Friends or family?

I respect and value my students as adults. I treat them as friends. At least, this is what I used to do, most of the time.

There are varying degrees of friendship. With some friends, you can talk openly; with others, you may not be able to spill your heart. But all of them are your friends—unique individuals who may or may not listen to you. We give adequate space to our friends, even very good friends.

As teachers, our students are hardly our best friends. With new batches of students passing through each semester or year, they are more like new acquaintances or new friends.

Having taught at my university for 17 years, I have come to learn that, sometimes, being a friend is not enough. Some students seem to respond better if you speak to them as if they were your adult children. I am not suggesting that we treat our students like young children, but I have observed that some of my colleagues do treat their students like their grown-up children, and, for some, this has worked.

We expect our friends to listen to us, to be good to us. Yet, we know that, no matter what we expect, a friend is not a family member. Family members make demands on us. Family members are connected to us on a deeper level. They are part of us, no matter what.

It is not so difficult to manage expectations of students who take a course or two from you. But what if you are their academic adviser? Being an academic adviser does not mean that the students we advise are close to us or willing to talk to us. So, do we simply provide academic advice about which courses to choose, how to study, and nothing more?

What about research students who work with us for a few years? Do we treat them like friends or family? When they repeatedly make the same mistakes, a friend would probably give up and say no more. But a family member would persist. Where do we, as teachers, draw the line?

When I was younger, my students were my friends. That was the way I wanted it. As I become older, I become less sure, and I realize it is unrealistic to expect from my students what I expect from my friends. Younger adult students are not yet that mature, and, if I were only a friend, I would be frustrated. I would demand that they be like me, that they think and work like me. But if I were to regard my students as my grown children who are trying to master particular subject matter, I would be more patient, more understanding, more tolerant of repeated mistakes.

I cannot say which is right or wrong, to coach my students as friends or as adult children. I only know that, with increasing age, my attributes as a teacher have changed. I hope I am now a more effective teacher. But that is for my students to say.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International. Comments are moderated. Those that promote products or services will not be posted.

Modes of suicide in the East and West

My students were miserable and complained about having no ideas to write about for their reflective journals. To help them reflect on elderly care issues, I taught them to use newspapers to identify possible topics.

I started searching for news clips in the papers. Within a day, there were six different news items about older people. One was about a couple leaving a baby in a pram in a mall. After failing to locate the parents for more than an hour, the security staff reported the incident to the police. Eventually, the couple—husband, age 67, and wife, 28—got their baby back from the police station. Next, a senior was knocked unconscious by a vehicle. Third, a fire in a nursing home warranted emergency evacuation of its residents. Then, there was a senior who got drunk and injured himself. Last, two elderly people with chronic illness—a man and a woman—jumped to their deaths.

Common means that elderly people resort to when ending their lives in Hong Kong include jumping from a height, hanging and burning charcoal in a closed room, resulting in death from carbon monoxide poisoning. These methods of suicide are somewhat culture-specific. With space at a premium and the majority of our population living in high-rise apartments—and I mean more than 20 floors and sometimes as many as 60 or 70—choosing to jump as a suicide method is probably out of convenience and ease of availability. Of course, in the West, hanging is also a way to commit suicide, but it is more common among the Chinese. Burning charcoal is becoming more common but, in the past, hanging has been a popular choice.

I wasn’t aware of the cultural difference until I was studying at the University of Toronto and a classmate asked me about it. She was curious and concerned as to why older Chinese people she had come across at work had resorted to ending their lives by such a drastic act as hanging. She was a social worker, you see. At that moment, I became aware that something I had thought was ordinary was, in fact, not so in another culture.

To us Chinese, or at least Hong Kong Chinese, there is nothing drastic about death by hanging. We have learnt about this method of committing suicide since we were small. We watched it in movies and traditional Chinese operas. Whenever a hero or heroine (usually a heroine) in a tragedy wanted to commit suicide, he or she would throw a string or a piece of long cloth through the main wooden frame that held the house together, tie a knot, climb onto a chair and finish the business.

Mostly, these were scenes created for the drama. Sometimes, they were about a heroine fighting against a family that forced her to marry into riches and fame and forget about the guy she loved. Also in these films, if the emperor wanted one of his concubines to die, he would order his officers to throw a long piece of silk cloth at her. Traditional Chinese movies are not graphic at all. So now you can see why killing oneself by hanging is not seen as something drastic in the Chinese population.

I found this revelation quite interesting (not that suicide attempts are interesting, but that observing the differences is). People in different cultures differ not only in how they live their lives, but also in the ways they choose to die.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.