We Need Emotional Literacy

Reading this chapter made me realize how emotionally illiterate I can be on the page sometimes, which to me is ironic considering how emotionally expressive I am in person. But then, it makes me wonder that something may be up with education where I simply can’t translate it on paper as well as I can in person, and I think it’s in part that many of the classes we take, writing especially, have you responding to the readings with what you think (e.g. “what was the symbolism you noticed?”) rather than how it made you feel inside. Teachers don’t often teach this expressive route, while others do. Before I got to college and experienced free-writing along with reflective writing, I had no clue how to write about how I felt, I just understood how to summarize and draw analyses from texts as if there was some disconnect in my own brain. Sometimes, I still don’t feel like I understand how to write that way, but progressively I feel I’m getting a little bit better at it through writing posts like this and doing other reflective writings in my other class. Like for my Public Essay class, we respond to each of the readings in our journal, and while I’ll sometimes say how portions made me feel, drawing on the anger or what made me confused or upset, I don’t think I’m getting as deep into the writing as I could.

So I think Bump is right, we need to incorporate emotional literacy in what is already being taught, because in a way it is therapeutic and helpful. It gets us more in tune with our emotions. Education really does go hand in hand with mental health. I mean, we all have minds, correct? We all go through stress, anxiety, and depression from time to time. Then we all have mental health that can deteriorate. As he quotes Redl and Wattenberg, “the teacher can and must assume some share of responsibility for the emotional as well as the intellectual development of his students.” (316). This reminded me of Wendell Berry’s essay “Two Minds” about the sympathetic and the rational mind. It seems like in education, we tend to place superiority in intellect and knowledge (the rational mind) over feelings and emotions (the sympathetic mind). We see our professors as highly-educated, powerful beings – Bump makes the joke of an automaton – instead of a human being with emotions like the rest of us. And that’s also why there may be this disconnect. Our professor doesn’t express how his day has been, so why should I? Would it really be uncomfortable or detrimental to the learning experience if we saw our professor as a peer rather than as a superior?

The part that really broke my heart was when he shared the story of a girl who had written an anonymous note about trying to kill herself, and once tracing the handwriting to the student, he talked with her through it, walked her to the counseling center, and kept in contact with her progress. Talk about showing emotion and showing how much someone can care. I truly believe that professors sometimes forget that their student’s aren’t just dealing with the work given in that class (or other classes for that matter), but go through their own turmoil with relationships, family, friends, stress at work, or even personal struggles with drugs or alcohol. And on the flipside, we also forget that our professors are people outside of the school context as well. They may be parents, have another job, have other commitments, but we just assign them to the context we see them in most, just like they may with us. And this is problematic. To bring it back to the rational mind, we see them in this intellectual context, instead of as people with passions, dislikes, worries, fears and all the things that make us human.

This piece also reiterated to me the notion that mental health still is very stigmatized. I was livid when the administrators cancelled his course because they thought he was blurring the roles of professor with therapist. There was too much focus on emotion, and he was trying to tell his students how to think and act (which he wasn’t). As if it isn’t his job to make sure his students are physically and emotionally okay while taking the course. The administrators clearly, as Bump points out, feared emotion and all that it could bring. And they clearly did not realize the extent with which taking a course like that can benefit you, how therapy isn’t a bad thing but is helpful. I even wrote in my notes, “did these administrators have sticks up their asses?” because honestly, why else pull the course, even when he backed up his argument for teaching it and they had no response. It just reinforces the fight that still needs to be made in education that we need emotional literacy. We need people, like them, to realize it’s not a harmful thing, but it’s a human thing. We all have emotions, and expressing them through writing is a very therapeutic thing, getting us more in touch with ourselves and how we feel.

If you couldn’t tell, I really enjoyed this chapter. I really loved the beginning with his own personal experience and I loved the discussion through the middle. However, I feel like he went on a bit too long about the process of what his courses taught and the process of his course being pulled and what he did to try and revive it. I understand he did this to get deeper into the discussion of emotional literacy being taught in an educational environment (using his own example), but I wanted more examples of it being taught elsewhere, a more global discussion I suppose. Either way though, it was a really interesting chapter that made me feel many emotions to which I tried to expand and write about here. Like I said earlier though, it’s still something I’m trying to get better at.