My job is tiring; many days I drag myself to the parking lot after school. A few months ago I was able to pinpoint the moment at which the fatigue set in. Before that moment I was fine; after that moment my energy had evaporated. I had just finished a class in which I had to deal with some particularly outrageous acting out by a small number of students.

In my three years at Chelsea High School I have never yelled in class, and my response to grossly antisocial behavior, of which I see plenty, and not just from “difficult” students, is almost always tempered by concern for the students who are there just trying to get an education. What I realized at the moment the exhaustion set in is that the self-discipline that enables me to respond appropriately in the classroom is the source of my problem. What is tiring me out so much is suppressed anger.

I took this discovery seriously because I know that, in some interpretations of the term, this aspect of the job is life-threatening. I discussed my discovery with my colleagues and with my wife Ruth, who is a psychotherapist.

Ruth came up with an observation that has permitted me to reframe my discovery: “Your anger is probably diagnostic.” What she knew from her experience was that there was something more than just the behavior I was witnessing that was making me angry; without knowing it I was taking into myself the anger of my students. (I know that unconscious mind-to-mind emotional communication can happen; I have heard anecdotes from psychotherapists about psychotherapists who were hallucinating by the end of sessions with schizophrenic clients.)

My students have plenty to be angry about. I have researched, and now present here, some environmental factors that are generally thought to be angergenic (forgive the neologism).

Among 435 locations in Massachusetts Wikipedia ranks Chelsea 430th in per-capita income. In order to show Chelsea in context I have compared it to Winchester, MA. (10th out of 435) and Peabody, MA (210th out of 435).

The environmental factors I am considering do not include the public schools. I believe that, in large part because of the participation of Boston University, the Chelsea School District is a success story among urban school districts.

I have rounded the numbers in the accompanying table for simplicity and to reduce the implied precision of the data. The following discussion refers to this table.

As a citizen of Chelsea the odds that your income is below the poverty line are one in 4, compared to one in 20 in Peabody and one in 33 in Winchester.

One fifth of the households in Chelsea are run by a woman with no husband present, compared to one tenth in Peabody (and some fraction in Winchester that was maybe too small for somebody to bother to report it). 

If you are a female citizen of Chelsea your chances of being forcibly raped are 5 times more than if you were a female citizen of Winchester. If you are a citizen of Chelsea of either gender your chances of being robbed are 19 times, your chances of having your car stolen are 26 times, and your chances of being seriously assaulted are 33 times more than if you were a citizen of Winchester. Violent conflict is part of the everyday conversation of many of my students, and it seems to be part of the everyday lives of some of them also.

Half a year ago PBS premiered Raising Cain, a documentary video about the emotional lives of boys. Over one quarter of the program’s two hours was about boys in Chelsea. The program showed how older boys teach younger boys how to fight in order to defend themselves from street violence. Fear is a normal part of the lives of some Chelsea boys.

Can academics coexist with fear and anger? My experience as a student and as a teacher says no. I was raised with all the opportunities that research says many urban children don’t get: my parents read to me, I took music lessons, I took trips, I had support to pursue my interests. With all those advantages I wonder if I could focus on academics any better than my students do if I had on my mind every day what they have on their minds every day.

© Copyright 2006 Mel Conway PhD