I was in Walgreens during the fall of 2019, waiting for my flu shot. I had been sitting in a chair for a few minutes when I became aware of the tears on my face. I'm not afraid of needles. Medical procedures do not cause me concern. I was crying because, in February of that year, I had lost a student to complications of the flu. This has happened every year since, so I would call getting the flu shot an emotional trigger for me.
Much political hay has been made of the idea of trigger warnings in recent years. In spite of the fact that they have been around for my entire life. We didn't call it that before the 2000s, but news anchors have always said things like "the following footage may be upsetting to some viewers." In the 80s, sitcoms would put up "viewer discretion advised" cards before some of their very special episodes. It only became a political issue when college professors started doing it in class and calling them trigger warnings because, as conservatives, we can't miss our chance to call people snowflakes and accuse liberals of engaging in a plot to weaken our kids. If we could pull ourselves away from our political tribal thinking for a moment and have a normal human conversation, we might recognize that it is kind to give people a few seconds to prepare themselves for discussions about sensitive issues, especially if it might be of particular sensitivity to them. It doesn't mean we don't teach the difficult issues (in the same way that I don't stop getting my flu shot); it means we give them a moment to steady themselves.
Let me clear that I am not suggesting we get "trauma-informed" training. The trauma-informed movement in education has done more harm than good in spite of excellent intentions. There isn't room to address that here, so I'll write about it some other time. What I am suggesting is that you are sensitive to the needs of your students. If you know you are approaching the anniversary of a student's family member's death, it would be wise for you to handle them more gently than usual. If your curriculum involves teaching about seizures, and you have a student with a history of epilepsy, a quick email home to inform the parent that this is coming up would be appreciated. They may ask that the student be allowed to sit out the lesson, or they may just want to have a conversation with their child to prepare them. It doesn't have to be a major traumatic event for you to exercise some sensitivity. If you teach seniors, and college acceptance/rejections have just been issued, the next day might not be the best day for the most difficult topic in your curriculum. You can teach that thing in a couple of days. Just recognizing the humanity of the people in front of you may go a long way.
In her Learning and the Brain Keynote speech at the 2022 Fall Learning and the Brain conference, Dr. Jessica Minihan compared kids to soda bottles. Here's how she put it. If you walk into a room and there are two bottles of soda, you will not be able to tell if one of them has been shaken. If you open them both, and one erupts, you know that something has happened to one of them before you got there. You did the same thing with both bottles, and it was a completely normal thing to do, but one of them had a history you did not know. If you had known, you would have changed your approach, either waiting longer to open it or opening it more slowly (or with that quick open the close quickly move). You prevent a problem by handling it differently.
The same may be the case with students. If you do something quite normal, but it evokes a dramatic reaction, it is likely not about you. It may just be that you have encountered a shaken soda bottle.
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