Tears Are Pride Leaving the Body

I definitely used to be one of those kids. I’m sure you probably knew me in school—the brown noser; that one dork who always got the A’s in every subject and who always did everything he could to please the adults around him. He was a strange one, for sure: that smart kid who obsessed over his grades and whose sense of self-worth was so strongly tied to good marks and praise from teachers. You probably could never understand when he cried over an A- on his fourth grade math test or when he faked sick in kindergarten to avoid talking to his teacher about a matter that really never was his fault, but for him, these sorts of things were world-shattering horrors.

As for me, though, I actually was that strange elementary school kid. I cried in Mr. Rossi’s class after I got a 92% on a math test (to this day most folks still don’t know that oranges weigh 2 pounds each and that people drink their coffee at 120 degrees Farenheit), and I pretended to have the stomach flu when I didn’t want to talk to my kindergarten teacher about something I was coerced into saying on the school bus (a bad-influence-of-a-friend told me to tell another kindergartener that I wanted to have sex with her. As an innocent five year old, I really had no idea what that meant, but apparently my rotten friend, this girl and her mom, and the school principal did). Yep, I was that smart and suggestible and proud kid. I did my best in everything, was very self conscious about it all, and, when my best wasn’t good enough, I cried.

All of this long personal history puts me in a unique position of empathy with those same sorts of kids that I’m getting to know now that I’m a teacher. There are a few students who try so hard to please me, just like I tried so hard to please my own teachers. There are a few who will do just about anything to get a good mark, even giving up their recess time to study English, just like I tried everything I could to put an extra plus sign after my A. After only three weeks teaching, too, I’ve already seen a few students in my classes cry when, like me in elementary school, things didn’t go there way.

As a teacher who was there in their place at one time not so long ago, I can empathize with them. I know well the feeling of disappointment and self-hatred after even a minor failure. I, like one of my first-time English students who is stressing out over a new foreign language, spent many nights of my innocent youth worrying over classes and whether I’d ever be able to accomplish the tasks set before me. I cried many times at discipline and correction, too, never wanting to be wrong at any time in public. I was easily-humiliated, and easily affected by how others thought of me.

Since that time, though, I’ve learned a lot. I’m a lot more thankful for what I have these days, and I don’t always think about what I don’t have. I’m not so easily moved by what others think is right, and am a lot more confident in what I think is right. This doesn’t change the fact that there are still standards and truths and sometimes I get them very wrong, but I’ve come to know that I’m just a human person and I make mistakes. Slowly, I’m getting better at accepting that. I know, too, that’s it’s a good thing to be humbled every once in a while and to believe that there are a lot of people a lot smarter and a lot better than me.

Knowing my own life and how much I’ve learned through so many painful lessons, I can’t help but be pleased when I see my own students learning these same things. It might seem a little strange that I smile when one of my best students misses recess for misbehavior, but I know they’re learning the important lesson that no one is better than the rule of law. I might seem to be a different sort of teacher when I’m glad to see a very bright student shedding a tear over her bad grade on a quiz, but I’m content to believe that those tears are very important and never shed in vain, demonstrating to her and the world that no one is perfect. Discipline and correction and humble pie certainly makes all of my students and me much better people. No one is perfect or invisible, and we’re all in need of a world of correction and training. Although it’s tough for me and my students to hear sometimes, we’ve all got a long way to go, a lot of humility to learn, and maybe some crying to do along the way, too.