So much of modern advice for teachers involves tuning in to students’ anxieties, fears, and moods in such a way that you are told, “Never cold-call a student,” or “Don’t give a student anxiety by asking them to read an unfamiliar passage out loud.”
I think this is a misdirected or perhaps misapplied approach to considering students’ feelings. While I never seek to actively increase a student’s anxiety, I believe that there is a value in productive discomfort. For example, if you call on a student to read a passage aloud, the “considerate” approach (advised above) would say, give them time to prepare so they don’t embarrass themselves. However, I think we are targeting the wrong feeling here: why should there be embarrassment? If they make a mistake, it is an opportunity for the class to reflect on
a) what the “mistake” actually means,
b) why the student made it, and
c) how to recover from it.
What I mean is, when we only allow learning opportunities that cater to students’ feelings of ease and calm, we are showing them that the world will give them ease and calm. When we give a student a challenging academic task and stand beside them through that task, we are showing them that these feelings of anxiety and fear can be accommodated — that a resilient learner accepts the negative feelings and works with them.
I believe that learning should be enjoyable and safe, and I do agree that students learn best in a trusting environment. However, rigor and difficulty are not the absence of trust. It is a sign of trust if someone believes I can do a difficult task and stands beside me while I do it…rather than watering down the task until I am comfortable with each stage.
Life after school will not wait for you to feel calm before throwing crap at you. Building a supportive and loving classroom means establishing non-negotiable rules of civility in the presence of difficulty, not the absence of it.
This post is part of The Learning Curve, my column on teaching and learning. In these posts, I’ll share experiences and research from college and high school teaching.
On the Blink 
Why is it necessary for children to read aloud if they’re not comfortable doing so? Yes, school should prepare children for life, but unless a child is considering a career as a narrator of talking books for the blind, it’s not necessary to be comfortable reading aloud.
When I attend poetry workshops, and we’re studying a poem, the presenter sometimes asks for a volunteer to read the poem. Being visually impaired and not usually having the poem on my Braille display, if the presenter had called on me instead of asking for a volunteer, I can imagine how embarrassing that would have been.
Why not ask for volunteers in your classes to read passages aloud? If there are none, read the passage yourself. The idea is to learn the material in the passage, not be comfortable reading aloud, unless, of course, you’re teaching a speech class.
In my classroom, I do ask for volunteers, but we also do readers’ theater. Reading aloud can often reveal comprehension errors that occur when students don’t know or recognize words. Expressive reading can help build confidence with a text and help the class understand it.
I’m visually impaired and I struggled to read aloud for years because materials were not accessible. I would never expect a student to read who does not have adequate access to the material.
York’s friend:
I have a weak voice, not quite a whispery one, but one that has to be “saved” to get through fifteen contact hours of classes a week. I was jealous of those with booming voices that could be heard in an auditorium without a mike. Being an oldster, I think of voices like those of Al Jolson, George Jessell, and Ethel Merman that could reach the back of the theatre and the top row of the balconies. By contrast, I’d end up rasping about like Bill Clinton.
In one Comp I class, I had a guy in the back of the class who hated my guts and he was constantly talking with a friend. To break it up, I said, “Mr. —— [I remember his name from 20+ years ago], my voice is playing out. Would you read the next sentence in the Orwell essay, beginning with ‘One day something happened’?” He did and was so full of himself that he gloated in triumph for several minutes.
By and by, I’d go down a row and call on each sentence to read a sentence and comment on it (if they had anything to say). It served two purposes: First, most of them hadn’t read the required essay, so it involved them somewhat. Second, it saved my voice.
I’d head off complaints by saying, “In each essay, you may come across a word you’ve read but you’ve never spoken aloud. If so, give it your best shot. Oh, whenever you come across a word you’re in doubt about, be assertive and say what you think it might be. Even if you’re wrong, others will admire your confidence.”
I had one class in which a young lady was highly sophisticated and aloof. She obviously held every classmate in contempt, although she didn’t tell them that. One day, she was asked to read a sentence, and it was total embarrassment as she stumbled over the simplest words. The insight? The sophisticated lady could barely read.
In a humanities class (Renaissance to Impressionists), I had a procedure when we got to “Hamlet.” I mentioned that they were all familiar with “To be or not to be, that is the question.” I said each actor playing Hamlet had to decide how to deliver the line. Does he throw it away casually or focus on one of the 10 words? I’d go around the room asking each person to deliver the line, but in a different way from what others had done.
I’ll close and not mention that, when mics were popularized, the Jolsons, Jessells, and Mermans were pushed aside by the crooners: Bing, Russ Columbo, Perry Como (a Bing imitator in his early days with Ted Weems), etc.
I won’t.
Don’t ask me.
Yours in the word, hd3