When Outside Stressors Disrupt College: How to Approach a Professor When You’re Struggling With Course Material
The dishwasher was humming through its rinse cycle last Sunday, and I was folding a pile of my sophomore daughter Lila’s hoodies when she dropped her laptop on the kitchen table between the detergent bottle and a half-eaten granola bar. She slouched into the chair across from me, pulled her knees up to her chest, and stared at the half-deleted email open on her screen. For five minutes she didn’t say anything, just picked at a loose thread on her sweatpants. Then she mumbled, “I don’t know if I can send this. What if he thinks I’m just making excuses to cover for being lazy?”
Lila’s a pre-physical therapy major, and her intro bio class is a make-or-break prerequisite for the program. For the past two months, though, outside life has piled up. My mom fell and broke her hip back in September, and Lila’s been driving 45 minutes back to our town every other weekend to sit with her while I’m at work and my husband handles doctor’s appointments. We had a surprise sewer line break last month that drained our emergency savings, so Lila picked up two extra shifts a week at her campus coffee shop to cover her car insurance and gas. She’s been averaging five hours of sleep a night, and she’s fallen so far behind on note-taking that the entire unit on cell respiration might as well be written in Greek. She wants to tell her professor she’s struggling with the material overall, but she’s convinced admitting that will brand her as an unfit student.
I’ve taught 12 years of high school seniors, and I see this same fear every single year, even before they get to college. Kids carry this idea that school is supposed to be your only priority, and if anything else gets in the way, that’s your fault. They think asking for help means they don’t belong there. Last year, I had a senior named Javi whose mom was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. He worked 30 hours a week stocking shelves at the local grocery store to help his dad pay for medical bills, and he failed the first marking period of AP Physics. He never told his teacher he was struggling, because he didn’t want to be “that kid” who asks for favors. By the time he worked up the courage to say something, it was too late to pull his grade up enough to get the credit he needed for engineering school.
I pushed my laundry basket aside and pulled Lila’s laptop closer. I didn’t tell her “just be honest” or “professors love when you ask for help” – that’s vague, and it doesn’t help when you’re staring at a blank email. Instead, I helped her rewrite it line by line, sticking to three simple rules I’ve picked up from talking to college professor friends over the years. First, state the problem clearly upfront, don’t make the professor guess what you need. Second, name your outside stressor briefly, don’t dump a five-paragraph backstory that makes you look like you’re asking for pity. Third, be specific about what you’re asking for, don’t just say “I’m struggling”.
We ended up with an email that read, “Hi Professor Hale, I’m reaching out because I’ve fallen behind on the cell respiration unit and I’m struggling to follow the new material we’re covering this week. Over the past two months, I’ve been helping my family care for my grandma after her hip fracture, which has cut into the time I have to study this semester. I’m not asking for any changes to my grading or extensions right now, but I wanted to ask if you had any extra practice problems or could point me toward a department tutor I could meet with to catch up. Thank you, Lila.”
Lila hesitated for another two minutes, then hit send. We didn’t hear back for 24 hours, and she checked her email every 10 minutes that whole day. When the reply popped up, I was making coffee, and I heard her yell from the living room, “Wait, really?” Professor Hale wrote back that he was currently juggling caring for his own dad with dementia and his teaching load, so he knew exactly how that feels. He attached a set of his own simplified lecture notes he uses for review, gave her an extra week on her upcoming problem set, and sent the contact info for a free undergraduate tutor the department keeps on hand for students who are struggling.
That’s the thing most people don’t tell you. Most professors aren’t sitting around waiting to mark you down for admitting struggle. They’ve all been 20-year-olds juggling school, family, work, and unexpected bills. The problem isn’t admitting you’re struggling – it’s how you frame it. A lot of kids either say nothing until they fail a midterm, or they show up to office hours with a list of problems and no idea what they actually need. Giving a specific, small request shows you’re still invested in the class, you just need a little support to get caught up.
For parents who are sitting where I was, watching your kid stress over this, you don’t have to fix the whole problem for them. You can just help them write that first email, or practice what they’ll say in office hours. You can remind them that it’s not a weakness to say you can’t do it all alone right now. I’ve had so many parents tell me their kid won’t reach out for help because they don’t want to seem like they can’t handle college. What I tell them is that handling hard things sometimes means asking for help, not pushing through until you burn out.
Lila met her tutor for the first time earlier this week. She still gets swamped, still has to leave campus early every other Friday to get to grandma’s, still pulls late nights to make up for the study time she loses to work. She’s still not sure she’ll get the A she needs for the PT program, but she says it’s a lot less scary now that she’s not hiding how hard it is. It’s not a perfect fix, and it didn’t make all the outside stress go away. But it was enough to keep her moving forward, one lecture at a time.
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