Martin Smiles …

… until he gets suspended. The Independent’s teacher/ diarist watches a promising student sink into depression. What’s the right role to play?

March 30, 2006

Martin, one of my 11th grade advisees and a former student, is not doing well. He’s had this terrible depression thing going on for months, and he’s acting out left and right. He wanders the halls, disrupts class, calls teachers names and writes disgusting things about them on the blackboard. The whole time, he smiles — like he knows exactly what he’s doing. He doesn’t do it to me because he has a different, closer, relationship with me than he does with other teachers. And I come at him differently — I don’t take the shit he does and gets away with in other classes, and he knows that. He tries it with me, but I know him and I don’t put up with it. So he feels comfortable and safe in my room. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do stupid stuff or that I don’t always do the right thing. This morning, I got to school later than I usually do, only to find that he’d been isolated in a room because he’d gotten into a fight with a freshman girl. He pushed her after he felt she’d instigated stuff with him — insulted, bullied, and smacked him. (I wasn’t there; I don’t know what exactly happened, but I did see cuts on his upper lip.) So obviously he’s now suspended. What is happening in his brain to make him act this way? He was a completely different person at the beginning of the year — enrolled at Quinnipiac University for a college class in the fall, getting As across the board — He was stunning. We had a great, close relationship and things were good. Somewhere in December it all fell apart. He started roaming the halls, calling teachers names, doing ridiculous things — and eventually he stayed in the hospital for a week, supervised. It’s such a sad thing to see someone crumble. He talks about wanting to do better and wanting to improve. But what I’ve seen — what he’s done — is anything but improvement. I’ve never had to deal with depression, so I don’t know how to approach it. As much as I hate to say this, to admit these terrible feelings, I think it’s too much for me to handle. I don’t want to be his only sounding board for his emotion. I don’t want to be the only person he ​“behaves” for. I don’t want to be the only person he turns to — because he has so much stuff to get off his chest. Why does it have to be me? I can’t carry all that weight. I can’t wrap my mind around all the stuff he’s dealing with. I just don’t want to do it. I should be grateful that he turns to me; and I am. I was. I am thankful that he has someone (me) to get feelings out. And he does talk to social workers and counselors. But it all kind of comes back to me. When he’s at school, he comes to me. And being at school triggers his depression and acting out; so it feels like whenever I see him, which is only at school, he’s got some ​“issue” he’s dealing with, and he only comes to me to deal with it. I feel the weight of his emotions unlike anything I’ve felt before; and, completely uncharacteristically, I want to reject them. The truth is, when faced with students’ individual issues this year, I’ve wanted to say: ​“I’m just an English teacher. I deal with iambic pentameter and Shakespeare. I deal with vignettes and with metaphor. I deal with film and five paragraph essays. I don’t do depression, suicide, pregnancy, death and illness, murders, or juvenile detention. They’re not a part of my job description.” But — ¬¶the fact of the matter is, they are. And when kids come to me with their waterfalls of emotion, I have no fucking clue about how to deal.