Every day, my students show me their individual humor and courage and persistence and insight and empathy. It’s impossible for me to not notice, especially because these are things I try to actively develop in each one of them.

And I love focusing on those things. I love seeing the positive pieces of them. It’s no secret that I’m kind of crazy about my students because, in them, there is just so much to be celebrated and loved.

But it’s difficult — very difficult — for me to process the heavier, more detrimental things that go on in their lives.

We all know these things are happening. We see the child abuse statistics and the rape numbers and the homelessness percentages, but this job requires me to interface directly with the results of those. And I realize I’m talking about myself right now, but this isn’t about me. Not in the slightest.

It’s about Alejandra and Rodney and Madison (the names aren’t real, but the experiences behind the pseudonyms are, I assure you), those kids whose parents show how much they value their children through the strikes of fists and belts and swears. It’s about Jacob, who lived in an alley and off of handouts and restaurant dumpsters after his parents abandoned him. It’s about Lamont, who, at 13-years-old, uses the money he makes selling drugs to buy food for his little brother.

It’s about the fact that these people are real and they’re in my classroom and this country and they’re just kids, and it’s my job to care about and nurture and develop them. It breaks my heart every time I find out more about the terrors so many of my students are living in and getting through, and that broken heart downright shatters when I consider that what we hear about is just a small portion of what’s actually happening. We often don’t know about so many of the rapes or the beatings or the pregnancies or the everything else that are silently destroying these kids. These things aren’t talked about because, well, because they’re tough enough to discuss from a distance, and they’re damn near impossible to address for those actually going through them. Especially for kids.

I hate thinking about all this because it hurts me to see the children I love suffering, and I hate thinking about this because I feel so powerless to do anything about it. How do you get people to stop hurting each other? How do you get them to value each other? How do you heal wounds, literal and metaphorical, that are cut so damnably deep?

And how do I get people who don’t see or deal with this to give a fuck?

It’s especially hard because education, particularly low-income education, has become so acutely politicized. The discourse, even by people who face these problems daily, is so unbearably limited to low-leverage assessment policies when the giant, terrible elephants in the room sit silent and unaddressed yet terribly complicit and pertinent.

“It’s hard for students to learn,” people will point out, “when students are hungry or unsafe.” And they’re absolutely right, but for some reason so few people are making the leap to say “well then maybe we should start fixing those problems”. Instead we just brush them off as if they’re an accepted, immutable evil in life. Or, worse, we use them for our own expediency. “It’s not my fault,” we’ll say, “that these kids score so low. Just look at their lives!” Somehow social issues stopped being actual issues and became merely explanations for shitty test scores. Somehow it became more important to be accountable than it did to be proactive.

“Well, we need to focus on what we can control”, people will say, or we’ll narrow the focus even further, making sure that we “stick to the data”, as if the bullshit numbers that we get from some bullshit tests are more important than the lives of the kids who are taking them. “We’re losing to other countries!” people cry out when they look at our national performance.

And I can’t help but think that if the biggest problems our nation sees when it looks at Alejandra and Lamont are their test scores, then we’ve already lost.