Teaching Diary: The Liar

I’m dealing with something that I have never before encountered, and I don’t know what to do.

I have a student who is a liar. Of course I have had students lie to me in the past, but this kiddo is a full on fabulist. A compulsive liar telling tales of enormous proportions. I wish I’d kept notes of the things they said in passing, but today the reality really smacked me in the face.

I had students pair up and write biographies of each other. For the project, students wrote journal entries about their lives to share with their biographer. The kiddos interviewed each other. Pretty normal stuff. I got around to reading the rough drafts today, and this kiddo told their biographer that they had been abandoned at four months old and also that their parents had been killed in a robbery (the kiddo was adopted — their mother works with me at the school). They also told their partner that they had Gigantism and that their biggest accomplishment is that they had a secret TikTok account with a hundred thousand followers.

What do I even do with this? In the past, when kiddo has told me a whopper, I’ve instinctively said, “that’s not true.” Like when they told me they’d been shot in the head once. They never really challenge me back. They just go on with their day. I mentioned it to another teacher in passing a while ago, and he said, yup, that kid lies all the time!

I mean, I’m not a psychologist, but there is pretty clearly something wrong with this kid, but also, it’s not something that necessarily disrupts class? I mean, sooner or later, they’re going to run into problems with their peers, right? And that’s something I should be worried about as a teacher.

Despite saying that I don’t know what to do, I do know that I will talk to the counselor this week and also the kiddo’s mom because there are other issues that she is causing/amplifying with the kiddo’s writing homework. I suppose what I most need to know is how to act in class in such a way that I don’t harm the kiddo. I don’t have much faith in the counselor because she is super young and new to the field, AND she is carrying the workload of at least three people, doing things well beyond the scope of her contract because our school is a festering garbage fire.

I don’t think people ever think about this when they think about the kinds of things teachers encounter in the classroom (if they think about it at all instead of just taking as truth whatever weirdo cable news pundit or dick-wad politician says about teachers), but this is certainly not something I ever thought I would encounter.

In some ways, it reminds me of this Instagram reel I saw from Latinos Against Spooky Shit, whose motto is “If you heard it, no you didn’t.” 😅 Is this just something that is so far above my pay grade that, if it’s not impacting the kiddo’s learning, I just make sure the counselor is aware and then go on with my day?

(This is just one tiny of example as to why governments and organizations need to 1) PAY TEACHERS MORE MONEY TO COMPENSATE FOR THE EMOTIONAL LABOR, 2) have adequate support staff for all the kiddos in our care (and for the staff), and 3) PAY US ALL SO MUCH MORE MONEY SO WE DON’T HAVE TO GET SIDE JOBS JUST TO SURVIVE. PAY US SO WE CAN GO HOME AT NIGHT AND HAVE A BEVERAGE AND DECOMPRESS BEFORE GOING BACK TO THE WEIRD SHIT THE NEXT DAY!!!!!!!

Teaching Diary: A(n Unattainable?) Goal

Related to my last post, here’s the really big question I have for myself: how do I put these kids down? Not in a take-them-to-the-back-pasture sense, haha (I’m actually quite stressed and tired so my joke is not great). I’m going to be thinking about my little fabulist for a long time, long after they’re not in my class. I still think about the horrible horrible little girl in my 7th grade class in Oregon, and her classmate who was homeless and couldn’t do her homework because she lived in a motel room with like four other people and her other classmate who died by suicide a few years after I left Oregon. I think about the little emotional vampire at my last school in the US who needed so much care for so long and would quite literally latch onto your side (like Wen Yuan in the CQL adaptation, only less cute and sadly smellier due to neglect and general adolescent funk). I think about the son of one of my coworkers — his brother died right before school started and his whole world shrunk down to that loss for years. The kiddo whose little sister was kicked in the head by a horse and died. The kiddo who trusted me enough to tell me she was being abused.

How do I put down my colleagues, who also carry these children and then go home to their own families? The ones who go home to empty apartments like I do, but I at least have my pocket friends and my hobbies and the baristas who know me.

How do I recover from the energy it takes to do things that don’t really matter and thing that matter so so much and often look like the same thing to me?

Who the fuck knows?