MAKING STUDENTS CRY

TEFL courses tend to ignore the possibility of students spontaneously bursting into tears during lessons, and those of us who have experienced such troubling spectacles are thus left with few guidelines as to how to handle sensitively scenes of sudden and inexplicable emotional meltdown.

Barely three months into my TEFL wanderings, I managed to make 66.67% of a class weep in under two hours, setting a personal best that stands until today. And before you jump to the perfectly understandable conclusion that I was teaching children of primary school age, I wasn’t - they were fully grown up Japanese Local Government Officers.

In the class there were three students, the Group Leader, a squat, wide, inscrutable blade whose only facial expressions were an occasional stiff smirk and an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes, and two twenty-something women from different Japanese Prefectures. It was my first lesson with them, and I’d chosen an exercise that remains one of my favourites to this day, for its adaptability, long-windedness and need for zero preparation. I forget from which book it comes, but students write on a piece of paper three names (someone they like very much, someone they’ll never forget, someone they don’t like very much), three places (the place they were born, somewhere they’d like to visit, a place they like to be alone), then three dates (the year they first went to school, the year they were happiest, the year that changed them most), and finally three memories (a happy memory, a funny memory, and their first memory). Then they read out their answers and everyone grills them for more details. Anticipating an unwanted emotional outpouring, I’d used what little intuition I possess to change one of the memory questions from a sad memory to a funny memory, but in the event, it helped not a jot.

After giving the students a few minutes to come up with their answers, I started directing my questions to one of the women.
“So, T, who is somebody you like very much?” I started brightly. She reddened and without managing to emit a word, broke down, the copious tears plopping onto her notepad. I hadn’t anticipated any plopping. I froze, neither knowing what was happening, nor what to do. I looked at the Group Leader, who stared back at me evenly, apparently determined to wallow in denial as if the wailing and gnashing of teeth to his right were a figment of our collective imaginations. We all remained there staring at each other silently for a few seconds as T sobbed quietly in the corner, before I could take no more and bolted. “Excuse me,” I mumbled as I ran out of the door and down two flights of stairs to the Staff Room, a-swearin' and a-cussin' like a docker.

“You shouldn’t do anything that involves expressing personal feelings with Japanese students!” my colleague helpfully advised me, just too late, “They’re shy, they don’t like talking about themselves - do something more general.” I grabbed a list of discussion questions, hastily photocopied it, legged it back upstairs and, taking a deep breath, made a stately re-entry into the fray as if it had all been carefully planned. Whilst I had been away, the Group Leader had either spoken kind words, or ordered T to get a grip, as she had, by this time, more or less composed herself. I handed out the new sheets and we continued the lesson, each of us respecting our secret pact that everything was going swimmingly.

The eerie emotional armistice lasted only a short time, before the other woman, A, was also reduced to tearful wreck. In answer to the question, “Do you think murderers should receive the death penalty?” she started answering, then became choked and started sniffling pathetically. My heart began to shrivel. The Group Leader’s eyes narrowed fractionally, but he kept them firmly fixed on me, determined to stoically face down this second emotional tailspin as he had the first. Composing herself after what seemed like an hour of titanic internal struggle, A revealed that a friend of hers had been killed recently and the murderer hadn’t yet been caught. Cut to me looking suicidal at the white board. How unlucky was that? Japan is famed for being one of the safest countries in the world, their murder rate is one of the lowest of all developed nations, for all that’s holy…

As a footnote, about three weeks after they left, I received a beautifully crafted Japanese photo album through the post from T, packed with pictures of their stay, including an ironic snap of me and the group grinning like our classes had been nothing but a series of fun-packed romps. There was also an invitation to visit her in Japan, and a confession of her amorous intentions towards me. The first lesson’s shenanigans kind of made sense now, but I decided not to take her up on her kind offer of hospitality - if she had been like that when she met me, imagine what would have happened when the time came to say goodbye.

Have you ever made your students cry? Are you planning to? Have your students ever made you cry? The TEFL Graveyard is a place where you can open your heart, and cry if you like.