Seeing the Pain Beneath the Challenge

Carlisha certainly has her share of challenges. I work with her both in small groups and one-on-one. Sometimes she falls asleep, which she attributes to her diabetes medication. Some faculty members speculate that she is faking because she doesn’t want to do the work.

What we know is that she is in sixth grade and reads at a third-grade level. I watch her pause to catch her breath between flights of stairs. She weighs about 250 pounds.

But Carlisha has made a lot of progress this year. Our staff works deliberately to include her and make her feel welcomed and cared for [2]. The special-needs PE coach [3] has been working with her one-on-one, as has a mentor from the Edible Schoolyard [4], a model for food curriculum, offering students a garden that provides free lunches and interactive classrooms, kitchen, based at a middle school in Berkeley, Calif.

As a result, she smiles more than she used to, says “please” and “thank you” more often and recently sported a pair of pants that she didn’t used to fit into. 

But last week brought a difficult day. Carlisha was asked to leave class for talking back to the teacher. She refused to speak to her mentor, with whom she is usually so eager to spend time. We learned that her general mood of animosity was triggered by the events of the previous afternoon: Her mom was denied parole.

I sometimes forget how many of our students’ family members are incarcerated.  Researchers suggest that the number of American children with a parent in prison [5] is about 1.7 million. 

While the prominence of incarcerated parents is shocking, (and more evidence that there is a problem with the way the prison system works in our country,) the silver lining is that there is some hopeful research about how we can support students whose parents are behind bars.

The Children’s Defense Fund [6], as well as Project Resilience [7] and The National Association for School Psychologists [8] are among these resources. We can also help break down the stigma that comes with having a family member in jail. We can take advantage of activities that discuss prison, poverty [9] and myriad related issues.

It is hardly novel to note that behaviors we see in class are often related to circumstances outside of our classrooms. That said, it’s good for me to remember that issues like obesity, or separation from a parent, certainly have more of an impact on a child than my lesson of the day.

What does this mean for me as a teacher? Perhaps it means incorporating articles about emotional eating and healthy habits into reading conferences, or leading an explicit discussion about the prison system [10]. I do have the power to address these real, pressing life issues, even in a 50-minute period.  

So I will continue to support Carlisha as she fights to regain control of her body, and empower her to feel a sense of control in a world that has locked her mother away. Carlisha’s story helps me reprioritize; health and emotional safety are as essential as anything measured on a standards-based test.

Craven is a middle school English teacher in Louisiana.