Overshare

A lot of my students have this tendency to tell me way more about their personal lives then I want to know. In class on Wendsday I was playing a game where I put a word on the board and they wrote down the first 10 things they thought of and I asked them about it. I put marriage on the board since my students act like there 1o years old so I knew I'd get a lot of giggles and laughs. One girl put down something like conflict so I asked her why, which is basically what I asked everyone. At first she said it was a secret, but since they constantly misuse words and don't like talking I pushed for her to explain something. I basically then had to cut her off about four seconds later when I think she was about to get into how her father beats her. I have no idea what makes the students want to share this sort of personal information. I know some of it is cultural, they just don't really have the same sort of personal boundaries we do, one student asked if she could pat my belly. One student once told Dave that she thought about killing herself. Dave was pretty freaked out and told Teddy whose basic response was to shrug it off. As Dave noted if this was the US he'd basically have a responsibility to immediately tell some one about this, but here they just sort of ignore it. It's not that I'm not interested in their personal lives, I just wish they wouldn't share quite so much very personal information.