I Can't Tell Anyone Else

A teacher is in a strange position. To a young student, she is an authority figure, a surrogate parent, an older friend or aunt. Just as in psychotherapy, strange projections result. The Narration Essay is tricky. Who is it aimed at? Most students feel the audience is their teacher. Students often write about the most important events in their lives in the Narration Essay, and thus form a bond with the audience, their teacher.

Students will sometimes confide in a teacher things they would never tell their friends. "I never told anyone this, but I feel I can trust you," is how it often begins. One time it was even "You're the only white person I've ever trusted," simply in being her teacher. Sometimes it's something they work out with you through their writing; sometimes it's simply that they confide in you.


An example of a student working it out through her writing is a young Mexican girl I tutored at Nassau Community College. She met with me twice a week and every paper was a different aspect of sex abuse. She was working out what had happened to her. This happened over two semesters of English classes. She never wrote the specifics of what happened to her, but she did take the bull by the horns so to speak and worked the issue right out of her system. She managed to liberate herself in time for her wedding, and invited me.

At Cooper Union, I tutored an Israeli girl who was having difficulty speaking up in her classes, and didn't know why. She thought it must be that she felt insecure about her English, or shy- yet out of class these things never got in her way of speaking. She came in to work on a Narrative Essay and began to speak about the topic, fighting that was going on in Israel. She spoke more and more, and gradually seemed to fall into a trance. The session had gone too much off track, but my instincts told me not to interrupt her. She must have spoken for at least ten or fifteen minutes straight. She told her story gradually- first, the war itself; then slowly another narrative emerged. It finally came clear what it was she'd been hiding- she told us, at first indirectly and then directly, that her brother was killed.

When she finished, her eyes unglazed and she started in surprise, as if she didn't realize where she was. She looked embarrassed. "I never told anyone that," she said.
She let me know next week that her problem in speaking up in class was over.

Also at Cooper Union, a very young Chinese girl overlooked the tutoring process entirely and asked if she could confide in me. "I can't tell anyone else," she said, and told her story of how she'd been seduced by a man who she had just discovered- after a year together- was married. Her heart was broken and she was all of 18. I thought I had little constructive to say, but she seemed to take great comfort in it. Like the Israeli girl, did she just need to talk?

It feels good to be able to make people feel better, but there is a bit of guilt. However much I love my students, things like this are more of a one-sided attachment, and we can't really give them all they need, we are professionals.