UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

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.

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