Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker is not a painting about scandal; it is a painting about fatigue. Its figures sit in public, fully visible and yet profoundly withdrawn. Nothing dramatic is happening. That restraint is its ethical force. Intoxication here is not rebellion or excess, but quiet anesthesia. It is a way of dulling pain when one has neither privacy nor refuge. Degas offers no redemption, no intervention, and no narrative closure. He offers sustained attention. He asks the viewer to remain with what is uncomfortable long enough for it to become morally charged.
That is why this work belongs with this day.
The student arrived unplanned and compromised. The smell of alcohol disrupted the ordinary choreography of a state-required exam, and when I named it, there was no denial. Only a lowered gaze, a small nod and the bodily language of someone already aware they have crossed a line but uncertain what remains on the other side. Like Degas’s figure, the student was present without being fully available to the world they had entered.
And yet they took the test.
This detail matters more than most people will ever understand. High-stakes assessments presume capacity: cognitive clarity, emotional regulation, physical safety, and a life stable enough to support concentration. For students living on the margins, those conditions are often aspirational rather than actual. When such a student sits for an exam, the act itself represents weeks, sometimes months, of invisible labor: phone calls unanswered and then answered, tracking down students experiencing homelessness, remaining ready when they arrive at odd hours, dysregulated but willing. What appears in the data as a failed test is often the residue of extraordinary effort.
I sometimes joke that I might be a historically bad teacher if all you judge is test scores. Maybe even the worst teacher my district has ever employed. The joke works because it exposes a truth the system rarely acknowledges. When effectiveness is defined narrowly, proximity to brokenness reads as incompetence. The closer one works to instability, trauma, and collapse, the worse the numbers tend to look. The metric does not fail accidentally; it fails by design. It was never built to see work like this.
Degas understood that kind of misrecognition. The Absinthe Drinker invites a shallow reading, inviting us to look at the failure, look at the decline but refuses to reward it. The painting does not ask us to condemn its subject, nor does it rescue her. It simply insists that we look honestly at what exhaustion and isolation do to a human being when the social world remains present but unreachable. The viewer becomes complicit, close enough to judge but too distant to help. That discomfort mirrors how institutions often engage the lives of the students I teach.
Later, the student asked to talk. To talk not about the test, but about the rupture beneath it. A breakup. A spiral. The accumulated weight of a broken home layered with housing insecurity. Alcohol, in this context, was not bravado. It was tragedy and it was triage. When they asked if they could call me when they needed to talk, I felt the familiar ethical tension of this work: the pull toward connection alongside the necessity of boundaries. Students ask for access to individuals because systems have taught them, repeatedly, that systems cannot be trusted to hold them.
Working with at-risk youth means living inside this contradiction daily. Care must be present, but it cannot be limitless. Boundaries are not refusals of compassion; they are the structures that make compassion survivable. The task is not to absorb students’ pain privately, nor to retreat behind policy, but to translate attachment into networks of support that do not depend on any one person’s endurance.
And endurance is the quiet core of this work.
Even in year nineteen, even having “seen it all," days like this do not get easier. It would be a lie to say this was my first intoxicated student. Experience does not numb the weight; it sharpens it. You recognize the patterns more quickly, the warning signs earlier, the likely outcomes more honestly. That clarity is not comforting. It is heavy. Degas’s painting understands this. Its stillness is not peaceful; it is compressed. Suffering is rendered ordinary, and that ordinariness is what makes it hardest to look away from.
What makes the work bearable is not individual heroism, but collective steadiness. The staff I work with understand this terrain. We support one another quietly through coverage, flexibility, trust, and a shared refusal to let students vanish simply because the day did not unfold as planned. When colleagues are absent, others step in. When administrators are unavailable, leadership redistributes itself without ceremony. This labor rarely appears in formal evaluations, but it is the moral infrastructure of the work. Like Degas’s café, the space holds because people remain in it.
The student left. The score was entered. The system moved on.
But for a brief stretch of time, the room functioned as a holding environment. Someone who was spiraling did not disappear. They stayed long enough to speak and to be heard. That will never fully register in the numbers, and it will never make me look good on paper.
If that makes me a historically bad teacher by test scores alone, then perhaps the joke tells the truth better than the data ever could. Degas offers no consolation, and neither does this work. What he offers, and what this job demands, is the capacity to see without rescue and to holdfast without illusion. The lights stay on. The chair remains available. The work continues, not because it becomes easier, but because it remains necessary.