Here's a newbie question:

I'm building a chest of drawers of various hardwoods in my class at
the community college. All lumber is rough sawn and I'm
jointing/planing it all in the shop.

Today I was jointing my 4/4 cherry stock for drawer runners. This is
the first time I have worked with cherry. I was getting frustrated
because of the tear out I was getting on face jointing the boards.
I'm not very experienced yet on milling my own stock so sometimes
figuring out grain direction is still a 50/50 proposition for me. But
it would seem that I would guess right for the first half of the board
but then the grain would switch direction on me and tear out the
second half. Even lightening the cuts didn't completely take care of
the issue.

Once I got the first face "acceptably" jointed (minor tear out that I
could sand out), I put it through the planer, deathly afraid I would
have the same trouble on the opposite face. With this, however, I got
much better results, taking off no more than 1/32 at a time. In fact,
on a couple boards, I went back and put the "jointed" face through the
planer to clean off the tear out.

Is there something inherently squirrely about cherry that I don't know
about? Or, more likely, is there a deficiency in my jointing
technique that has never shown up on walnut and maple? Thanks for any
tips.

Ian