About students this time

We're three weeks into the semester, and they're already falling away or falling apart. And I am dreading, truly dreading, what the first versions of their first essays are going to look like. I am confidently sure that the ones who will have the hardest time with every part of the assignment are the ones who also will wait until next Sunday to even start--and then they'll completely freak out and either just quit entirely or turn in something so utterly unbaked it will be painful to contemplate.

Then again, as I've said all along, if I only have a handful of students, I only have that many essays to grade, and that isn't a bad thing.

But there's one student, I'll call him Working Dad, who is going to be more than a bit of a pain. I don't know whether he legitimately is not very quick off the mark or if he's the kind of person who worries himself into problems he doesn't really have, but he seems to find very simple things quite surprisingly difficult. He's getting help, though, which is great--he is going to the Writing Center and he has a faculty mentor--but still. For one thing, I really don't want to hear for the fourteenth time that he is a working father so he has to get a good grade in the class because he's paying for it out of pocket. (I finally had to say to him that he's not the only student who is in that kind of situation. Almost all our students have very difficult lives, and most have to work, in addition to everything else.) But after whining about that--again--he also said he was disappointed in his score on the first quiz, and that he had tried not to use the language of the book; could I give him an example of where he went wrong?

I told him 1. the quiz is a "low stakes" assignment (20 points out of a possible 2,000), so he shouldn't sweat about it too much. 2. Sometimes one has to use a specific term, but it's a good idea to put the term in quotation marks--and then, the most important thing, to explain what it means. 3. Here's an example--and his answer was exactly, word for word, the language of the book. It wasn't even one of those cases where the attempt at paraphrase is too close for comfort: it was exactly, word for word, the language of the book.

Oh, and in reading about research and what to look for to evaluate sources, the book mentioned currency--and explains the importance of having things that are up to date--but apparently he just read the word "currency" and thought it meant "money."

{{Professor quietly slams forehead into computer several times, takes a deep breath, tries to explain to the student the error.}}

But another thing--and this is a shift of gears--but I've seen, and am seeing again, that over the past decade or so, the number of students who struggle with anxiety, as well as depression and other psychological difficulties, is rising exponentially. They're not pulling a pity card, either: more of them are genuinely psychologically troubled than was the case when I started teaching. I've been reading about it, too: for all the parental attempts to keep their children safe from every bump and bruise and to make their paths entirely smooth and easy, students are more fragile, frightened, and lacking in internal resources than ever before, and the world expects more of them in some regards--like, know your career trajectory and that it will earn you a good income when you're 18 years old....

Actually, let me restate that. The students' fragility, fears, and lack of internal resources exist because their parents try to protect them and smooth their way. I listened to what I think is the first TED talk given by Brene Brown (back in 2010, I think it was), and in it she says that parents should look at their children as beings who are "hardwired for struggle." And yet so many of my students encounter my class as the first place they have ever had to struggle in their lives, and they absolutely know they cannot do it.

It breaks my heart.

It doesn't make me want to make my class easier.

But it does make me wish I could do more to help them: be their psychologist and coach and tutor and support system, to help them learn that they can struggle, that they're good at struggle, that they get stronger when they struggle. But that, I'm afraid, is a lesson I really cannot teach them. They have to learn it on their own.