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Is anyone willing to say what has been the most emotional
moment or experience in any of your classes?
How did the students and you respond?
Thank you.
Alan
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From the issue dated 4/18/2003
Crying in the Classroom
By JEFFREY BERMAN
The classroom situation was not that unusual: A student,
Matilda, was preparing to read her essay aloud to my
expository-writing class. Describing her feelings toward her
father, who had abandoned his family several years earlier and
then died of brain cancer not long afterward, the essay was
wrenching. Nor was the topic unusual, for many of my students
wrote powerful expressions of grief or anger toward parents
who had either died or disappeared as a result of divorce. As
Matilda started to read, she began to choke up, and she asked
me if I could take over. I nodded, but before I reached the
second paragraph, I suddenly found myself feeling shaky,
welling up with tears. I could feel my face burning, my heart
racing, my nose running, my glasses fogging. No longer able to
control my body, I burst into tears and sobbed as I hadn't
done for years.
For over a quarter of a century, I have read emotionally
charged diaries and essays to my students, and though my voice
has occasionally faltered and my eyes become watery, until
then I had never failed to complete a reading. Matilda's essay
was not the most upsetting of the semester, yet I found myself
unable to hold back the flood of tears. When I regained my
voice, I apologized and asked Matilda if another person could
read the essay. She nodded silently, and her classmate Mia
began in a steady voice. The students were as startled by my
tears as I was, and I could hear muffled sounds from several
people. At the end, I thanked Mia for her strong reading,
again apologized, and dismissed the class. The students
silently filed out of the room.
Why had I cried? And why was I so troubled by my tears? I have
always maintained emotional control in the classroom, and I
did not like the new experience. I had never heard of a
college teacher crying in front of a group of students, except
for those who became misty during their final class before
retirement. Teaching is not a profession that typically
sanctions tears, nor does our culture endorse men weeping.
The popular stereotype of an English professor is that of a
man wearing a tweed or corduroy sport jacket, looking urbane
and sophisticated. If he is middle-aged, he may lament the
loss of his hair or his virility, and perhaps secretly (or
not-so-secretly) lust for his female students, but there
aren't many novels or films in which the professor breaks down
in class, crying over a student essay. (He may feel like
crying when reading a pile of poorly written essays, but that
is different.) Tears well up in Robin Williams's eyes in Dead
Poets Society, but only when he attends his student's funeral.
Mr. Chips cried when reading the list of Brookfield graduates
who were killed in the Great War, but he was only permitted to
do so because of his age. "Well, why not, the School said; he
was an old man; they might have despised anyone else for the
weakness."
I was embarrassed because I had suddenly gone from being a
witness to another person's pain to being a fellow sufferer. I
felt as if Matilda's words had pierced my heart, and I
identified with the sorrow and loss in her essay. I knew how
unbearable it would be for my wife or me to be estranged from
our grown daughters. I identified with Matilda's father, for I
could imagine the anguish that he had felt along with his
regret and guilt. My own father had died three years earlier,
and I had long felt that he had been emotionally unavailable
to our family, although my parents had been married for more
than 50 years. I had grieved for his death, but had not yet
resolved my disappointment with him, or my guilt for being so
judgmental. "The bitterest tears shed over graves," Harriet
Beecher Stowe observes, "are for words left unsaid and deeds
left undone."
I did not weep at my own father's funeral, but I did weep when
I tried to read a student's essay mourning the death of her
father. How strange the mourning process is, how we may be
caught off guard when we least expect it. Who can know when,
crying for others, we are also crying for ourselves?
It was only after I had broken down in class that I began to
wonder about the cultural and psychological significance of
crying. I knew that crying is a universal phenomenon shaped by
cultural factors, but I was only dimly aware of the complexity
of those factors. And so I began to research the subject. I
discovered, not surprisingly, that many books have been
written on crying. "Tears are the most substantial and yet the
most fleeting, the most obvious and yet the most enigmatic
proof of our emotional lives," reports Tom Lutz in his book
Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. He states
that the "prohibition against male tears ... only takes center
stage in the middle of the 20th century, and even then it was
not fully observed, as we can see in the weeping of film stars
and crooners."
Jeffrey Kottler takes a more psychological approach in The
Language of Tears, arguing that crying is an expression of
loss -- which perhaps explains why, in every culture with the
exception of Bali, it is a universal response to death.
Kottler is especially perceptive in pointing out the gendered
nature of crying, and his discussion helped me to understand
how I fell into male stereotypes when I apologized (twice) to
my students. And why I felt better not while I was crying, but
only after I stopped.
But what about the classroom? How did the students view my
crying? While Mia read Matilda's essay, I sat with my head
bent, trying to wipe away my tears; the one time I looked up,
I observed everyone with bowed heads. No one looked at Mia,
Matilda, or me. It was as if everyone sensed that privacy had
to be respected. Each seemed to be unaware of his or her
classmates' existence, yet at the same time I sensed that
everyone was emotionally attuned to the sadness and loss in
Matilda's essay. The silence struck me as profoundly
respectful. My students knew that Matilda's essay touched me
deeply; they knew that my tears demonstrated the power of her
language. And they seemed to feel that my tears gave them
permission to be moved. Although I wished I had not cried, I
also felt closer to my students afterward.
Perhaps most important, if my students were frightened or
distressed when I broke into tears, I think they also felt
reassured when they saw me stop. If, for a few moments, they
discovered that words failed me, they witnessed words
gradually returning to me, the teacher once again in control.
At the beginning of the next class, I asked the students to
describe, in a brief and anonymous in-class essay, how they
felt when they saw me cry. To judge from their own words, the
students found the class wrenching, but they were not
disapproving. Several reported crying themselves during the
class or afterward, and nearly all experienced empathic
distress while hearing Matilda's essay. They admired her
courage and gave her credit for coping with a difficult family
situation.
They also believed that my loss of composure, while surprising
and distressing, had positive consequences. One person said
that it led to "greater communication" between teacher and
students; a second felt that my response indicated "care" and
brought me "a little more down to earth"; a third believed
that my tears "allowed the students to feel comfortable in
their sorrow." Those who felt momentarily overwhelmed said
that they found their response appropriate to the intense
emotions elicited by Matilda's essay. One student, who had
noted in an earlier essay that she was adopted, felt a longing
to discover her biological parents. Two students expressed
gratitude for having loving relationships with their fathers.
Those who had missed the class predicted that they would have
felt upset, sad, or choked up during the reading. Only one
student reacted negatively, believing that I had forced
Matilda to read her essay aloud, when, in fact, she had wished
to share it with her classmates.
We often use metaphors such as the "flood" or "overflowing" of
tears, or speak of drowning in tears, to describe crying,
suggesting our cultural fear of being "swept away" by
dangerous emotion. The reality, however, is that, after a few
seconds, we usually stop crying. Rarely, if ever, do people
perish from tears. Indeed, clinicians believe that the
opposite situation -- the inability to cry -- is far more
dangerous. My father never cried, not even on his deathbed,
and I often wonder whether his refusal to express his feelings
about cancer hastened his death.
I don't feel ashamed anymore that I wept in class, nor do I
feel proud that I have now written and spoken about the
experience. If I cry again in class, it will no longer be an
event to cover up or cry about.
Jeffrey Berman is a professor of English at the State
University of New York at Albany. His latest book is Risky
Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the
Classroom (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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