I played the song once. Just audio. No visuals, but incomplete lyrics on paper and Don McLean’s voice filling a classroom of young adults in Brunei, painting the afternoon sky with words.
My objective was simple: descriptive adjectives. How writers and songwriters use language to make you see something, a starry night, a weathered face, a field of amber grain. Vincent was perfect for that. Rich, layered, beautiful language. I was pleased with myself for finding it.
I had no idea what I was actually opening.
Setting the Scene
It was my first year teaching in Brunei. My students were 18 and 19 years old, young adults, polite, quietly observant, the kind of students who watched you carefully before deciding whether to trust you.
To understand the song fully, we had to understand the man. So across three sessions we moved through Vincent Van Gogh’s life, his loneliness, his passion, his brilliance that the world failed to recognize in time. We talked about his painting, his letters to his brother Theo, the way he saw the world differently from everyone around him.
The students were engaged in a way that surprised me. Something about Vincent seemed to reach them.
For their homework I asked them to write a letter addressed directly to Vincent Van Gogh. Tell him something, I said. Whatever you want him to know.
I collected the letters and brought them home.
The Night I Read Them
It was late. I was alone, sitting at home, working through the stack the way teachers do.
Then I read one that stopped me completely.
Then another. Then another.
A handful of my students, four, maybe five, had used their letter to Vincent as a door. Behind that door was pain I had no idea they were carrying. Some wrote about feeling unseen, misunderstood, exhausted by the weight of expectations. Some said they understood why Vincent chose to end his life.
I sat with those letters for a long time.
My heart broke. Not dramatically, not in a way that made me reach for my phone or pace the room. Just a quiet, deep sadness for these young people who had carried this alone, and had finally found a way to say it, not to me exactly, but to a dead Dutch painter who had also felt the world was too much.
What I Did and What I Didn’t Know I Was Doing
I was a first year teacher. I had no crisis protocol training, no guidance counselor handbook in my head, no framework for what to do when a homework assignment becomes a confession.
The next day I went to our principal, an older local Muslim man who carried a kind of quiet authority that I trusted immediately. I told her what I had found.
He listened carefully. Then he arranged for an imam to speak to the class.
Our classroom was rearranged, chairs shifted, the space made different from its usual configuration, as if even the room needed to acknowledge that something had changed. The imam spoke in the local language, which was exactly right. He spoke about prayer, about bringing your burdens to God, about the importance of talking to someone when the weight becomes too heavy. He told them that the principal’s door was always open.
The students sat quietly and listened. No dramatic outbursts, no tears, just that particular Bruneian stillness that I had come to understand meant something was being received, processed, held.
I sat at the back of the room and watched, and felt something I can only describe as relief mixed with inadequacy. Relief that someone wiser than me was in that room. Inadequacy because I wished I had known sooner what my students were carrying.
What Shifted After
Something changed between us after that, quietly, but unmistakably.
My students became more open. More participative. More willing to speak up in class, to take risks, to laugh. It was as if the act of being heard, even indirectly, even through letters addressed to someone else had loosened something.
I responded by giving them more. More games, more activities, more movement, more life in that classroom. If they had forlorn thoughts, I wanted them to sweat those thoughts out, to move their bodies, to laugh, to feel present in the room with each other.
It became one of the most alive classrooms I have ever taught in.
What That Lesson Actually Was
I set out to teach descriptive adjectives.
What I actually created without knowing the term for it, without planning it, without any training in it was a space for projective writing. When you ask someone to write to a historical figure who suffered, you give them permission to speak about suffering without speaking about themselves directly. The distance makes it safe. Vincent became a mirror, and my students looked into it and saw their own reflections staring back.
I didn’t know that then. I know it now.
Looking back, my biggest lesson from Brunei wasn’t about language teaching at all. It was this: always expect the unexpected. The most powerful moments in a classroom are rarely the ones you planned. Be open enough to recognize them when they arrive. Be humble enough to ask for help when they exceed your training. And always, always, consult someone wiser, someone more experienced, someone whose cultural knowledge runs deeper than yours in that moment.
What I Would Do Differently Today
If a student handed me that same letter tonight, I would still go to a professional. But I wouldn’t wait until the next day to address the atmosphere in the classroom.
The morning after, before anything else, I would get them moving. Physical activity, something simple, something that gets the body out of its own head. If they are carrying forlorn thoughts, sometimes the most human thing a teacher can do is help them sweat those thoughts out, even temporarily, so there is space enough to breathe.
Then I would arrange a proper session with the guidance counselor. Not just for the few who disclosed, for the whole class. Because if four or five wrote it down, there were others who didn’t.
And I would keep creating spaces for them to write. Carefully, intentionally, with proper support structures in place, but I would keep doing it. Because that classroom in Brunei taught me that students are carrying more than we see. And sometimes, a song is all it takes to open the door.
A Reflection for You
Has a lesson you planned for one thing ever become something completely different, something your students needed far more? What did you do with what you found? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.
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