No one talks about "trigger warnings" anymore.
We don't hear complaints about the term "safe spaces" much either.
But that the terms aren’t trending is not a confirmation that the either have gone away or that they were right: that we were complaining too much and we expected too much.
From my experience as a community college professor and woman living in California, in the business I’m in, we’ve found a way to temper the extremism surrounding both of these related concepts. I barely notice when a host on NPR or a caption on the screen warns me of some content to come that could be too much for my ears and eyes to bear. And this is out in the world, not in a classroom, where students should not feel held “captive” by the desires of a professor to teach her faves, while de-centering what’s best for the learning environment.
Out here in this “real world”, where most of the media I consume is coming through the internet, when I am warned about what’s to come into my ears (I’m an avid podcast consumer), the content I’m warned about is not even close to what is too much for me, which. No, the stuff that hurts, needs us to hurt, are the voices and screams of those living through the hell of wars and genocides, broadcasted from Democracy Now! every morning straight into my brain.
In a college setting, the notions of trigger warnings and safe spaces are a way to communicate a welcoming and belonging tone. To send a message about our culture, that asks us all to really linger on the title: community college.
I’m not naive enough to believe that just because a signpost is pointing at something that the something is necessarily true, effective, or a promise kept.
It’s not possible in such a massive world as ours, even in this pocket of Northern California, to provide open arms and keyless entry to everyone who wishes to look inside and stay a while.
Now that I am in my fifth year of teaching 100% online at a public community college (twenty-one years teaching at SCC), I presume that from the outside, it must seem natural that more barriers to entry have dissolved. Don’t I wish!
Here in my unabashedly belonging-oriented, safe-ish space, as a progressive educator—meaning, I stay on top of the current literature and continue to evolve my praxis according to the mission to teach all students in the ways that speak to their individual educational needs within my discipline—my work towards increasing students’ sense of belonging certainty is woven into the culture of my virtual classroom.
However, when students come in, they come in with loads of knowledge from their lives online, from being continuously connected to their devices, with apps relentlessly beckoning them, worming their AI magic, often to the point that many (the majority?)of them are inviting in that AI dystopian thing of becoming one with the brain.
The word “trigger” is perfect for what its meant convey figuratively. “Spark” has too much of a positive connotation; and other ways to say it are too long, like “made me think back to that time when…”.
I know enough about myself to know what I don’t want to consume, the stuff that makes me sick.
Rape scenes in movies are a hard no. The Accused taught me that way back in 1988; to this day, I can see images of that pool table, of Jodie Foster’s body, her head and face reacting to this drowning, this force of a man’s strength, while, only seconds before, she had been free in a drunken bliss state as she danced.
Yes, I have been triggered by a pieces of writing and film, like The Accused, works that I found to be too much to bear. I’m not referring to work where I have a momentary need to hide my eyes, turn my head, cover my ears. That’s not I’m talking about. If I was so sensitive that I had to be like the monkey covering her eyes, ears, and mouth, I don’t know how I would get through life.
I’m referring to work that hit me so bluntly, surprising me into a state of deep sadness, the kind where, even after it’s over, I cried and cried.
Those are untouchable, like The Deer Hunter. I can barely even look at the title without a shiver; it’s the memory of me watching that movie, which I did for the first time on New Year’s Day probably twenty years ago, that broke open a fully over-the-top emotional wreck, sending me into a three-month tear fest that I could not shake.
While I can’t ever watch that film again, I don’t regret seeing it. It’s a remarkable thing when a piece of art, including non-fiction, can move a human being in a way that hits a core nerve.
I had a similar experience with reading Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street. The lasting emotional pain and disturbance I experienced during and after reading it was beyond words like “worth it.” This book changed me, it opened and broke me. I could never revisit it and I can’t give it a full on recommendation without couching it in what I’m writing here. But the way the book deepened my brain’s network of all that has oppressed me personally, gave me more strength, true power, as a woman, a writer, a teacher.
I don’t judge anyone who would be so injured by art that they would need to opt out of a classroom assignment, such as if I was teaching Howl and forgot that Ginsberg uses “cunt” and “cocksucker,” and it bothered a student who might be offended by such imagery.
If my curriculum choices did annoy a student to the point where they felt like they didn’t belong in the room, that would be bad. I don’t teach Howl anymore to my general ed. lit. and comp. students. Instead, I teach “Brokeback Mountain.” I didn’t make that change because of any students’ issues. I did it because over time, I learned more and I strive to be better at my job semester-after-semester. The short story, “Brokeback Mountain” by E. Annie Proulx is just the best short story ever written. It can give us as a class so much more than Howl can. So there it is.
I do all I can to avoid culturally insensitive materials, and I make myself available and approachable so that student feel comfortable communicating their feelings with me.
I invite that. I survey my students frequently, asking for feedback on my feedback and instruction, and I pay attention to them, reaching out if I sense something is wrong.
In fact, when I did teach Howl, many many years ago, this was during a time where a sizable portion of my students were new immigrants, Christians from Eastern Europe and Muslims from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I would tell students on the first day of class to read the book that week on their own so that they would know if they were interested in this course. No one ever dropped because of Howl. Like with Othello, they learned a lot about this country and its history through those texts.
The kind of triggering that I am more concerned with is what could possibly put students in a setting that’s like a pressure-cooker, the kind of tension that leads to serious mental health concerns, like those related to PTSD.
College is that. Beyond any text, college itself is the trigger. It was for me, aside from marriage, the drip drip drip of pressure sent me into a most dark, alone, self-destructive place while in the pursuit to demonstrate my perfection and worthiness to those who, I believed, had the authority to judge and rate me. Including my parents.
And I know it is this way for many of my students, maybe most of them. So, is college, as the system operates today, still with a grading system with requirements that are often unattainable without harm, good for those with eating disorders, clinical depression, drug and alcohol addictions, or other types of self-harming disorders?
Without a degree, let alone the education that it’s meant to reflect, Americans have less ability to create a life with options for a career that truly suits and supports them, a career that won’t make them sick, miserable, and struggling to pay their bills and life a life that looks somewhat like the one they dream of.
Even as important, if not more, without being enrolled in a college, many people today are untethered, have no sense that their choices matter in times when things are not looking so hopeful. Their day-to-day is one of deep uncertainty and even burnout from trying to get a foothold.
It is undisputed that mom’s and young women, some of whom are moms, are driven by the desire to take care of their children. My students who have kids have the motivation and they push themselves so hard. However, for so many, the requirements of their multi-faceted lives force them to make hard choices, often meaning they have to drop out.
For so many men and childless women in my classes, being enrolled in college might be the only thing reminding them that there is somewhere to go, someone there looking out, something they can turn to, maybe.
When I teach, I keep my personal details, my story, to myself. I might reference “mom” or “Paul” or “the cats” or “working through a flare-up”, but that’s it. Class time is my students’ time.
I do worry that I can be a trigger. Did I just find the title of my blog? Not just this post, but the whole deal?
In my life outside of the classroom, there’s one person that I thanked in my book’s acknowledgements but who I haven’t had contact with in close to twenty years. She has no idea the impact she had on me, my writing, and my recovery. I don’t reach out to her because I worry that even hearing from me will unleash (oh, another synonym, go Eve!) what I represent to her, that I will remind her of times she rather forget. I could be projecting; I could be so wrong, and it’s possible that she would feel honored and excited that her words’ impact on me decades ago is part of my writing process. I’ll probably never know.
With my students, I don’t lead with, “Hi, I’m Professor Imagine, and I have a history of tons of health problems. I have a disability and wrote a book about living with a severe eating disorder.” I allow just a few details about my history and my present state of chronic illness to come out organically. I’m VERY attentive to not be one of those stereotypical over sharing and overly self-centered professors.
I do at times mention a flare up or that I was dealing with “some health struggles” as a way to model what I do to work through my own challenges and so they know how deeply I do get it. I want my student to see the human that I am so that they can feel confident if they do ever share something personal, which happens all the time, not just with one demographic of students either.
I lead with being a writing professor, coach, and mentor. And, because my word is bond, I am able to be a resource for my students who are suffering with their own, often debilitating, situations.
Every semester, a few students reveal to me that they have an eating disorder. Like I said, I don’t talk about my own, but now that my book is out, they at least have a sense that I’ve been through it, too.
My work is centered on helping my students gain a sense that they are connected to class, that their presence matters to me, and I hope to make it so that they feel like it matters to them, too. For some, being in community college tethers and grounds them to something when life becomes chaotic, such as when a student is jailed for a parole violation, possibly he fucked up or maybe it was just a slight mishap—like a curfew issue—or, could be being punished by a rogue cop, abuse of power. It’s not my business: I’m focused on him, his access to the knowledge and degree he’s aiming for, his link to me and others who help him know that we care about him.
I do all I can so that the students who are on the edge don’t disappear. These students show some struggles starting around week six, when the fatigue begins to set in but the pressure is only just starting to ramp way up.
The thing is, I teach in a way that is all about depressurizing the environment. I consistently remind my students in multiple ways that “this is not a test.” My students have so much control over their grades, but no matter what I do, how I present my instruction, the learned pressure builds, cooks, then boils. For some, it’s too much.
Right now, there is a difference. Students who were in high school during COVID are now in college and more of them than ever before do disappear. They just ghost the class, sometimes coming back for a minute, but then falling away again.
I don’t give up on them: I keep reaching out. This semester, one of the brightest lights of a human did come back. She had stepped back and I was worried.
When she returned, though, she was so energized and ready to work. I asked her if she thought she just works better under pressure, since she came back with just a few weeks left and dug deep. She got so much work done with such quality, and it’s clear she didn’t use AI or cut corners. This student has shared her struggles with me, including at least two issues that are very real, documented, often debilitating health issues. I hope to help her a perspective and actionable strategies so that her specifics, the hard ones, can be tools rather than self-harming weapons.
Just today, another of my students let me know that she has an eating disorder. This came out after us communicating a lot. Not about eating disorders, but about how to help her work through (or not—I remind her that her health is the priority and that she can always re-take the class) the suffering from medical issues that, weeks ago, started to impede her ability to complete assignments.
This student has been in pain and has had to spend hours and hours in the ER, with her mother by her side, for a condition that they are trying to figure out. Then, this morning, when she told me that she has an eating disorder, every nerve in my body was triggered.
I’m so used to talking about my history and about eating disorders generally. I am not usually so sensitive, and this wasn’t a trigger that’s going to make me relapse, not that kind of trigger. I’m in the mindset that nothing will cause me to relapse again. I’ll always be on guard, but I feel very safe now.
This was an emotional response, one that I should have, one that I want to experience, because if I was walled off from that kind of detail, then I would only be staring at a calendar, counting the days until summer break.
The only reason I’m not living a life of career burnout, especially now that AI is creating a lot of tension and new kinds of challenges from all angles, is because I am open and I invite my students in. To find true meaning in my work, it has to be more than just about teaching writing. The meaning can’t be mine alone.
Teaching can be a special, unique profession if you let it. It can fill you up, make you sick if you’re not careful; but it can also make you better. Better at being a human.
When I get up in the morning, I listen to NPR Up First, followed by Democracy Now!
Talk about triggers. I used to call Democracy Now! “instant depression” but it’s unethical for me to ignore it. For the rest of the day, I don’t consume news so I’m not bombarding my brain for hours, but I need to get the hard stuff in before I begin my day.
Silence=Death.
On today’s episode, the hosts did a story on the new pope, including three guests. One of the guests was a sexual abuse survivor, a man named Peter Isely, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a priest. His first words after being introduced asserted, “It’s hard not to be a part of the Leo fan club right now. I’m pretty confident I’m the most unpopular person probably in Rome right now, and certainly on this panel.”
From there, he went on and it wasn’t long before I was not just persuaded, but re-invigorated in my stance that the church and all organized religions are projects of covering up such systemic abuses. My body felt for this man, the child he was, and the countless victims. The only thing the new pope should do is focus on rooting out the molesters past, present, and future, dismantling the cover-up machinery.
While our government is now so invested and quick to collect on those con-artists who dared take out student loans and then be unable to pay them down, while they ignore tax cheats, it’s those at the top of our country who use education and children as justifications for trampling on the rights of trans military vets, while abusive drunks run the war industrial complex.
Still, I look out at my students and I look into literature, and I find beauty and empathy. That word, I’m not sure it’s any good anymore, like “trigger” it’s maybe losing its resonance. It’s the word I have, but it requires thousands more words to make it believed. At the Dark End of the Street should be required reading for every adult who scoffs at the notion of empathy as the most vital force we have.
John McWhorter’s got a new book out. He’s one of my favorite interviewees on the talk shows and podcasts I consume. He reminds me that there is still so much fun and joy to be had teaching students to care about words. We can learn the new trends in communication and traffic in those, but what about the new fight I find myself in?
This fight isn’t against AI, but it is against the tech industry’s marketing and its attempts to make AI as addicting as social media, but even worse. AI tools become a crutch, not just a companion or a tool to help with grammar and spelling. They become a crutch for thinking and doing, and how can I not fight for my students to, at least, for 3.5 months with me, bring their full human vulnerable selves, to experiment with words, to communicate in their own voices?
After taking that little video break, I’m remembering that I tell my students: this is ours to figure out. I will always try to teach anyone I can to fight against marketing, to question and resist, but I also know there is a way for us to come together to make this evolution of our digital age as human as the tears, the blood, the babies that keep being born.
Want more of Eve’s writing and Paul’s drawings? You can get my book: Body in Script, available at many online retailers. You can find it at my publisher’s bookstore, or other places, like Amazon. (eveimagine.com is a work in progress). If you are local to Sacramento and want to buy a copy directly from me, leave a message and we’ll work that out. I would love to see you!
Terrific post, Eve. Love the anecdotes about working with students who fall away and return, about how they feel comfortable with you to share some of their hardest stuff… this is the essence of good teaching, and you are, in person/online/everywhere, a superb teacher. I’m so happy to know you and to have called you one of my dear colleagues!