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An introspective approach to class introversion

Nicholles Klevisha
Connector Staff

For many students, public speaking is a dreaded prospect to be avoided, and that fear has translated into the context of the classroom.

Professor Rita Sullivan of the English Department said she tells her students every semester that this fear will last unless they confront it.

“If you’re not going to talk in the first two weeks, you probably won’t [for the rest of the semester] because you’ll build it up to be such a big deal,” she said.

Students often feel some pressure before speaking up in class, sometimes coming from the students’ tendency to overthink the answer or the feeling that their input is not valuable, they say.

“I typically assumed the answer was wrong and if the answer was wrong I’d be embarrassed,” said Cat MacDonald, a former Middlesex Community College student.

However, whenever she was actually right, “It made me feel good, but lucky,” she said.

There are some students and teachers who say they have difficulty empathizing with anxious students because they believe their anxiety is all in their head.

“Saying something is in their head is an interesting way to put it,” said Professor Dale Young, who has a degree in expressive therapy, which uses creative processes such as acting as a form of therapy. “We tend to think that if something is just in your head, we think, ‘Oh, it’s just in your mind. Get over it.’”

MacDonald recalls a time in which she felt invalidated by one of her early childhood teachers.

“I can actually think of the first example that made me want to stop participating,” MacDonald said. “In third grade, I told my teacher that the cursive ‘n’ looked almost like a non-cursive ‘m,’ and she, like, bashed on me for it. She said that I was wrong, and as a twenty-year-old now, I can definitely say it looks a lot like an ‘m.’”

Mechanical engineering student Justin Litteral said he has no problem participating in class, but he remains conscious of his participation in relation to that of other students.

“There are moments where I feel like I’ve been talking too much, and I try not say things as often. But if people aren’t answering or responding, I’ll talk more to fill in the space and get other people to talk more,” he said.

Extroverted students and introverted students are both susceptible to feeling a certain level of tension and anxiety from the dynamics of the class, but Young says we shouldn’t just ignore them.

“Most of the fears that we have and most of the dangers that we experience are in our heads, but to ignore psychological fear is to do potential damage to ourselves,” Young said. “Stage fright is a very real thing. It’s also very different from somebody who is very shy or somebody who is very nervous or somebody who is risk averse.

Young and Sullivan say they try to mitigate student fears. Young said introverted students should understand that what they are experiencing is not wrong. “First thing you do is normalize their hesitancy and normalize their fear,” he said.

Sullivan said that being kind and respectful does not mean holding back one’s opinions for the sake of another’s.

“I like when students can, with courtesy, disagree with one another,” she said. “The more vehement they get, the more interesting it gets.

However, Sullivan says she tries to cultivate an atmosphere in which students will not feel judged for their opinions, even if they are unpopular. Instead, she says, students should be able to respectfully disagree with their classmates.

“Everybody’s viewpoint is legitimate,” she said. “If you’re out and wrong, I will tell you that as gently as I can. If somebody else knows you’re wrong, they should tell you that as gently as possible. An atmosphere where people are nice to each other.”

Young said the class might not see it, but introverted students will be able to see improvement within themselves. “The victory for them might be to get up in front of a group of people and say their name,” he said.

“You can’t make anybody do anything, but you can offer them choice and hope that they choose to do something,” said Young. “It’s hard to do, but man, is it cool when it happens.”

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