(no subject)
Someone posted about The Monster Study (the speech therapy and anxiety one that ended up screwing up the kids who hadn't had speech anxiety before) on a community that I am in, and it prompted me to air some thoughts about something that's been with me for eleven years now.
I was a freshman in college and we had a required speech course. Okay, fine. I'd been in drama and done speaking, and been a class officer in high school (don't ask me how that happened. I was...not popular to say the least) and was pretty much used to public speaking stuff. Cue the class with this woman, who I will refer to as only her first name in case libel is an issue.
Stacy was one of those exacting, nitpicking people, who criticized every little thing. If your hands involuntarily moved while you spoke? Sure, she'd note it on the eval form, which, okay, that was part of what the class was for. But Stacy also, after people spoke, would come up to the front of the classroom and mock every little thing they had done wrong during the speech. If you'd spoken too slowly, looked at somebody for too long, stuttered or mispronounced a word. Anything.
Before I entered that class, I was confident in public speaking situations, reasonably fine with talking to an audience or reading things outloud in a group, etc. In that semester, I went from being able to handle that sort of thing to being riddled with anxiety whenever I had to even go into that room or face anybody. My asthma flared continually in that classroom, I was genuinely ill a number of times, and I left with an honest to goodness stutter that had never been there before. I wasn't even able to read things outloud in my other classes, and I struggled with this for a good number of years. It made me miserable, it made me withdraw from interaction with anybody, and while I managed to hit the dean's list my next semester, after nearly failing speech, and only speech that first semester because things got so bad for me in there.
I spent a lot of time deeply affected by this, deeply traumatized, and hardly able to say a word to anyone. Eventually, I took some acting classes to round out my arts credits, and those started to help me get some of my confidence back, but even while I was in grad school, I would have professors ask to see me before class because I wouldn't be able to speak about what we'd read, but had written killer essays (we usually had to summarize two pages of whatever we'd done and take a stance on it in most of those cases), and who gradually, along with the performing classes, got me pulled out of my shell again, but I still fear the rejection, and the criticism and every time I walk into my classroom to teach, there's that part of me that wants to run away and curl up somewhere. I've learned how to work through it, and past it, and it's rewarding that I have, but there's still that part of me, you know?
This kind of shit can leave really deep psychological marks, and that's part of why I'm so careful as a teacher, even when I think a student has said something really ridiculous that I work past it, to talk to them about it in a constructive way instead of mocking them. I hope I never do to someone what was done to me, you know?
I'm...not sure why that's still with me, but getting it out feels better, almost.
I was a freshman in college and we had a required speech course. Okay, fine. I'd been in drama and done speaking, and been a class officer in high school (don't ask me how that happened. I was...not popular to say the least) and was pretty much used to public speaking stuff. Cue the class with this woman, who I will refer to as only her first name in case libel is an issue.
Stacy was one of those exacting, nitpicking people, who criticized every little thing. If your hands involuntarily moved while you spoke? Sure, she'd note it on the eval form, which, okay, that was part of what the class was for. But Stacy also, after people spoke, would come up to the front of the classroom and mock every little thing they had done wrong during the speech. If you'd spoken too slowly, looked at somebody for too long, stuttered or mispronounced a word. Anything.
Before I entered that class, I was confident in public speaking situations, reasonably fine with talking to an audience or reading things outloud in a group, etc. In that semester, I went from being able to handle that sort of thing to being riddled with anxiety whenever I had to even go into that room or face anybody. My asthma flared continually in that classroom, I was genuinely ill a number of times, and I left with an honest to goodness stutter that had never been there before. I wasn't even able to read things outloud in my other classes, and I struggled with this for a good number of years. It made me miserable, it made me withdraw from interaction with anybody, and while I managed to hit the dean's list my next semester, after nearly failing speech, and only speech that first semester because things got so bad for me in there.
I spent a lot of time deeply affected by this, deeply traumatized, and hardly able to say a word to anyone. Eventually, I took some acting classes to round out my arts credits, and those started to help me get some of my confidence back, but even while I was in grad school, I would have professors ask to see me before class because I wouldn't be able to speak about what we'd read, but had written killer essays (we usually had to summarize two pages of whatever we'd done and take a stance on it in most of those cases), and who gradually, along with the performing classes, got me pulled out of my shell again, but I still fear the rejection, and the criticism and every time I walk into my classroom to teach, there's that part of me that wants to run away and curl up somewhere. I've learned how to work through it, and past it, and it's rewarding that I have, but there's still that part of me, you know?
This kind of shit can leave really deep psychological marks, and that's part of why I'm so careful as a teacher, even when I think a student has said something really ridiculous that I work past it, to talk to them about it in a constructive way instead of mocking them. I hope I never do to someone what was done to me, you know?
I'm...not sure why that's still with me, but getting it out feels better, almost.