In Celebration of Small Victories

I am sitting in class at the professor’s desk, my slides pulled up, my attendance app ready on my phone. It is 8:56 a.m.—minutes before class starts—and just about everyone is here. She is not, and I hoped she would be. I watch the door more anxiously than I probably should. Maybe it is because I believe she needs this. Maybe it is because I believe I do, too.

Shayna (a pseudonym) is one of several students giving a 10-minute presentation today on their recent projects. I’ve seen her project already, and it is good, but it is the presentation part that I know is psyching her out.

Shayna has pretty acute social anxiety. As she explains it to me, it is really peer anxiety, born of a learned perfectionism that stems from her early upbringing and schooling. She avoids making presentations, and the one time this year another professor made her give one, she froze, apologized and took her seat. She tells me in confidence that the professor knew better, knew her issues. That’s why I try to strike a balance between pushing Shayna to present but not pushing her too hard.

She and I have talked after class about how to make her most comfortable, including yesterday during a virtual meeting where we went over the final details. My job is to coach and also to cheerlead. “You’ll do fine, Shayna; if you want to back out, I will let you, but I really think this would be good for you to do,” I tell her.

What I don’t say is that I need her to do this for me, too.

Why? I don’t want to sound dramatic, but it might be the pinnacle of a surprisingly shitty period of teaching. I have taken on too much, including chairing a large, collegewide committee that, I later realized, I don’t understand enough to have any business chairing. I also agreed, at the last minute, to teach a course section for an ill colleague. And maybe it is the post-COVID thing, but students seem markedly less engaged in recent months—and in ways in which their disengagement is blatant, in which they don’t bother to hide how bored they are and think all of this really is just a game of accumulating points and college credits.

As a result, I’ve been persistently stressed, and the stress is even starting to get a bit irrational. Every day, I have new items to grade and give feedback on, as well as several other pressing things on my to-do list. It’s gotten to the point that when I finish everything, I still can’t go home and relax, because I now have a permanent sense that I am behind on something—even if I don’t remember exactly what. If you are not a teacher, imagine continually feeling this and having to stand up each week in the front of classrooms of students staring at laptops, where part of your effectiveness depends on exuding a confidence you no longer have.

That’s why I need Shayna to show up. Two more minutes go by. Not here yet. Everyone else has arrived. There is still time, I tell myself, and try to keep smiling.

It sounds blunt when said this way, but Shayna is a sort of project for me. When I started teaching, colleagues would console me after the bad days that everyone has but thinks are uniquely theirs. They would remind me that it’s really about the small victories: “Focus on those, because if you can affect just a few of them, it will be worth it.” It wasn’t the advice I wanted to hear then, so I’d often retort with a quick, “If we were doctors who thought that way, would we be OK if most of our patients died?”

Yet I now realize that it is good advice. At very least, a few visible success stories each semester is warm chicken soup for the teacher’s precariously fragile soul.

So, yes, Shayna is a project of sorts. I met her last spring when she took another of my classes. It didn’t seem like a good fit, because my courses are extremely discussion-based. We use the Socratic seminar method, where we all read the same text and arrange our seats in a circle in the center of the room to discuss it—so students can’t even hide behind a desk. I noticed that while she always brought great notes, she kept her head down and didn’t talk.

I brought this up to her. She set up an appointment to talk with me about it, and when the time arrived, she told me about her social anxiety. She is, she said, fine interacting with children (good, because she wants to teach young ones), but not peers. She thinks she’ll mess up, reveal how stupid she is and everyone will know; everything will change.

I press further, and she tells me that the first time she remembers feeling that way was in middle school, after a particularly nasty teacher repeatedly berated her for stumbling over an assignment. Try as she did, she could not get this teacher to stop, and that’s when the nervous pains in her chest started. And now, it only happens around people whom she feels the need to impress but fears—knows!—she cannot.

I was, therefore, shocked and flattered when she enrolled in another course that I was teaching, the one she is in now. She didn’t have to sign up for my section, but she did, even knowing it was a discussion-heavy course.

Challenge accepted, Shayna! We’ve found ways to get her involved in those discussions a bit more. I’ll tell her a period ahead of time that I want her to start the next class conversation with a question, she emails some possibilities to me and I help her choose one. She also talks during small group activities. One time, she even made a wholly impromptu comment to the group. Not big events to others, I’m sure. Shayna and I know differently.

She needs this. I need this. The more she avoids talking to others, the more the cycle of fear perpetuates. I know she knows that, but there’s often a difference between what we know we could do and what we actually can do. And for me, I want this to be a high note—more for her than for me, but yeah, for me, too. Not a lot has gone right this semester. But this still might.

Obsessing Over Better Things

Shayna walks in almost exactly at 9 a.m. She is visibly nervous—at least to me, because I know the backstory. I make sure not to smile too hard, lest it put more pressure on her. I start my instructions for our presentations and give students the order of presenters. Shayna, as she requested yesterday, is neither the first nor the last one; she’s second.

The first student goes, and his presentation is a bit rambling. Strange to say, but I was hoping for something like that. If Shayna is a perfectionist, maybe the person before her shouldn’t be too perfect. I didn’t plan it this way, but he wasn’t.

It’s Shayna’s turn. I tell everyone—again, at Shayna’s request—to allow her to sit in her seat to present because she wants this to be somewhat informal, more of a conversation. I see a few students roll their eyes and smirk to each other. Do they know?

I tell Shayna she can start whenever, and she launches in. The presentation is a mixture of well-rehearsed speech and reading from the paper in front of her. Occasionally, she grasps for words and pauses for a few seconds, but she keeps going.

Anyone have questions? Two hands go up. She answers their questions, and she seems more relaxed now. We all clap.

For the rest of the class—several more presentations—Shayna mostly keeps her head down. I imagine she feels that edgy relief you do after you’ve done a really stressful thing and your nerves are still frayed but trying to relax. One person’s minor challenge is another’s mountain, one so high the air can be too thin to breathe. Shayna is still breathing. So am I.

After class, she waits until I’m done answering other students’ questions about the final paper. She approaches and sheepishly asks me whether her presentation went long. In fact, she finished a little bit early, so I tell her that she completed it in plenty of time. “Really?” she asks. “Because I felt like I talked way too much.” Her tone sounds relieved.

“Nah,” I assure her. “We all think we talk too much when we give presentations. You did great. If you can, you should do something nice for yourself today. You earned it.” She smiles, thanks me and leaves the classroom.

It’s such a small thing, but small things can be big ones, as well. Shayna knows that her anxiety comes from her obsessing over hypothetical what-ifs that she magnifies until they are as impermeable as prison walls. For me, the past months have been one continuous obsession over the things I am doing and might do wrong. So, why not obsess over other, better, small things? Ones that give you hope?

I make it back to my office, close the door and take a seat at my desk. Other tasks await, but I don’t feel like doing them yet. Instead, I brew another cup of coffee, take a deep breath and think about whatever meaning there is to what just happened. I’ll work later. For now, let me just feel content. I hope Shayna does, too.