Psychoanalyze my student

In My Humble Opinion
1

Disclaimer: I know you are not really analyzing my student. You are only making guesses and telling stories about yourself or people you know. You are not responsible for actually figuring this out, only for giving me things to think about.

One of my most conversational HS students is a girl who chooses to sit at the front of the class, and always pays attention, and makes sure to call me over to help her when she doesn’t understand something. She almost always works until she’s done with the work for the day.

She runs a behind the pace of the class and has had to come in a few times for tutoring and then test retakes to get decent grades, when the vast majority of the class has not.

Since I am not her father or her boyfriend, and she doesn’t know this forum, I will say that she is not conventionally pretty. It is only through her personality that I have good visual images of her. She is not at all one of those of whom I think, “Man, born 15 years earlier, and I’d be saying different things!”.

She gets sly asides and laughs easily.

Here is the “problem”.

She routinely dresses as death’s hand maiden. She draws jagged lines from her eyes, wears her hair in her face, wears pseudo-goth clothing (except that I’m sure she’d scream at my “inaccurate” term). She very often wears very heavy eyeliner and even deep blue or black lipstick, giving herself a corpse-like appearance. She obviously knows the look, as she’ll bring out a compact and check exactly how much she looks like death.

She usually wears t-shirts from Slipknot and Marilyn Manson, and has an outfit using a Manson shirt that has “Fuck You” baaaaaarely not entirely displayed on her back, the better to not get flatly cited for a dress code violation, I suppose, although I have a feeling she’s not been spotted in that by a member of the administration.

She sometimes is spotted poring over her history homework or some such with her knuckles labeled “MUST KILL”.

Her mother called me twice in a “deep concern” about her grades when I took over the class in the middle of the year from the substitutes who had been making a hash of it. The principal indicated that the mother is known hassle for the front office, although it seems the mother is pretty genuinely concerned about the grades, and has insisted that she come in for tutoring and retakes.

So…

She’s rebelling against controlling parents and eventually will be driving kids to baseball practice in a Honda Odyssey? She’ll discover in her thirties that she’s done rebelling and just be “rock n roll”? She’ll marry some fang-wearing band member and live the life of the dark princess?

Any thoughts on the situation in general?

2

How does she act around other people? Does she have friends? Is she friendly with other people?

3

One can’t be too careful with weird people these days can one.

4

Sounds to me like she just hates the status quo, resents the jock crowd and all the guys named Chad with Hollister shirts and spiked hair and look-alike girls with straightened blonde hair, and she’s trying to actively rebel against it by dressing in a jarring way. She’s still conforming to another stereotype - the whole “goth” stereotype, or “goth jr.” as it may be, since in my experience Manson and Slipknot are kind of considered juvenile by the more literary, indie type goth people. But she’s trying to be aggressively different, in her appearance. There’s not much mystery to it. If as you said she acts normally, is conversational and has a good personality, she’s not a psycho or anything. Seems like she’s just trying to raise eyebrows.

How old is she, though? I knew a lot of these pseudo-goth type people when I was in 8th and 9th grade, and by the senior year they seemed to turn to more developed and mature countercultures - indie rockers, punk rockers, drama types. The whole Slipknot/Manson group is more of a young, “let’s piss off our parents” deal.

5

Upon preview I see that Argent Towers already said pretty much what I was writing.

She seems to care about her grades and it sounds like she is really trying in class. No matter how unconventional her style, it sounds like she cares about her looks as well.

Sounds like regular old teenage rebel against the parents and the cheerleader types stuff to me.

6

I’d worry if she was falling behind in class and didn’t care; the fact that she’s trying to keep up her grades, as well as being able to laugh easily, shows that she’s at least got a positive (or determined) outlook.

I think it’s just a style statement. She may or may not grow out of it, but it’s no reason to worry. :slight_smile:

7

Sounds like several of my friends…

Who are now minivan driving mothers, some of them high school teachers themselves. The tatoos can be covered by long pants and not wearing sleeveless tops.

8

She’s fine. She could have been any number of my close friends who are now all functioning members of adult society.

9

I’d worry more about a student who had no regard for their appearance at all.

10

If anything, I’m more likely to get along with people who were goths or rebels in high school (even though I was most certainly not, and was in fact part of the group that they would have hated.) It shows that they have a spirit of nonconformity, which I long ago feared but have now grown to appreciate.

11

Nothing you have said so far makes this sound like an unhealthy rebellion. It’s particularly good that she catches your sly asides and laughs easily. Encourage the student to open up to you.

I wish more parents were that concerned about their children’s education!

12

That was (kinda) me. I have Ph.D. in psychology now. I really didn’t want to hear about how much better my life would be if I’d just look/be/feel different.

She’s an engaged student. That’s such a plus.
A kid like that is CONTROLLING the criticism they’re getting. They’ve gotten so much crap over stuff that they have little or no control over, they are GIVING you something to rag on them about. But you don’t have to play, and it will be healing for her if you can manage that. What about her puts a twinkle in your eye? I love working with adolescent girls like that. I find something beautiful/charming/special about them and* focus*. You might not get to see the difference it makes, but keep paying (positive) attention to her. She’s starving. Feed her.

13

What does her being “not conventionally pretty” have to do with it?

14

If she seems like a nice person, I wouldn’t worry about her too much. Metal heads and goths tend to be more intelligent and nicer people than frat boys and valley girls by many many miles. They’re probably the nicest people on the school yard. True, they don’t seem to generally be destined for greatness, from the ones I know, having some sort of grudge against “the system” and thinking that companies which give them an honest wage and expect honest work are trying to screw them, but that’s fairly well true of most city people.

If you’re worried about her, specifically, for some reason just be her friend and chat with her normally. If you’re worried, tell her that your worried, but don’t try and force her to tell you anything and don’t try to change the way she is. Being present and available is enough.

15

Interesting, she sounds like a diligent student, yet is making quite an effort to look different.

Maybe she is not rebelling against her parents, possibly she is distancing herself from her class mates. Some form of self defence - camauflage to look more dangerous than she is.

16

As a former oddly-dressed teenager, (never got into goth, but was a punk rocker who’d wear ripped stockings and enjoyed metal studs and leopard print accessories) I can say she is probably trying to make some statement about what is now deemed “lookism.” Personally, I dressed like that because a) I thought it looked cool (still do to a certain extent) b) scared stupid people and c) (in my mind anyway) made a statement that just because I look different doesn’t mean I’m evil or weird or less of a person.

I’d be more worried about a normal-looking kid that’s sullen and withdrawn, or aggressive and angry. If she’s trying hard in school and has a concerned mother, I’d say she’s a few steps ahead of the crowd. Be there if she needs you, but don’t pry too much. Don’t push her away.

On a side note, I’m surprised and happy to hear that punk rock is a more developed and mature subculture- I mean, there’s a lot of (sometimes) thoughtful political discourse, but we also have a lot of drinking and fighting. We’d be happy to have her though.
:wink:

17

I can’t recall many or maybe even any really pretty girls who went out of their way to “ugly up”. I thought that maybe she’s taken a lot of crap earlier in life from “the pretty ones” and has decided to have the defense of “it’s a style, which you obviously are too lame to understand.”

18

Well, she knows one other girl in the class, but come to think of it, she doesn’t really interact with the others much at all. This is my high chemistry class, and in this neighborhood, that means I have 2 whites, 2 hispanics, and the rest east asian of some type (Chinese and Korean being the heavy hitters). I get the impression that either she doesn’t have many classes with this academically driven crowd, or they just don’t get her, and it’s kind of mutual.

I wish the other white girl would show up to class more. That’s another story: she says she’s moving in the summer and may not complete her senior year at all, so she doesn’t care about her grades, and has a 0 in this class. The good news is she can arrange music in her head and sight sing and seems to be something of a musical prodigy. I hope that carries her into a career.

19

oh- just wanted to add- I wouldn’t worry about the MUST KILL on her knuckles. She probably just does it for the shock value, and finds it hysterical when people freak out about it. Like my friends who wore their Misfits shirts that said “Die, Die My Darling.” (A friend of a friend got expelled for wearing an “I heart Eric Harris” shirt, actually. Poor taste, of course, but got the reaction she wanted) Early punks wore a lot of swastikas too, simply for the shock value, not because they subscribed to the Nazi ideaology. Like I said, I’d be more concerned about her attitude and personality than her style.

20

Yeah, sounds like standard issue teen angst rebellion to me. My high school had millions of them- me included. Why does that happen?

Finding a subculture where you can be accepted and not have to worry about the “popular” people accepting you (although she may not have friends like her in school, she is likely to at goth clubs, etc.)

Disassociating yourself from the status quo, which you may percieve as perpetuating a lot of Bad Stuff (war, racism, etc.)

Crafting your own identity seperate from (and even contrary to) people’s (espcially parent’s) expectations of you.

It’s fun! We all like to dress up to some degree. Dressing up extremely can be extremely fun.

I agree that this particular form tends to mature into something else. I went through a brief “teenybopper goth” stage before I discovered punk rock drama geek. In my experience, most people doing this are “thinkers” of some sort who arn’t satisfied with the shallowness of normal high school life (though as kids, of course, they may be a bit shallow and misdirected themselves.)