Opening Up
A student’s mother shows up for the first time in almost a year, and she’s well dressed and looking like someone straight out of a fashion magazine. She had the latest phone model, flashy jewelry, and was just expensively dressed overall. The student, on the other hand, was always shabbily dressed. He even once went without a blazer for a week because his parents weren’t buying him one, even though our school mandates it as part of our uniform.
We allowed him to wear his sports jersey in the class, which is normally not allowed, and we constantly called the parents, to no avail. Anyway, on this particular occasion, she showed the slightest possible interest in her child, telling us to make him study however we wanted and even hinted at hitting him if he didn’t behave. A lot of talking and counseling later, the dark truth finally came out.
It turned out that the student was actually from a well-to-do family, but the parents didn’t get along well. The father went away on “business trips” for weeks at a time, during which he was having multiple affairs and the mother was doing the same at home right in front of the child. It was an open secret. The child acted weird just to get some attention in school, which he wasn’t getting at home. I really felt for the child. He was eleven years old at the time.