Shy Girls

Mean girls and drama queens make the movies (and blogs), but this is a post about shy girls.  Schools, colleges, I suppose even work places, are full of them.  They quietly do their work and silently get the job done.  They don’t make waves, they don’t raise their voices, and often they don’t raise their hands.  People count on them, teachers count on them.  They’re the backbone of the classroom.  Maybe every now and then someone notices them, but hardly.

I suppose there are shy boys too, but it just seems that shy girls are so much more common.

Maybe because I was one once, I make it my mission to take the shy out of the girl.  “Enough with the shy,” I say, and I try over and over and over and over and over over the course of a year or two or three to get the girls to open up and be playful and express their ideas.

Usually, my efforts succeed most readily through writing.  Shy girls tend to leave my room writing pages and pages.  I give them private journals and public ones, science journals and field journals and math journals and travel journals.  I hope the seeds I plant through writing blossom over time into vocalization.

It’s Round 2 of parent conferences, and today I had one with one of my shyest girls, Anna (who has hardly appeared on these pages).  Accompanying her was her sister, a high school senior.  Anna is a sweet, slightly pudgy, very smart 8 year-old.  Though you wouldn’t have known it when you met her…

At the beginning of the year, she tried to disappear as much as possible.   Only when absolutely necessary, she would communicate through her head and shoulders.

Me: Anna, did you enjoy “Amber on the Mountain”?

Anna smiles, nods her head.

Me: What was your favorite part of the story?

Anna shrugs her shoulders.

Me: If you enjoyed it, you must have a had a part that made you smile more?

Anna smiles, shakes her head.

By Thanksgiving, we had progressed to single-word answers.  Yes, no, a few nouns and numbers.  But Anna always covered her mouth with her hands or sleeves whenever she gave them.  And worse still, she squeaked them.

Me: Anna, did you enjoy acting out “Mushroom in the Rain”?

Anna smiles, nods.

Me: What was your favorite part?

Anna (hand over her mouth, squeaking): The mouse.

Me:  Why was that your favorite role?

Anna smiles, shrugs.

Me, pressing: What characteristic of the mouse did you like?

Anna, trying to bury her entire face in her sleeve: He squeaks!

But now it’s March and she’s come very far.  She’s become comfortable in the class.  Maybe my humor has worn down her resistance to utterance.  She’s reached the point where she wants to tell what she knows, which is quite a lot.

She got all 3s and a few 4s on her report card (3 means at-grade-level–and she’s an English Language Learner!).  She’s ready to be reclassified as an English speaker which will get her out of the ghetto of English Learner classes in middle school.  She’s ready to become the editor-in-chief of our class newspaper, I told her sister.

If only she keeps talking more.  And squeaking and nodding less.  (And reading a little faster.)

I asked her senior sister what she was going to do when she graduated next year.  Sis told me she was going to a local community college.  I praised her for her achievement and told her that Anna could do the same if not more.

I asked Sis if she’d heard of Harvard.  She said sort of, but she didn’t really know what it was.  I explained about the Ivies and Stanford, and also about their tuition waiver plan for promising students who couldn’t afford $60K/year.

Fidgeting quietly beside Sis, Anna was ALL smiles.

Then, I thought about all the plans I was making for my son’s summer: music camp and movie-making camp science camp and national parks and New York City and and…

Me: What does Anna do in the summer?

Sis: Nothing.

Me: Nothing at all?

Sis: She stays home.

I told her about the summer achievement gap and said we had to find enrichment possibilities for Anna. She promised to talk to her parents.  We promised to work together.

Thank you Ms. B, squeaked Anna, when the conference was over.

We still gotta get rid of that squeak.

Then we can work towards Harvard.