Freshman (Part 4, Those Who Can, Teach. Those Who Can’t Teach, Suck.): Tell the suicidal kid it’ll have to wait until Monday.

As a teacher it was easy to become disenchanted with the reality of the system. And a part of that system—which made it easy to loose faith at breakneck speed—was the guidance department. After my first few months it had become apparent that the guidance department was just an inappropriate name for something that was, fundamentally, a rather inefficient scheduling apparatus. Guidance counselors were really just master schedulers and the only counseling going on was relative to how many credits you were short of meeting the graduation requirements. (I’ll admit that I am over-generalizing, but there is a point to be made here and I’m only stopping short to spare feelings.)

High school guidance counselors, whether by default or by design, have (in my experience, of course,) morphed out of the person you go and talk to when your having a problem and into the person you can never get a hold of, no matter what your problem is. Much of this is based on certain deficiencies in the system—deficiencies that are way beyond the scope of the individual counselor’s control, to be sure—but they exist, and they bring with them very real consequences.

Things like not enough help, too many students and not enough time in a day all contribute to the diminished capacity of the so-called counselor. Even so, many of them passively become victims of the system of which they are a part and make decisions that only they can be held responsible for. After all, whether they have the resources or not, they are the first logical place for teachers and students to go for help; and because that is their role, they are under obligation to, at the very least, try.

But don’t misunderstand; many of them do try. Many of them put in many hours trying everything they can come up with to help the kids in need. And many of them, at least on occasion, succeed. But, as it is with everything else, it’s not the good ones that stick to your brain; it’s the one’s with their master’s degree from an imaginary university with offices in a strip mall that you just can’t seem to get away from. The one’s that tell a struggling student they’d be better off going to an alternative school for a GED and then maybe signing up for the military because they’re “probably just going to drop out anyway.” The ones that carry around pockets full of chewing gum and prescription medications, throwing each one back without discretion. They are indeed the one’s I’m talking about here. And, as is usually the case, I have a story.

I was sitting one afternoon, talking with another teacher when one of her students came into the class for a tutoring session, noticeably distracted. (I wasn’t always my students providing the information.)

“Ms. Brown,” she said softly, not wanting to interrupt. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” my friend replied. “What can I do for you?”

“Um …” the girl mumbled, looking right at me. “Can I talk to you in private?”

“I need to get going,” I said, recognizing that as my cue to exit.

I didn’t think much of it, having had that exchange with my own students on more than one occasion, and so went back to my classroom to mix chemicals. It hadn’t been fifteen minutes when I got a phone call from Ms. Brown.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked, pretty sure that I’d believe it.

“So the little girl that just came into my room just now … yeah, she was in here a few days ago talking to me about a friend of hers. Apparently this friend has been talking about committing suicide … regularly.”

“She didn’t do it, did she?” I asked, because really, you never know.

“Not yet. But she will if guidance has anything to say about it,” she was getting louder as she spoke, and increasingly agitated.

“What?” I asked, unsure of where she was going. “What do you mean?”

“Right … so I was talking to this kid two days ago and she was telling me about her friend. She said that she was scared that her friend would actually do something but she didn’t know what to do and she wasn’t sure how to handle it and she didn’t know where to go for advice … you know, 15 year old stuff; I’m sure you get this all the time.”

“Sure,” I said, because I did know and, as she knew, I did get it all the time.

“So I told her that I would call the girl’s guidance counselor … because I didn’t know the kid myself … and get her to call the family and let them know what’s going on. So I did. And I also asked if she would call the kid down into to her office first and see if there was anything else going on with her.”

“That sounds reasonable,” I said, because it did.

“You’d think. But is that what happened?” she asked, not waiting for an answer. “Noooooo,” she said with obvious disdain. “So the kid comes in here today because she hasn’t heard from her friend and she is really starting to worry. So, while the kid is in my room, I call down to guidance to find out the status of this whole thing, thinking maybe the kid saw her counselor and they had taken some kind of action. And do you know what her counselor said to me? Do you know what that fucking bitch said to me?” she was hot with rage and began mocking the counselor as she recounted the conversation. “When I asked her if she had talked to the girl, she told me that she has been swamped and hasn’t had a chance to look at her ‘to do list.’ She’s put a suicidal kid on a fucking to-do list. I mean, are you kidding me? What is that? And then I tell her that she’s got a friend here who’s very concerned and is afraid that something is going to happen to her. And she says, ‘Well, it’s going to have to wait until Monday. Besides … if she hasn’t done anything by now, she’s probably not that serious about it.’”

Then Ms. Brown paused, but only for a moment. “What the fuck! I mean, seriously: What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

I would like to second that. Because one of the reasons kids commit suicide is that nobody believes they will. And here we have someone who is supposed to have a degree in counseling, making excuses for why they don’t have the time to offer any counsel. What the fuck, indeed.

“I don’t know,” I said, not really answering her question. “I wish I did. But I don’t.” And then I hung up.

It was right about then that I decided to stop teaching.