Talking to Erin
By: Michael Rossi
Tags: 2020, Education, Depression, Covid 19, Teaching

One of my student’s is named Erin[1]. I’ve been her English teacher for three months now. I’ve never seen her face.

Well, that’s not entirely true. When I open my electronic gradebook and hover my cursor over her name, Erin’s school picture appears. She is smiling, wearing a t-shirt and a headband that pulls back her hair. Erin looks about seventeen, tan and happy.

But that’s not how I know her. We log on together three times a week and interact remotely. Erin doesn’t turn on her camera. She doesn’t speak. A three-dimensional being collapsed into a blank space, no bigger on my screen than a postage stamp.

Teachers are always more curious about the lives of their students than their students are of their teachers, mainly because students seem so much more alive. But remote learning has leeched so much humanity from my kids. Gone is the spontaneity, the liveliness, the banter of a classroom. On Zoom, you have to click a button before you can speak. And if the student doesn’t turn on her camera — as many of our students do not — she exists only as a name on the screen, a vacuum into which the imagination rushes.

Not pictured: The kid cos-playing anime, the kid who only speaks through a sock puppet, the kid whose dog is licking peanut butter off his face for uncomfortably long periods of time…

At first, I tried to understand what kept Erin from revealing herself. I called on her in class and sent her messages in the chat. If she replied, it was always in the terse, chary manner of teens who have gone boneless and will force you to drag the words from them. I pictured her slouched over her Chromebook, fingers drumming out her boredom, listening to me babble on about analysis and composition. Does she have posters on her walls? Books on the nightstand? A favorite YouTube channel? But there was no way to penetrate that veil. We can’t even hear one another breathe on the other side.

After a while, I simply surrendered to it. I was not going to get to know Erin, learn her repertoire of facial expressions, figure out what makes her laugh. This isn’t merely because we’re virtual; every year, there are kids who wall themselves off and make themselves remote. But rarely has the metaphor been so defeating as the Zoom grid checkered by blacked-out squares.

I think I understand Erin’s impulse to retreat. Lately, I’ve been struggling to be in the presence of other people, a manifestation of my deep sense of shame. Over the past fifteen months, my daughter has struggled with anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideations, which crested recently in a long-term hospitalization. She’s currently residing in a residential facility and will be there for several more weeks. Because of COVID, I cannot visit her, and the rules limit phone conversations to 15 minutes a day. I understand intellectually that her condition is not a reflection of my parenting, nor is her struggle a failure of my love. But in my chest, something has cracked, and the contents have come sluicing out. My daughter has become a black screen to me, and I can’t stop myself from feeling responsible.

Perhaps what is most painful is that I feel undeserving of the complaint. This year has taken so much from so many. People have lost jobs, rituals, family members. It’s hard to feel justified objecting to the fire in your house when the entire West Coast literally burned to the ground in July. I don’t know how to answer people when they ask how I’m doing. I’m not okay. They’re not okay. But do either of us really want to uncap the hydrants of emotion we’re both lugging around?

Learning about your child’s depression means grieving for old expectations. You move through the five stages — “This can’t be happening… why is this happening?” — before settling into acceptance like a sinking tanker finally comes to rest on the seafloor. Mental illness can be medicated and managed, but, like diabetes, fundamentally changes the sort of life one will lead. For a parent, it can feel like a large rock that has inexplicably appeared in the middle of your kitchen. You keep trying to move it before realizing that it’s not going anywhere, and you’re going to have to change the way you cook.

But before you reach acceptance, there’s a lengthy stage of bargaining, where you make all kinds of deals with yourself about what recovery could look like or how we might return to normal. “If we can just get the dosage right,” I said, “then we might be in the clear.” And maybe that’s true; every kid is different. For all I know, my child will age out of this just as suddenly as she aged into it. Change can come that fast. Somewhere in Wuhan, an infected bat flew too close to a curious human. One year later, we’re all living underground.

Of course, disaster can also become the wallpaper. The scary thing about this year is that we’ve invested so much in bundling it into one calendar. We’ve all talked about 2020 is “the worst,” as though it were a statistically inevitable outlier on some bell curve of misfortune. We’ll get a vaccine, a new president, maybe a new Marvel movie. Next year won’t be as bad; next year couldn’t possibly be worse.

It’s bargaining, again. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the other stages, too. People have been mad at teachers and schools during this time, which can resemble a person in a lifeboat complaining that their dinner is late. But the anger is about so much more than the diminished learning experience. It’s about empty stadiums on Friday night, concerts assembled online, school dances that can’t be rescheduled. It’s about recognizing that we are small and vulnerable and most days hang by a thread.

Before acceptance, there’s a sense of powerlessness, impotent anger, despair. That’s the dominant affectation of my students — a “lol nothing matters” resignation that our disasters have an inertia that can’t be stopped. We’re not the Greatest Generation; we don’t come together to win wars or save the world. We can’t even agree to wear masks.

I get this. My enemy is an inscrutable genetic deficiency. I can’t reach it with medicine or therapy. It feels inevitable, almost karmic.

But I am a teacher. Every day I get up, and I have students to reach. And I believe that my students can be reached, even across great distances, to learn, to be inspired by the humanity of literature. I believe in magic word combinations that, like spells, summon a wayward kid from the fringe to the center of class. I believe that teaching models integrity, altruism, passion, and curiosity, and that these virtues can bend a person’s life towards the good. This isn’t borrowed faith. I was saved by teachers. I’ve seen it in my own classroom. And if I don’t show up, none of those things will happen. It’s true for my daughter, too.

The greatest surprise of this year — more than the global pandemic or the sinister germ inside my child’s head — has been the stubborn resilience of hope. I’ve lost so much good about myself — my humor, my patience, my resiliency, my lightness. But I still have my classroom, where nothing is inevitable or lost. The mission is pulling me through, despite myself. I’ve protested, shouted, begged, and despaired. And now I can accept it. This is my life, and it’s a vital one.

Another day at my monitor, and the class is dismissed. But Erin’s black box is still there, logged on. Maybe she’s not even there. Maybe she simply stepped away from her Chromebook and missed the bell. Or maybe she’s waiting for me to say something. To teach.

“Erin,” I say to the darkness. “Erin, we’ve got this. We’re going to be okay.”

[1] Actually, that’s not her name. But for confidentiality’s sake, I’m going to call her Erin. And those aren’t my students pictured above, either; it’s a stock photo.