Jennifer Gonzalez on Crying in Front of Students

??????????? In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez remembers a day in her fourth year as a middle-school ELA teacher (she’d arrived at the school in mid-January to replace a teacher who’d just retired) when she felt her gorge rising. She’d worked hard the night before preparing a card-sorting activity, but some students weren’t getting started after she’d given instructions, a boy grabbed a girl’s purse, and the girl squealed flirtatiously and started hitting his arm.

“As I tried to get them back on track,” says Gonzalez, “I found myself getting in my head. They would never act this way in Tony’s class, I thought like I often did, comparing myself to my much more experienced mentor down the hall. They don’t respect me.” When she saw two students laughing, she assumed they were laughing at her. Then a desk got knocked over, students laughed, and she lost her temper and yelled loudly at the class. “They sat in stunned silence while I ranted for another twenty seconds or so, and then for a moment, I just looked at them and they looked back at me.” That’s when Gonzalez felt a wave of shame. The tears were coming and she headed out the door, asked the teacher next door to watch her class, and locked herself in the bathroom and cried and cried.

Are tears in front of students – this kind of loss-of-control crying – okay? If it’s a one-time thing, Gonzalez says it’s pretty common, especially among first-year teachers, and should not be seen as the end of the world. It’s part of growing a thicker skin. Students may even show remorse, turn on their misbehaving and disrespectful classmates, and play a part in improving classroom dynamics. But if crying becomes a pattern, it can lead colleagues and administrators to believe you can’t handle the job. That may be true, or it could be a poorly-run school, a mismatched teaching assignment, or personal problems outside of school.

In Gonzalez’s case, the incident made her determined that it would not happen again. For starters, she analyzed the factors that produced that moment:

-?? Taking things personally – “When we let our thoughts go in this direction,” she says, “it’s easy to get our feelings hurt.”

-?? Feeling disrespected – When Gonzalez compared the way students acted with her versus her colleague down the hall, it made her feel weak and ineffective, triggering the tears.

-?? Overwhelming demands on time and attention – Students need help, technology breaks down, a desk crashes to the floor.

-?? Shame – “Feeling incompetent is awful,” she says, especially when a supervisor or colleague sees your out-of-control class.

Gonzalez then suggests some strategies to prevent and cope with these moments:

? Pay attention to early signs and regulate your emotions – Take slow, deep breaths, count to ten, or go for a short walk after getting someone to cover your class.

? Do something totally unexpected. Here’s a move Gonzalez has used successfully more than once. Stop teaching, sit in a chair at the front of the class, open a notebook to a blank page, and start writing. “Within a minute,” she says, “this calm, simple act would silence the whole class, because they had no idea what I was doing, and my sudden stillness caught them off guard. As I wrote, I felt my adrenaline and anxiety dropping, my breathing becoming slower, my sense of self-control returning. Then I would often switch tactics. I’d start looking around the room and writing down things that had actually gone well in the last few minutes, whether it was the groups who did, in fact, attempt to do the activity as planned, the folder on my desk of make-up work one of them had just handed in minutes before I lost it, or the funny thing another one had said at the beginning of the hour.

“In between short bursts of writing, I’d breathe and look around the room, taking in all of their faces and mentally noting all the ones who really hadn’t caused any trouble at all. Every time I did this, I was surprised to discover that what I thought was an out-of-control class was actually more like 3 or 4 kids who were giving me trouble, another handful that were merely distracted by the show and a whole lot more who were mostly just waiting for things to get back to normal. Huh. That’s the sound my brain would make upon realizing this.”

??????????? ? Tell yourself a different story. Using cognitive reframing with the incident described above would have consisted of acknowledging that the activity she had planned wasn’t working, that she should have modeled how the cards were supposed to be used by groups, and she needed to scrap it or start again.

??????????? ? Move into third person. “When you’re feeling emotionally triggered,” says Gonzalez, “it can be incredibly helpful to take one step away from yourself mentally and think of yourself as an observer of your own mind, rather than letting your emotions dictate how you interpret a situation.” By creating some distance from the situation, almost like an actor contemplating a scene they’re in, you can create enough space to handle things more calmly and effectively.

??????????? ? Approach situations with curiosity and care. “By doing this,” she says, “it makes students seem less threatening, it moves the focus off of yourself, and it helps get you into problem-solving mode.” When a student doesn’t follow instructions you’ve just given, it seems disrespectful and rude, but what else could be going on? The student is preoccupied? Simply didn’t hear you? If the student really is upset with me, what could be going on? Of course, this approach works best if you know students really well.

??????????? The day after Gonzalez’s meltdown with the seventh graders, she spent a few minutes talking to the class about what happened: “Although they hadn’t seen me cry, I wanted them to know that I had kind of lost it, that I was a little embarrassed, and that it made me realize that I needed to get better about communicating expectations and giving clearer instructions. Then we moved on and it never happened again.”

?“Some Thoughts on Teachers Crying in the Classroom” by Jennifer Gonzalez in Cult of Pedagogy, March 17, 2024, summarized in Marshall Memo 1029