Right now I am checking my email every minute or so. Even though I know that it will tell me when I get a new email, I am furiously clicking the refresh button because right now I have a troubled student. Actually I have a couple, but tonight I am concerned about the one.
This student is having what the student describes as personal problems and I can tell from the student’s emails that he/she is suffering from depression. It’s painful enough to think of someone the age of a college freshman having depression problems, but when that student is in my class, I take it personally. I don’t see that there is any other way to look at it. So I email them and hopefully encourage them not to give up.
The problem is that depression, even in a mild form, can be so insidious that there isn’t much anyone can do. When I have a depressed student, I fear sometimes that it’s like a greek tragedy: what makes it tragic is not really the fact that bad things happen but that none of the characters can do anything to stop it. As if it’s my role to be “the concerned teacher” and it’s my student’s role to be “the troubled student” and things will not turn out well.
But I’m not really that pessimistic, so I just keep checking my email.
