Category: undocumented students

Complex Trauma in High School English Class

While all around me the federal government is being dismembered, it seems apt to bring up the novel we’re reading.

In English 12 we’re halfway through Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s hard not to draw parallels to what is happening in the U.S.A. today. I feel like Offred seeing the bodies from the “salvaging” hanging on the wall for the crimes they committed — men killed for gender treachery, doctors for performing abortions.

U.S. AID was butchered yesterday. The Department of Education last week. NIH before that. Canada is now an enemy. Undocumented immigrants are all criminalized. In Gilead, they know that nobody can be trusted. They know how dangerous scientists and intellectuals can be. “Eyes” are everywhere.

My EML students worry that family members will be deported while they’re at school, parents afraid to go to the supermarket or church. They bring these fears into the classroom, and either act out or remain unusually quiet. Some students just stop coming to school. Their anxiety seeps into our shared space. Whispered conversations, a heartfelt journal entry.

A teacher friend from another school told me that a student asked if she was legal. She is from South America and speaks with a slight accent. She replied, “I am now, but I wasn’t when I first arrived in this country.” The student responded, “Then I would have reported you to ICE.”

It could be worse. I could be a 53-year-old NOAA scientist with kids about to go to college — decades into public service, too young to retire, years of exceptional performance reviews — fired through a social media posting from DOGE.

I could be an undocumented LGBTQ+ immigrant about to graduate.

Seniors had to write an essay about the value and relevance of The Handmaid’s Tale for today’s teens. One student wrote that reading this text shows the consequences of not standing up against injustices in the world today. Another student wrote, “our government is meant to protect us, but if they ever turn against us, marginalized communities will be in the most danger.”

The fascist flexing taking place right now in the White House is meant to provoke fear and panic. Our president is inflicting continuous trauma on this country, with marginalized populations suffering the most. And they are sitting in my English 12 class.

Teachers have little training in how to deal with anxiety, emotional dysregulation, or persistent difficulties in sustaining relationships (symptoms of complex stress disorder), but we see them becoming normalized.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

I have hope that my students will stand up against injustices, that they will fight for the future they want to live in. I will do everything in my power to give them the tools they need to think critically about our world. One of the best tools at my disposal is excellent speculative fiction, like The Handmaid’s Tale.

Because I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, I can (still) teach a novel that has been banned in Florida, Oregon, and Texas. This is exactly what we need to be reading right now. This is exactly what we need to be discussing. This is exactly how we can overcome the psychological stress of living through the next four years.

The Upside Down

In just a week, the new presidential administration has sent a wave of fear and shock into every DC area school. I teach at a school that’s 60% Hispanic, with many undocumented students hidden in plain sight. When I quietly handed out MCPS fliers on immigrant rights, printed in Spanish and English, nearly every student grabbed one. 

My students don’t talk about it with me. It’s my first year at a new school, and all my classes are co-taught. So we haven’t developed the kind of mutual trust that I am used to by this time of year. But my colleague who works with newcomer students said they were panicking. 

Violent January 6 criminals are granted blanket pardons while innocent children, many of whom are refugees from political violence, are at risk of deportation. I keep coming back to my mantra from the previous Trump administration: “This is not who we are.” But clearly, I do not understand my fellow Americans. Apparently we are a bigoted, anti-authority, xenophobic country.

We’re living in an upside-down reality, like an episode of Stranger Things.

I will do everything in my power to help my students. But I wish I could change the channel.