurt myself.

Also, because the kids can’t control their emotions, fistfights break out almost every day. At first, when the boys would fight, I’d step in to break it up, but since I injured my back, I don’t intervene anymore—I just call the discipline teacher. Even the kindergarteners fight with their fists, but the fourth graders hit each other even more brutally. That’s bad enough, but yesterday, one of them looked up a handgun online and said he was going to kill someone with it… These kids really have a bleak future ahead of them. Around here, once kids get to middle school, they don’t settle scores with fists anymore—they use knives and guns—so incidents never stop, but they don’t even make the news. It’s just considered “Black Kid stuff.” It only makes the news when they go on a rampage in a wealthy neighborhood and commit a robbery. That’s because who the victim is matters. If the victim is a “Black Kid,” nobody cares.

It breaks my heart. These personality and emotional disorders are influenced by the environment the child has lived in and continues to live in. Many kids are suffering from trauma and need treatment. One of my students searched for handguns online. He recently came to live with his mother after the grandmother who had been raising him passed away. His father is in prison for a gun-related incident, and his mother has also been struggling with trauma. He constantly says he’s afraid someone is going to shoot him, and he always has a headache, so he covers his head during class.

Then there was another student who complained constantly and had severe mood swings. His mother is in prison, and her father was homeless. As a result, he was shuttled from one shelter to another until his biological grandmother—who had been in a coma for three years—woke up and brought him and his father to live with her. Unfortunately, the very next week, his father died of a heart attack. The boy who had been so happy to finally live with his father was suddenly faced with his death.

Sometimes I get hurt and feel annoyed with them, but that’s only temporary—my sympathy and empathy for them take over. Even though my love can’t heal their wounds, I still want to give them love. When I go to school in the morning, I start the day with a smile, and by the end of class, there are kids who annoy me again, but I forget about it on my way home and start fresh the next day… And before I knew it, the second semester had begun.

Still, when I returned to school after my 10-day vacation, hearing all my kids say they missed Ms. Joo gave me strength, and seeing them run up to hug me did too. Also hearing them ask, “Will Ms. Joo be with us next year too?”—that gave me even more strength... And so, for this very reason, every morning, I’m getting ready to love them all over again as I head to school today.

01/12/2020 by Dr. Lan Joo