I earned a doctorate in history after twelve years of effort (not constant effort, but quite a bit of effort nonetheless). I completed classes in all genres of history, methodologies, research skills, and a foreign language (German, now mostly forgotten). I have written book reviews, literature reviews, original research, syllabus rationales, and countless other bits and pieces of prose. I have delivered lectures, talks, papers, witty and informative asides, diatribes, and participated as a speaker and moderator on panel discussions, roundtables, and conversations.
The expectation of my mentors, professors, and instructors as I worked toward that doctorate was that I would then teach at the university level, and I have done so. Given the nature of work in the contemporary academy I am "almost-actually-kinda" successful. I landed a tenure-track job, I have won teaching awards, I receive a decent salary, and most of the time I enjoy my work and the satisfaction that comes from teaching. I even landed a position despite that I work in a not terribly sexy field: business history.
Yet, nothing in all of that prepares you for the human-side of teaching. As I am now nearing my tenth year of working in collegiate instruction (I offered my first class as the instructor-of-record in the fall term of 2004 while not yet ABD) what has become apparent to me is how woefully inadequate my training was in reality. Not in terms of content, or even delivery -- these I either understood naturally or because I emulated the faculty who had inspired me over my years of being the student -- but in terms of psychology.
During the two years that I was an assistant professor at a state university in southern Georgia a significant portion (probably a solid majority) of the student population was either active-duty military, reserve, retired, or spouses and dependents of military personnel. Given the pace and scale of our military deployments overseas since 2000 (of longer duration than any previous sustained conflict in US history with the possible exception of the "Indian Wars" of the 1870s - 1890s), I had 22-year old freshman who had completed tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, or multiple tours in each theater and who has seen friends killed, maimed, injured, or had themselves come to physical or mental injury. It is one thing to enjoy teaching a World Civilizations class where half of the class can speak with deep knowledge of the Sunni/Shia divide in the Muslim world, it is entirely different to have a student show up in your office hours telling you that she hasn't slept a full night in weeks because when she does sleep her dreams are a grim catalog of each and every soldier or civilian who died on the operating table where she was a field nurse, or the other student, a former Army Recon battalion non-com who disappeared for two weeks mid-semester only to return having just been released from county lock-up after a drunk and disorderly charge was compounded with a spurious "assaulting an officer" charges. They looked to me for help and I had nothing to offer beyond human compassion. I walked the first over to counseling services on campus, but even those folks were not in a position to help someone suffering so terribly with PTSD. The second eventually dropped out, and is probably in prison. He had developed a drinking problem in order to calm his nerves, and results were not pretty.
At my current institution the problems are not nearly as severe at first glance, but just as troubling to me. How does one comfort a student who has been beaten regularly by his boyfriend and cannot turn to his family for support because they disapprove of homosexuality? Where do we learn to reach a student who suffers quite clearly from "affluenza" - the distinct inability to see beyond the wealth and comfort to which they have become accustomed?
