Homesickness as a plague

So this past week (week 8...a few weeks ago) has been a lovely refresher course in hand-holding and exercises in trying to make everybody happy all the time. Like always, it didn't happen. But I did successfully navigate one tragically homesick student through his troublesome first day (he was on the verge of tears the entire day) and he ended up having a great time, bonding the most with the other new students, as well as being one of the stars of the campfire skit. Its funny that the most important part of my job many weeks has nothing to do with what I went to college to study...making people feel comfortable. Fighting homesickness has nothing to do with being well versed in psychological theories or being able to diagnose and medicate a collection of symptoms. Many times it just takes a bit of waiting and a lot of listening. We all feel out of our element and therefore out of control of our own lives at some point in time....never more than the first time or two we are forced out of our homes and put in the care of a bunch of hippie-strangers who keep pointing at plants and rocks and saying strange words (that they might be just making up). Its so easy as a "naturalist" to focus so much on the science of a place that you forget the intrinsic value that, for many people, must come before any understanding of more concrete concepts. You can't learn math by having somebody point a gun at you and threaten to learn or shoot, to some of these students its almost as scary to be thrown into the "wild" of one of these programs. And its easy to discount student's fears and anxieties on account of their privileged home-lives but that's just as ignorant as  judging us because we are voluntarily homeless. Age doesn't matter, socio-economic level, intelligence or even how well traveled a person may be...a bad day/week/month is always a hurdle to true personal and educational development. It doesn't matter why or where its coming from, as an educator it is my job to figure out how to work through it or give up the goal altogether. And I'm not in the business of giving up...that's what my little homesick 6th grader showed me.