Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

What is the word for schadenfreude but also you relate to the frustration and anxiety on a deeply personal level?

Empathy.

I know in the US, really rural areas have incredibly high drop out and drug/suicide rates. Was any of that a big concern over there?

I know that our pass rates for senior years were below national average, though most who were dropping out were heading into work. We had a real boon in our town, that a polytechnic offering trade courses (hairdressing, civil engineering, automotive mechanics, hospitality, a bunch of other stuff too) allowed our senior students to take part, having one day a week away from school and doing these courses - with the caveat they should be keeping up with assessments for school, and particularly passing the assessments (predominantly in English and Maths, but an assignment requiring an essay for any subject could be literacy, and assessments for designing+writing up experiments with quantitative data in Science counted for Numeracy) that would award them Literacy and Numeracy.

Senior students who did leave school early, for the most part appreciated the importance of getting Numeracy and Literacy and dipped after passing what they needed to. Whether the assessments they could complete to be awarded those would always accurately reflect their ability (or lack thereof) to be literate and numerate enough to be a contributing member of society is an excellent question. The Ministry of Education assures us it's at the top of their list.

While there almost certainly were students who were taking drugs, you could count them on one hand. Vaping became the new smoking around the time I started teaching, so that was a constant issue (again, mostly, around a small core of students who were receiving a lot of wrap-around support). To my understanding, we probably had about the same proportion of students having these issues as any other high school round the country.

An issue which had been rumbling on the horizon while I was teaching but I mostly dodged was the readiness of primary school kids coming up into high school - or the lack thereof. Word in the staffroom (and particularly among the teachers in the Technology Department - of which I was one for two years - who saw kids from most of the local primary schools once a week to use our Technology department's facilities) was more behavioural issues at primary school, including kids whose families were involved in gangs.

Poverty was another huge issue; we had a staff member whose full-time job was community outreach, keeping contact with families who were struggling. Organising school uniforms, food, groceries, whatever they might need when things like "my work schedule means I can't drop the kids at school two days of the week, and we can't afford the bus" was affecting attendance. I had one kid who was a royal pain in the ass, whose family was living out of a tent for the first six weeks of the school year.

I did not experience the suicide of a student during my five years of teaching, nor was I in a position where a student told me something I had to disclose to appropriate channels for the child's safety. For, that I am extremely grateful.

There was one death of a student during my four years living rurally. I do not wish to discuss this further.