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In a few posh enclaves on Long Island, where I live, neighbors have pulled their kids out of school for the semester to study in “pods” — face-to-face with teachers and classmates, no contaminated buildings, no distractions at the edge of a screen. These alternate-reality schools try to impart a sense of normalcy: sports, drama classes, lots of spontaneous interaction.
My patient Leah came out of retirement to teach in one. “I thought it would be fun,” she said. “I miss the kids.” Until about three years ago, Leah taught English at a local middle school. She started seeing me now, however, because things haven’t turned out as she expected.
The students are privileged, articulate, and eager to learn. There are no discipline problems. But Leah has never taught kids as obviously troubled, and she is not sure how to respond. Since mid-August, when the semester began, the level of stress among her students has only increased. “I can tell from what they write [that] they’re worried about the future," she says. "They think they’ll fall behind and never catch up.”
Leah feels stunned by what the kids express, paralyzed, out of her element. She wants to understand her responsibility, whether she’s just an innocent by-stander or something more — a designated Good Samaritan, perhaps, who cares and gets personally involved. “I’m a grandma, you know," she says. "I can listen.”
She wonders whether the kids are reaching out to her, indirectly, in carefully constructed essays that nonetheless scream for help. She wonders whether the kids are conscious of how they’re reacting, and whether their parents even know. “Should I tell the parents?” she asks.
Leah began to sense something wrong when she assigned Billy Budd, a middle-school classic about a teenage sailor who is hung for striking an officer on a British warship. Herman Melville left it unfinished at his death in 1891, and it quickly assumed a status in his oeuvre second only to Moby Dick. “I’ve taught that book for years,” she said. “The kids always read it as a morality tale — you know, about duty, injustice, the big issues that you want them to think about.” Except this year, when students started taking it personally. “They identify with Billy. They feel they’re caught in an upheaval, like he was in the mutiny, and that they’re just as helpless.”
Here are kids from affluent homes, and they worry, figuratively speaking, that their lives are being cut short. Leah showed me the essay of one boy, Ian, who is 14. In part, he wrote:
Billy wasn’t far from my age. He was the victim of circumstances beyond his control. He never wanted to be in the British navy. But they got him. Then he had no way to defend himself, even though almost everyone loved him. In the end, there was no way out of the inevitable. You see it coming. I feel that Billy could have been somebody if they hadn’t got hold of him. Now I’m in the same situation. So are all the people around my age. Instead of the navy, it’s the virus. But it’s the same thing. We started out thinking we were going somewhere. But we are going somewhere else, and it won’t be as good.
Ian’s fears were typical, said Leah. Despite their parents’ cosseting, the kids had picked up on news about the economy, job losses, universities closing, and a general contraction of opportunity. They seem to have taken it personally. They seem to have assumed that they were part of a developing story — a developing catastrophe — that would hang them up. Like Billy. More or less forever, since the kids coming after them would not suffer the same disabilities. “In their minds,” said Leah, “they’re competing with kids they’ll never even meet, since they’ll never catch up to them.”
As a psychiatrist, I could see depression in the works — a feeling of being had by “circumstances.” Leah, a literary type, saw irony — that being in a “pod” made the kids see everything outside as dysfunctional, a threat from which they’re being artificially protected. One kid even wrote, “Our parents just outsmarted themselves.” It was as if their parents’ money, and admittedly good intentions, couldn’t change anything. They saw Billy as their future.
Before she had come to me, however, Leah had tried to change the subject. She assigned parts of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, the classic paean to American opportunity. “I thought it would be the counterpoint to Billy Budd. America isn’t the British navy.”
But it didn’t work. The kids’ basic take was that nobody needed a college education in the 18th century because the country was wide open. All you needed was to be smart, like Franklin. And even Franklin started out with good connections. “He had a letter of recommendation,” wrote one girl. It was as if they were determined to write themselves out of the American Dream.
Leah wondered whether this was adolescent hysteria, which they’d grow out of by the time they got to high school and reconnected with all their friends. But she worried. She wasn’t sure. Earlier in her career, if a child seemed troubled, she’d suggest a visit to the school counselor. The counselor could decide whether to involve the parents. But this pop-up pod had no counselors, just a few teachers with no real training in adolescent psychology.
“So, what should I do?” she asked. “I’m afraid that if I offer some advice, I’ll say something wrong. The parents might become upset.”
Tough question. I wondered about my own kids, who were somewhat younger than Ian but very aware — what are they thinking? Are they telling me?
As we spoke, I realized that Leah had come to care about these kids, not least because she saw them as articulate representatives of millions of others. She said she’d feel guilty if she did nothing.
Indeed, I thought it was good to take on their fears, so long as she didn’t transgress their parents’ expectations (which, according to her contract, was to teach them American literature). So, I suggested, “Why not have a few lessons on young people who’ve overcome adversity? Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, might be a good place to start.” In other words, have the kids think about, and talk openly about how the worst disabilities imaginable — being deaf and blind — couldn’t keep a smart person from becoming world-class.
Up until now, the kids had been open about their fears in the written work, while in class they spoke about the books and the characters in conventional terms. It was as if they didn’t want their peers to know how they felt — how the books reflected how they felt. I suggested that allowing the kids to be open, to share their feelings, while appreciating Helen Keller’s success, might give them some perspective. “If they can see adversity as part of the human condition — part of what they share right now — but see people who’ve found a way through it, that could help.” Helen Keller had a devoted teacher, Anne Sullivan, and they have teachers who care about them.
Of course, the kids felt anxious. But Leah said she would try to meet them where they are, under cover of their peers’ added support. “At least I don’t want them to feel like nobody knows and nobody cares.” It was somewhere to start.
