Faculty Vulnerability in the Classroom

I started my courses for this winter quarter by talking not about my own syllabus, but about something I’d read on a friend’s.

At some point in his class, Sam Wineburg, Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University, warns on his syllabus, he will talk about his struggles with mental health.

I had asked to see the materials for his graduate course on writing because I’m greedy for recommendations. Sam has exquisite taste, which is to say it closely mirrors my own. He is a font of teaching wisdom, and I often grill him on practices I can steal and use in my own classes.

The care with which he crafted his syllabus surprised me not at all. But I gasped when I read the following: “Trigger Warning: I am a mental health advocate. At some point during every quarter, I talk about my own struggles with depression and the coping strategies I’ve developed to maintain mental health.”

I watched the video link Sam provided where he talks about his first bout of depression in college and how the “black dog” has followed him throughout his life. He mentions strategies he’s used to deal with it—meds and therapy.

Here’s a sixty-something white male professor with an endowed chair at an elite university being vulnerable in ways that, I must admit, kind of shocked me.

When I asked him how students responded, he said, “I give a talk every quarter about this. Last time was BP (before pandemic), and people were hanging into the hallways and sitting on the floor. Mobbed afterward by pairs of tearstained eyes thanking me for normalizing what they hide in the closet.”

Over the past two years, I’ve heard many faculty members talk about how stressed they are. Still, I suspect most of us maintain a professional, distanced persona in the classroom. We do our jobs and try our best to support the students. Some of us share curated bits of our struggles as they relate to our profession. I have always talked about how hard it is to write, about never feeling content with what I’ve done, about the fact that every time I give a reading from a published book, I have to edit the passage because I’m embarrassed by the drivel I’ve allowed to appear in print.

I talk about challenges that come with the territory of being a working writer and the importance of being able to meet deadlines and provide clean copy. But it had never occurred to me that bits of more personal information might be useful in the classroom.

When I told students about Sam’s trigger warning, they leaned in, nodding in grateful acknowledgment. These days, students often introduce themselves with their diagnoses. This generation tends not to feel stigmatized about mental health issues, which they are accustomed to hearing about from their peers and, with increasing frequency, from celebrities like Simone Biles and Prince Harry.

But still, I think it’s only natural for them not to see their professors as, well, fully human.

Sam is, as he says, a mental health advocate and someone who wants to serve as a resource for students. Whatever else I am, or want to be, I am not that. So instead I thought about what I might want students to know about me, something real and vulnerable, that would be relevant to my teaching.

It didn’t take long to remember that one of the things students have commented on my teaching and thesis advising is that I am, well, critical. I have never mastered the art of the compliment sandwich. When I think something is good, I’m quick to say so. I’m even known to gush. But I tend to home in on problems.

That is because—and here it comes—I was raised by a hypercritical father. My English professor pop and I connected only when he read my angsty teenage poems, red pen in hand. He bled ink over my cautious words and fragile feelings. For me, the gift of attention comes wrapped in a package of all the ways I am deficient.

My father would no doubt cast it differently. He would say that all he wanted was for me to achieve, to perform to the best of my ability.

Any child of a tiger mother or striving Jewish father can recognize this syndrome. What it means for me is that one word of criticism rings louder than a thousand words of praise. Critique is how I experience love.

When I work with editors, I tell them to bring it on. Don’t fluff me up by pointing out what you think I’m doing well; just protect me from myself, from the yearning, never-quite-good-enough teenager who ended a sentence with a word that didn’t resonate, who fell back on clichés, who didn’t think hard enough.

After years of teaching, reading Sam’s trigger warning made me think how I present in the classroom. When I give feedback, I told students winter quarter, I tend to focus on how they can do better. What I know is that, at best, I come off as intense. It doesn’t help that I have sharp facial features and am characterologically blunt. When I first started working in eastern Washington, a colleague told me that people weren’t accustomed to my “New York ways.”

This quarter, I shared with students some of the childhood insecurities that have clung to me like dog hair for my whole life. I opened myself to them.

They responded by offering up bits of their own lives while we discussed the damage done to Perry Smith by his family in In Cold Blood or the way Alison Bechdel struggled to figure out her father in Fun Home and turn that into art. Our conversations felt intimate. Though the group of students includes a Joe Rogan fan, a man who is writing about his transition and a number who identify as neurodivergent, it was clear we all know what it’s like to grow up in a family.

We talked about the about how the best writers render pain on the page with compassion, not anger. They read in Vivian Gornick’s book The Situation and the Story about how much more interesting it is to see “the cunning of the innocent and the loneliness of the monster” than to write a Mommy Dearest screed.

Many of the students at my regional comprehensive university were told they weren’t good at school. They don’t see themselves represented in much of the work they read in their literature classes. Some of their professors come across as imposing and imperious. I know that my own intensity can be off-putting, and I’m not sure it’s better or worse when my face is masked. What I wanted them to hear is that, like them, I am damaged goods, just trying my best to get by.

If voicing my lingering sense that nothing I ever do is ever feels like enough—that I am not enough—helps even one student, it’s worth the scary revelation. That is, after all, why we read literature: to feel less alone, less like the little freaks we all fear ourselves to be.