The Girl With the Amethyst Hair

It’s the fourth week of school and you’ve already missed four classes in a row. You can only miss three before I start chopping points off your final grade. Still, you’ve returned now, you insist for good, sporting new amethyst hair.

Hair like that is a pronouncement. Of what, I was sure I did not want to know. In my younger days I might have thought hopefully that it was a quiet sign of your freshened dedication. I am not young anymore, so I must admit that your hair made me vaguely uneasy, even before you followed me back to my office and unspooled your tale of woe.

Now it is my job to listen, and to find things out about my students whether I want to or not. I did not want to see that one student’s scar on her lower back from when she had surgery on her pilonidal cyst. Nevertheless, before I could object, it was presented. I did not want to hear the tale of that other student’s groin abscess, or its untimely burst. Protestations were useless. But mostly I must confess that I do not want to hear about my students’ emotional problems, most especially when airing those problems is the very first conversation that student initiates with me, inevitably after they have stopped coming to class or doing work. I do not want to be privy to long personal details of their lives, whether those details are real or imagined. In part because I have my own problems, and my own friends and family members with problems. Most of us are on anti-depressants. Some of us have chronic medical conditions. Many of us are in bad marriages, or have money or career woes, or parents that have decided it would be nice to drive to the grocery store in their underwear. Some of us, God help us, are dropping dead with little or no warning, and others in ways to painful to imagine.

So I do not want to know, Girl With the Amethyst Hair, that you found your boyfriend dead last semester. I do not want to know that you are having seizures, and panic attacks, and you’ve used way too much ecstasy. I do not want to know that your doctors think you might be bipolar. Or hear about your therapists, or your uneasy membership in two sororities. I do not want to know that the Xanax isn’t working, and that you think you might be agoraphobic. And I do not want to know that you’ve heard things about me, bad things about how I grade, and you’re terrified of coming to my class.

But you say these things anyway, and I have to think for a bit because I am not sure what to say to you, or your amethyst hair, because I don’t know how to help you. You are clearly upset, as I would be, hoisting around such a burden of real and shadowy plagues. So I try to tell you the right things. You need to visit student services. They can help you with an accommodations plan. No, you say, because your mom told you they won’t take your problems seriously. Everyone will think your problems are “made up”. But they might as well be, Girl With the Amethyst Hair, because I cannot help you, unless those nice people at student services tell me how.

Perhaps you should reduce your course load, I say, and put less pressure on yourself academically. In a rush to graduate, you have taken nineteen credits. I tell you plainly that nineteen credits is too much. No, you say, you need to graduate. You say you’ve been in school too long. Nineteen credits this semester and thirteen over the summer will allow you to finish, and coming back in the fall is just “dumb.”

You say most of all what you need is to get out and get a job. But that is not what hair like yours is saying. It is saying “I have lost my way in the world, and perhaps if my hair is this color, someone will find me”.

You have my sympathy, but you will not take my sound advice, and sympathy does not and will never translate into the commodity that you so obviously want from me, which is why you came here to begin with. You wish to transform my sympathy into slack, of which I can give you none until university officials tell me how. And in any case I cannot relax the standards of the class to accommodate you, no matter what sort of tragedy has befallen you. This is a sad fact, one of many that is better learned when you are young, as you are. Shit happens and you don’t always get a pass. Sometimes you can’t do everything at once. And, unlike our kind and loving God, people will not generally bestow upon you what you have not earned.

So come to class, and do your work, because in ten weeks’ time a bunch of numbers will tell me how to calculate your final grade, and what to put in that little box with your name beside it, not your tale of woe, or the color of your hair.