Paley: Respecting Tears

Decisions about fairness, it seems, often appear as the result of someone’s tears. We teachers are not overly fond of crying when there is no physical hurt, but the children insist that crying means something is unfair and needs to be corrected. It is never a case, for them, of the adult “giving in” to tears; on the contrary, the sympathetic adult receives high marks for fairness when tears are respected.

-Vivian Gussin Paley, from The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: the Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom