Crying in Graduate School

A few years ago I gave a presentation in my critical statistics class about standardized testing and pandemic learning loss. The assignment was to examine current education research and give a critical analysis of how the statistics were being used. Spoiler: I would argue that 99.9% of statistics in public-facing published research are entirely misleading. There is often little accountability for who is included in the study, crucial information gets left out, and numbers are presented in ways that are easily misinterpreted without the full story. Unsurprisingly, these numbers end up shaping how we think about education and even help manifest the realities they claim to measure.

The article I chose was from Education Week. It discussed how students were “rebounding” from pandemic learning loss and included a chart comparing test scores from 6.7 million U.S. public school students in grades three through six. The conclusion of the article was predictable: the way to close the gap was to move students forward faster, covering both current standards and the content they supposedly missed.

I remember reading that and thinking, this is such bullshit.

Not because statistics themselves are completely meaningless, but because the way they are used often strips away everything that actually matters. Students become numbers on a chart. The social, emotional, and relational dimensions of education disappear when education gets treated like capital.

During my presentation I quoted scholars who have written about this for decades—people like Dr. Laura Rendón and Dr. Rochelle Gutiérrez—who point out that our current education system privileges intellectual development while treating emotional and spiritual development as secondary, if it acknowledges them at all.

Somewhere in the middle of explaining this, I started crying.

I remember my eyes filling with tears and the panic to make it stop, suddenly realizing I was overwhelmed in front of a room full of people. Speaking about the topic out loud triggered a full-body reaction. It reminded me of my time teaching in a public school—being told to “move through the curriculum quicker,” being instructed to practice multiple-choice questions every day, and being told that if I wasn’t doing that, I was doing a disservice to my students. All the sensations of that incredibly dehumanizing reality—how these systems operate in schools across the country—came rushing back. And in that moment, I couldn’t do anything except cry.

For a long time I thought crying in academic spaces meant I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I felt immense guilt at my own perception that I was “making everyone in the room uncomfortable.”

But the truth is, I wasn’t treated that way. My professor was kind. My classmates were supportive. One person even asked for my presentation afterward so they could share it with people at their school.

This was not the first time I cried openly like this in an academic space, and it also wasn’t the last (lol).

But this experience, along with my current research around love in the classroom, has had me reflecting on how academic spaces rarely make room for emotion, even though emotion plays such a critical role in how we experience learning.

Okay, but why am I always crying?

When we talk about education research, we often talk about things that are deeply upsetting. Systemic inequity. Standardized testing. Schools that function like prisons. Colonized schooling. Students being labeled, measured, and ranked.

But the way these topics are usually discussed is strangely sterile through concepts, data points, and frameworks. What disappears is the emotional reality of what those systems do to people.

Sitting in that classroom, my body was reacting to something that the language of the room was flattening. We were analyzing statistics about students whose lives were being reduced to numbers. My body was responding to that disconnect.

Now I see that reaction differently. I see it as my body’s wisdom. Many of us (through our own education) have become so disconnected from our bodies that we don’t feel these reactions anymore. That is exactly why reconnecting with our bodies, and learning how to understand our body is so important.

and why aren’t more people crying?

When I think back on the times I have cried, often because I feel deeply upset by the dehumanization that persists in schools, I sometimes wonder why more people aren’t crying.

We were talking about systems that have shaped generations of students through ranking, labeling, dehumanizing and excluding. We were discussing the ways test scores get used to define intelligence, ability, and potential.

And we were doing it through charts and academic language. I’m not saying every conversation about education needs to turn into a room full of people sobbing.

But I do think something is missing when the emotional weight of these topics disappears entirely.Education is about human lives.

If our bodies never respond to what we’re studying, it’s worth asking: are we even listening?

I’m sorry, I am still crying

For most of my life, my relationship with crying was complicated. If I cried in front of people, I apologized.

Later I started announcing it ahead of time, as if giving people a warning. I would say something like, “I might cry while talking about this,” or “I’m going to start crying.” It was a way of trying to manage the discomfort my crying might cause.

What I didn’t realize then was that I was often abandoning myself in those moments. My focus was on making sure other people felt comfortable instead of tending to what was happening in my own body.

Thankfully, that relationship has started to shift.

Now when I cry, I try to stay present with it. It’s not something I perform or exaggerate. It’s simply something that happens when my body is responding to something meaningful, overwhelming, or sometimes something so touchingly beautiful. (Yes, I also cry when things are beautiful. lol)

And I’m learning that I don’t need to apologize for that.

body is knowledge

Embodiment has become a daily practice. Part of that practice is paying attention to the signals my body gives me. If something feels off, I don’t automatically push through it. If I feel frustrated, I take it as information that a boundary may have been crossed.

It’s a kind of language between me and my body that I’m still learning.

There are small practices that help with this—breathwork, meditation, journaling about what I’m feeling in a situation, or simply pausing long enough to notice the sensations in my body instead of immediately overriding them.

These practices aren’t about becoming perfectly calm or regulated all the time. They’re about staying connected to myself. The more I pay attention, the clearer it becomes that my body often knows things before my mind has fully caught up.

My experience with embodiment is personal, but in the way I know we are deeply connected, I know I am not the only one feeling this.

Schools and academic institutions are places where we learn what kinds of knowledge are valued. In many Western educational systems, the mind is treated as the primary site of knowing. The body, the heart, and intuition get pushed to the margins.

For me, embodiment has become a way of remembering that knowledge is not only something we think.It’s also something we feel.

And sometimes, it’s something we cry about.