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106 CHAPTER 8 Minimizing the Risks of Personal Writing The Empathic Classroom Teachers cannot eliminate the risks of personal writing, but they can minimize and manage these dangers by adopting the following classroom practices. (For an extended discussion of these protocols, see Risky Writing 29–48.) These practices help to create and maintain the “safe haven” that enables students like Patty to disclose painful or shameful experiences that are rarely discussed in the classroom. Empathizing with Students Empathy is the foundation of a self-disclosing classroom, and I encourage students to try to understand their classmates’ feelings and thoughts. Heinz Kohut, a leading psychoanalyst who founded a new movement, self-psychology, based on the empathic-introspective stance, argues that “empathy is the mode by which one gathers psychological data about other people and . . . imagines their inner experience even though it is not open to direct observation” (262). So does Carl Rogers elevate empathy to the highest importance in psychotherapy and in education. “This attitude of standing in the other’s shoes,” he writes in Freedom to Learn, “of viewing the world through the student’s eyes, is almost unheard of in the classroom. One could listen to thousands of ordinary classroom interactions without coming across one instance of clearly communicated, sensitively accurate, empathic understanding. But it has a tremendously releasing effect when it occurs” (112). The most striking description of empathic listening that I have come across appears in Rogers’s book A Way of Being: Almost always, when a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, “Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me.” In such moments I have had the fantasy of a prisoner 27460 part 02.indd 106 27460 part 02.indd 106 10/2/07 2:06:20 PM 10/2/07 2:06:20 PM Minimizing the Risks of Personal Writing 107 in a dungeon, tapping out day after day a Morse code message, “Does anybody hear me? Is anybody here?” And finally one day he hears some faint tappings which spell out “Yes.” By that one simple response he is released from his loneliness; he has become a human being again. There are many, many people living in private dungeons today, people who give no evidence of it whatsoever on the outside, where you have to listen very sharply to hear the faint messages from the dungeon. (10) On the first day of the semester I give my writing students a handout called “Reading Empathically” (see the appendix) in which I tell them that the success of the course depends upon their ability to engage in empathic reading, listening, and speaking. Some people are more empathic than others, but empathy is an acquired art that can be developed, like other befriending skills. I am not always successful in creating an empathic classroom. Sometimes I make statements that students experience as hurtful. As far as I know, this did not happen in Patty’s class, but it did occur in the same Age of Freud course that I taught two years later. Whenever students write essays in my literature courses, I ask them to agree with two of my in-class statements and to disagree with two other in-class statements. I do this so that students will listen attentively in class and develop their own critical thinking. “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil,” Nietzsche observed wryly, and teachers who encourage students to disagree with them avoid creating discipleship. Sometimes a student’s disagreement convinces me to modify an interpretation. I ask students to state their disagreements as I collect their essays, and generally I listen without defending my original statement. Louise, an education major, disagreed with my statement that Sylvia Plath was a famous poet whose suicide had contributed to her cult status. She said that she had never heard of Plath before my class and, to support her argument, stated that her Google search on Plath’s name had turned up only 10 entries. I expressed surprise and said that probably every good library in the country had several books written by or about Plath. The following class I returned the essays to their authors, and I told Louise that my Google search on Plath’s name yielded 675,000 entries—a statement that prompted her classmates’ laughter. She also laughed...

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