Every year when I get to the topics of disordered eating and, later, suicide, I get nervous. Both are “trigger” issues, topics that can remind students of prior psychological trauma. Yosup and I have spoken a few times over the past week about broaching the subject of disordered eating. We had a plan.
Yesterday that plan was blown up by a student question. The plan was to address the issue on Day 2 next week, but when going over Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs a student asked a great question: “If hunger is one of the physiological needs that must be addressed before an individual can move onto another need, what’s up with eating disorders?” That’s a great question.
In Yosup and my strategizing, we’d decided on two principles to guide the lesson: first, we’d address the issue of disordered eating from a biopsychosocial model, and, second, our goal is educating, validating, and building support. I’m so grateful that we’d spoken before this came up; the question really caught me off-guard — but I was still able to answer it, and extend my answer into a discussion of disordered eating that I think was educational, validated the struggles that recovering students face, and demonstrated a culture of care and support for students.
While part of my brain was focused on word-choice and framing my discussion of the topic, I was consciously aware of where my eyes were traveling around the classroom. In the class period that this occured in yesterday, I have four students who have been treated for disordered eating, and I wanted to (a) make mental note of their reactions to the discussion, and (b) not call attention to them (either by looking at them too much or too little). I was conscious of moving my eyes across everyone in the class more than normal.
Students definitely leaked emotions, emotions that they were trying to hide, during the discussion; I noticed these reactions, but I’m reasonably certain that others in the class did not — which is good. Teenagers already suffer from the spotlight effect; I was very careful to not accentuate that in any way. I’ll be following-up today with school counselors on specific students, just to keep all of the (relevant) adults on campus informed of where students may be emotionally.
For the past 24-hours, I’ve been thinking about how this 15-minute discussion went; it’s just one of those topics that scares me. In my normal teaching, there isn’t much harm that I can do to students — but this is different. There are students in my class with varying degrees of wounds; some are raw and open wounds, others are scabbed over, and some are just scars now. I’m scared, even after a decade of doing this, that I’ll make things worse. This year, it all seemed to go quite well, even if not according to my timetable.
Now the trick will be reproducing this successful discussion with my other class next week…