When educators label as "emotional" the girl crying in the bathroom or the boy who just slammed his locker shut, they risk assuming that only overt displays qualify as emotional and therefore necessitate attention. The fact is that whether a student outwardly displays emotion or not, he or she is emotional, and the teacher has a pedagogical responsibility to respond to him or her in an educative way. Education relies on the students' personal experiences--the emotional realities of students' lives qualify as personal experience, but the experience of those emotions whether displayed or not in the classroom can be harmful to the student if the teacher responds inappropriately or not at all. As a teacher links experience with reflection for students in the classroom, they take on a pedagogical responsibility to build a strong, caring relationship in which care is provided for the student by helping them attain competency in the world. Just like students, teachers bring their own emotional histories to the classroom and these histories make a difference. Both conscious and unconscious histories influences the way educators understand gender and emotional displays. Amanda West describes several conditions that teachers need to constantly consider and teacher candidates need to be made aware of as they imagine and engage in educative interactions with their students: 1) There are cultural expectations and norms surrounding who is allowed to display emotion and where; 2) Teachers have their own personal conditioned reactions to students' emotional displays and need to be aware of and defuse those reactions; and 3) Teachers must always take student emotions seriously.