Been Down So Long, Seems Like Up to Me

Lou Spaventa, California, USA

[ Editorial note: this powerful piece on teacher depression is paralleled by The Depressed Teacher, Ozaki Edwards and Rinvolucri, Short Article 2 Year 7 Issue 5 Nov 2005]

I steal the title of a book by the late Richard Farina as I steal the persona of a solid and sober professional. All the while, behind that public posture and inside my deepest self, a darkness clouds me. I am a person who is just discovering the depth of his depression, something my wife knows that I've had for years, but for which I've never received treatment until now. In my family, there is a thread of mental illness from a distant cousin to my oldest daughter. I see the thread in my mother as I recognize it in myself. Today I wonder what the outcome of these periods of depression, whether short or long term, has been upon those whom I have taught.

I teach difficult classes of difficult students, students who have little intrinsic motivation, who don't seem to care about their work, let alone their instructor. I take this all in. I breathe it and it hurts me. When I am feeling down, it becomes worse. I move myself to an extreme position. Philosophically, I believe that I can't teach anyone; I can only lead them towards an awareness of what is needed to teach the self. Where did I get this from? Mainly, from my own learning. I recognize that in the past I have deferred learning certain things, even deliberately resisted learning them, until the time was right for me and I went ahead and learned. This was true for me with the study of linguistics. When I did my MA TESOL, linguistics didn't interest me. Years later it became a consuming interest, and I learned. It didn't matter to me who the instructor was or what the conditions were for learning.

I have been thirsty to know everything all my life, so it is not easy for me to think others might not feel the same way. When I face students who are indifferent to what I do in the classroom, I need to defend myself by carefully planning and overplanning. I try new techniques. I change the course calendar. I talk with students about content and method. If I am busy enough, I can resist the temptation to pour ashes on my head in penance for not reaching my students. But if I am down, if I am depressed, I open a wound inside myself. Each sign of student resistance or indifference - an absence for a group presentation, a failure to read even one page of an assignment, a thoughtlessly done paper, makes the hurt go deeper inside. Then I withdraw. Not overtly, but covertly. I imagine the distance between myself and the nearest student to me as an unbridgeable chasm, one which I have neither the strength nor the energy to do anything about. I am physically present in the classroom, but spiritually I am miles away. When I am depressed, I start thinking with dread of the classroom I have to enter. Each student's face is a study of indifference to me and a message telling me how little what I do means to anyone. I count the days until semester's end. I count the minutes and hours in the classroom. I am afraid of my work. I feel a fraud, someone just going through the motions of teaching. This is someone whom I would never have thought I could be. Yet I am.

Last week in the midst of a serious bout of depression and living with insomnia, I spent hours selecting and previewing scenes of films for a class in which groups of students were to present on the books they had been reading for the last several weeks. Carefully, I previewed scenes that I thought would provoke the students to think more deeply about In Pharoah's Army, Old School, Tortilla Curtain, About a Boy, and Fight Club. The last two books had been made into movies, so I selected scenes which I thought brought out the themes of the novels.

The first three had not been made into films, so I chose "Full Metal Jacket," "Dead Poet's Society," and "A Day Without a Mexican," all films which took up similar themes. I told myself this would really work well. After each group discussed its novel in the allotted fifteen minutes, I would show the scene from the film and we would all see the themes acted out.

In the event, down as I was, I sat there while the first group droned on for nearly a half hour. Instead of crisply summarizing the novel they had read, they went into relentlessly monotonous detail. I did nothing. I let it happen. When it came time to show the scene, I got up and made a hash of it. I could not get the remote control device to work. I fumbled aimlessly for nearly five minutes before asking for student help. I was deeply humiliated by my ineptness, but said nothing to the students, save a weak word of apology. The class continued in this way till the bitter end. Monotonous and overlong presentation. Fumbling attempt to show a scene. The only thought I had when the class finished was that I needed to be there but once more.

I don't quite know how this recitation of depression and ineptitude will strike the reader. I apologize in advance if I bring anyone down to the depressive level of my own present consciousness. I have been teaching for over three decades, and I have never acknowledged my depression. It has had a great influence on my classroom practice and in the way in which I think about teaching. However, I did not realize it as depression. I just thought I was getting "fed up" with student unwillingness to work as hard as I do. It must be true that how I saw student behavior and intuited student attitude was shaded by my own mental state. Even when I was praised by students and colleagues, even when I was reviewed favorably, even when I was given the honor of addressing conferences, even when I achieved at most things I set out to do, I had the feeling that it wasn't enough. One negative comment was enough to color my thinking.

So what to do? Should I and will I go on teaching? Yes, as always awareness is the first step towards accommodating myself to the new reality. I find that talking about my depression, acknowledging it to friends and colleagues, is a step towards relief from the burden of the feeling I carry around inside when depressed. To become fully aware of who I am is one way of dealing with this depression. I am more careful with my students, and I hope I am more forgiving of their own sadness, whether episodic or unique in their lives. I welcome reader responses to what I have written here.

Post Script
Just this past week, at a department meeting which I chaired, my colleagues and I engaged in our chosen discussion topic of student attitudes and student behavior (Remember we teach the "difficult" students). One of the issues that came up, raised by an older and wiser head, was that of teacher burnout. This individual thought that it was one of the great unexplored and misunderstood topics of the teaching life. He said that over time, the psychological consequences of face to face encounters with students have a cumulative effect on teachers. We understood that he was referring mainly to the effect of negative encounters although it must be the positive encounters - the psychic rewards of teaching - that keep most of us going. I wanted to mention this because it is quite different from depression. I believe teacher burnout is a contextual phenomenon in which an individual no longer wishes to be teaching. For me, this is not my experience. I look forward to teaching every new semester, and I delight in planning a new syllabus for each course. I anticipate the new group of students and enjoy getting to know them. However, when I am in a depressed state of mind, which is most often triggered by stress, displeasure with the bureaucratic nature of schools, pressure to perform or conform to standard, and negative effort on the part of students, my mental state is not that of a burned out teacher. It is that of someone in depression. The two are not the same.