I teared up in class again yesterday. Actually, I pretty much bawled quietly–so much so that I had to stop reading for a few minutes.
I’ve been reading out loud to my students the historical novel Blue, and I hadn’t thoroughly previewed yesterday’s chapter. It tells of the narrator’s little brother’s death from polio, how her tears ran over his withered body and how her mother repeated the boy’s favorite saying–“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”–as they buried him.
Children suffering hits a soft spot for me, and this was no exception.
My students were a bit taken aback by my tears. I heard a chuckle but mostly low whispers of “He’s crying” and “It’s a sad story” and general, respectful quietness as I let myself cry and then tried to regain my composure.
Along with my tears on Tuesday, my expression yesterday may have sealed my reputation as an emotional basket case. When I read that same chapter to a later class–the only class that I haven’t yet cried in–I noted at least one student watching me very, very closely. I guarantee I’m not that interesting to watch while I read, so I’m pretty sure he was watching for salty pearls. Since I knew what was coming in the story, however, I braced myself well; he must have been sorely disappointed.
After I came home, I learned that M, t00, had shed tears. At about the same time that I began reading to my students, M said, she cried as she learned in a BBC report about a family who lost two young daughters to an Israeli soldier’s deliberate gunfire into a “terrified procession” of a “mother, grandmother and three little girls.”
If only, if only–if only this was fiction. Composure be damned.
One Comment
Jennifer Jo
Once again, backbone for a good article.
-JJ