notes from the quiet kid

It’s been nice how, since college, people have equated my quietness with deep thinking. They haven’t always been so generous. I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s better than the alternatives, this latest in a series of other people’s comments about my quietness. Anyone who has been called "quiet" or "shy" knows what I’m talking about:

“How’d you get so shy?”

“She's just stuck-up.”

“Why don’t you speak up?”

“Why don’t you like anyone?”

“Can’t you say anything? Say something for us.”

Why quiet folks are singled out for this interrogation is beyond me, given that we probably constitute a near-majority. Maybe it’s just to give more garrulous folks something to talk about when they run out of anecdotes. I’m regularly awe-struck by how much people can talk. We build walls with our talk, and whenever there is the slightest chink to be filled in the wall—a speaker’s pause for breath, the few seconds between songs on a CD—we spackle it with talk. We spackle over places that don’t need it, where there is really no room for extra conversation at all: movies, classes, concerts, crowded & noisy hallways. It’s as if silence is a thing to be feared and avoided at all costs—and silent people pose a problem to be solved. I’ve always wondered why being talkative was so highly rated. I’ve also wondered what my answer to people’s intrusive questions would be. So here goes.

***

Maybe people unconsciously think of talk as a campfire built with the last match—you can’t let it go out, because you could never get it started again. Maybe, thousands of years ago, a group of our ancestors developed their grunts into words and began a conversation. They liked it. Being able to confirm their observations was comforting( “is the sky what you would call ‘blue?’ Or is it closer to ‘azure?’”). Being able to speak a thought helped alleviate uncomfortable and dull rumination (“I’m anxious about our dwindling supply of boar’s meat.”). Their fear of losing the conversation soon transformed it into a curse. It became an obligation, a thing to be constantly tended to. They could no longer go for solitary walks without being accused of dodging their duty to keep the conversational flame burning. They couldn’t follow their own train of thought for too long without periodically forcing it into words. Thus their thoughts became less profound, less unique, less interesting. They had to endure each other’s talk and its increasingly limited originality (“Look at that blue sky.” “You like boar’s meat? So do I!”).

Maybe we inherit this burden when we are born. Our parents rush us towards our first word and then announce it with pride to anyone who will listen. We are inured to the drone of the human voice by hordes of relatives gooing in our faces, we are trained to blather by the T.V. Though we’ve forgotten the original intentions or the value of this never-ending talk, it’s become instinctual in most of us. Children who are slow to talk, or who prefer sounds other than their own voice, inherit the plight of Neanderthal kids who didn’t like to hunt, of Spartan children with delicate constitutions—threatening to become burdens, selfish solitary walkers living on the welfare of talker’s hard work, they are exiled. Questions like, “Why are you so shy?” “Why won’t you talk?” are well-intentioned, but anyone who has heard these questions has felt and probably retreated from their inherent aggression and accusation. In school, it's not long before a quiet kid loses his or her name and becomes known only as “the quiet kid,” one to be subtly shunned. She’s pretty easy to ignore—it’s not like you’re going to miss out on a great joke or anything.

Maybe not.

***

Here’s where it’s worth really thinking about why we quiet kids don’t talk much. Here’s also where I get personal. I’m not quiet because I’m too busy philosophizing to speak. It’s not that I’m stupid, and it’s not that I’m smart. It’s not because I don’t find people interesting, or because I don’t want to know them or be known by them. The best explanation I can think of is sheer exhaustion. The amount of mental editing I have to do in order to feel safe in a conversation is grueling. Maintaining these conversations is exactly like laboring over an essay in school—and even if you do like to write, you couldn’t do it all day, every day.

This editing that dries up the conversation—this must be something that many of us who live on the margins do. There are places where a conversation must not go for us, because we fear that it is the territory in which our difference will be revealed, or spotlighted. This, we fear, will make people uncomfortable, exceedingly polite, and ultimately cut off from us. Camaraderie is ruled out, real connections are closed down, and courtesy takes the place of sincerity. In order to avoid this, we have to be careful in a casual conversation. And conversation being what it is—winding roads of free-association—it’s a minefield. Editing your way through it is a rigorous mental exercise: Anticipate the possible paths of every possible topic of conversation. Home in on the ones that have little chance of triggering a question that might lead to scary territory, then speak. It takes too long, and it leaves us with pretty boring, or pretty obscure, topics.

When we first discover the feeling of a crush, our little hearts give us volumes to talk about. This might be the moment that I began editing—finding myself in the awkward position of having that first, terrible crush on someone who was out of bounds, I silenced myself in those conversations. Perhaps I could have been very brave; perhaps other children are very brave, talking and enduring the playground consequences, but I was not brave. I became quiet. I thought about my crushes as much as anyone, but I never spoke the feelings, and therefore I was not a player in the most frequent conversations among friends. The thing is, it’s got to be nearly impossible for pre-teen girls to talk for more than thirty seconds without the conversation veering inevitably towards boys:


“Did you watch The Dukes of Hazzard last night?”

“Of course. Who do you think is cuter: Bo or Luke?”


“Let’s lip sync ‘Islands in the Stream’ again.”

“Okay. I’m going to dedicate it to Chris Bonino this time. Who are you dedicating it to?”


“Can we watch a movie on your Betamax player?”

“Oooh—yeah. I want to watch Tom Cruise dance in his underwear some more. Isn't he gorgeous?”


Figuring this out, eventually, I began to manufacture crushes on the athletic and good-looking boys, pinning my feelings for the athletic and good-looking girls onto Kevins and Christophers and Shanes. This gave me things to talk about, and people to dedicate lip sync performances to. For a while. As my friends grew out of the all-talk, no action phase, they increasingly gathered deeds to back up their talk—first kisses, tacky but symbolic jewelry, visits to each metaphorical base—and my fountain of talk quickly ran dry. I had no experiences to describe, I didn’t particularly wish for those experiences, and I did my best editing in hopes of preventing the conversation from going to the place where I admitted either fact.

By ninth grade, I had edited myself into virtual silence. It became too much trouble to participate in most conversations. Not wanting to talk to anyone, I took refuge in another identity: the nerd. Being naturally shy and dorky, not to mention having a string of profoundly bad haircuts, I played the role masterfully. I was helped by Molly Ringwald, of course, who added a bit of glamour to the condition of nerdy datelessness. I had found a well-trodden, socially acceptable, she’ll-grow-out-of-it territory. I wasn’t asked to explain myself or my silence, and as long as I was scribbling popular boys’ initials in hearts on my notebooks, I avoided being asked about it. Inevitably, friends grew out of their phases and gathered their deeds. For my part, I maintained the bad haircuts, but they turned out to be thin armor, really.

Throughout high school, I actively avoided talking outside of the classroom. I’d seen what was done to kids who didn’t edit themselves, and I much preferred being called “the quiet girl” to becoming a victim of my conformity-enforcing peers. Besides, a touch of black lipstick and a Morrissey t-shirt made my silence look like an accessory to a fashion statement. It made me look outspoken. Out spoken. True enough: if talk was a race, I had been out spoken, fair and square.

Eventually, I was filtered out as something more than just nerdy, not quite abject enough to be gothic. Coming out, I was shocked to find myself in good company—not the creepy gym teachers or girls with rat tails I’d imagined would be my only friends. It felt good—it felt unbelievable—to speak, unabashedly, without fear. I could talk, and talk freely, and stop editing—and I did, for a while. I did my best to fill any space I walked into with my words.

***

Now, I am a school teacher. And I am back, full circle, to painstaking editing of myself, to retreating from personal conversations in the lounge, to being the quiet kid on the faculty. My personal life doesn’t belong in the classroom, of course, and I’m more than happy to keep the two well apart. Yet I’m exhausted, again, by the editing I do, talking to colleagues, fearing gossip mills, parents' anger, the ugliness that might follow if I let anything slip. I’m afraid, again, of well-intentioned questions:

“When are you going to have children of your own?”

“Don’t you have a husband yet?”

“Just haven’t found the right man, huh?”

I tell myself that this is a necessary part of doing what I’ve chosen to do, that this is not the battle I am here to fight. I am a good teacher, and that is my armor now. I have answers to the questions, even if I don’t say them aloud. Still, I’m surprised to find myself quiet again.

querencia

Jo's Coffee, South Congress Street, Austin

Meeting a town is like meeting a person; sometimes you just click. Small, serendipitous things that happen when you click with a town, as if the place and its population have conspired to make you feel content there, welcome.

Austin has a talent for offering this kind of ethereal warm welcome. Sometimes the gesture is elaborate—as it was last spring, when Jo’s Easter Pet Parade welcomed us to town as if it were specially designed to amuse the hell out of us. A drum major and a sousaphone player in musty thrift-store uniforms led a proud line of two dozen costumed pets. Their inordinately proud and unselfconscious owners marched, smiling, and I couldn't tell how much they were serious, how much tongue-in-cheek. They stalled four lanes of traffic, a testament to the power of silliness in this place.

More often, as this morning, the welcome is nothing more than a very friendly and instantly warm conversation with a stranger—where he parks his baby right next to you and walks to the counter to get napkins (this makes you feel awfully good—it tells you that in this place, you’re not suspect or freakish, but kind and decent; the world at large and you agree about your character, here—it’s the ultimate gesture of a stranger’s trust in your goodness). This, after your eyes met and you gave your standard smile—you imagine that it’s shy-but-sufficiently-friendly, but you’ve never seen what it actually looks like—and he replies with a beam and a “how’s it going?” that is actually, astonishingly, followed by a pause indicating that he hopes for a real answer. You remind yourself that you have to get out of the habit of replacing “hey” with a “how’s it going,” that lacks this pause and eye contact. So he parks the baby, asking your indulgence, which you gladly give and feel very friendly and gracious for doing. You make lame-but-nice comments about the baby, he asks you what you’re reading; just as he’s spooning applesauce into the baby’s mouth, his order is called out and set on the counter; you offer to get it for him. He refuses, but does a double take and introduces himself, offering a hand to shake.

This is a gesture that I love and that I need to master: not the double-take, the warm and authentic introduction. The gesture that tells a person she has moved beyond small talk and into the possibility of genuine fondness, that she is the kind of person you’d like to know. Giving your name like a gift to some stranger, pulling them a little bit closer to you, sticking out your hand to be shaken. It’s powerful, perhaps because it is the first risk in polite conversation between strangers: the hand could be refused, one’s name withheld. Maybe your offer to get the latte was the first risk, maybe that’s why it struck him and prompted the introduction. Either way, after that point, you feel comfortable going back to reading instead of chatting, knowing that you no longer need to be polite, only real—speaking when you have something worth saying, or asking questions that stem from genuine curiosity. Soon, with applesauce finished, latte fetched, stroller packed, Tobin & son were gone. Nothing terribly profound, just Austin saying, “I’m glad you’re here—” which is profound enough, really.

Thanks, Freetaco, for the photo of the exact spot I'm talking about (it was at www.flickr.com)! What're the chances?

LEAP into oblivion

I'm trying to type quietly so I don't distract the five students who are hunched in too-small desks over test booklets. Those bubble-in answer sheets must look like Magic Eye optical illusions to them at this point, three days into this I-LEAP test. My 9th graders with learning disabilities and mild mental disabilities are giving everything they've got to this test. All week I have been fighting off the bleak knowledge that it won't be good enough. All week I have been searching for ways to protect them from realizing the same. I preach reality and the real world all the time to my students; now, suddenly, I have my fingers in the dam, trying to prevent reality from leaking into this room.

These five students have worked very, very hard this year. Between them, they have fewer than 5 absences. That's including the young lady who has lived in six different towns since the hurricane. Four of them have done their homework faithfully since August. All of them are active participants in their classes. Several of them have gone from being nearly expelled last year to having a clean discipline record this year. The others have never been suspended. The point I'm making is that these are five good students, five kids who have held up their end of the education bargain.The other side of this reality is that none of these students are going to pass this test, nor will they pass it in 10th grade or 11th grade. They will not get a high school diploma at the end of their 12 years of good faith and hard work. They may or may not get a "certificate of achievement" instead--a piece of paper not recognized by colleges or most employers--depending on a state decision in the coming months. Their parents have signed papers acknowledging this, and the students have been told about it, coated in plenty of sugar so that the abject injustice of it doesn't fully sink in. If it did, they would probably stop coming to school--and how could we persuade them otherwise? As much effort as it takes for them to do what they struggle to do--read and write--every single day, what is the incentive, the reward, the carrot at the end of the stick? When it comes to students in special education, we only have the stick. We believe that they will fail, so we don't even have a meaningful reward for those who make it. We prod and we preach, we teach the same standards and we give the same tests, but we expect failure, and it's hardly surprising when we get it.

You probably think I'm pessimistic and cynical, and that I have given up on my students. I believe--and desperately hope--that this is not true. I have not given up on their ability to excel, to grow by giant steps, to build fulfilling lives, to be leaders in their communities, to leave their mark on the world. That's what we work toward every day. These students have pulled themselves from a 1st or 2nd grade reading level up to a 4th or 5th in the past 8 months; that is remarkable growth that results from remarkable effort. A test on a high school level, however, is just not within their reach, yet.

I'm not blaming the test, and I'm not saying that students with special needs shouldn't be held to high expectations or tested. The problems are farther- and deeper-reaching than that: The problem is that they are promoted to 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade without their 2nd grade reading level ever changing. The problem is that they do the same worksheets from the same textbook for all 4 years of high school science, that neither they nor their teachers have access to a reading or math program that meets their needs, that their "Individual Education Plans" all look the same, that they are bored or confused in most of their classes, and have been for the past 10 years, that they have never been asked to read a novel or write an essay, never been taught algebra, never used the scientific method to investigate a real question. The problem is that I'm sitting here writing on a blog with a circulation of 4, instead of raising my voice and fighting. The problem is that nobody knows what to do about it.

The kids are still hunched over their test booklets. They have brand-new, neatly sharpened pencils lined up next to them. They have packed granola bars and little bottles of water in their booksacks for sustenance, as if they are on a long and demanding hike. They are, I suppose, and I'm their guide--and I have no idea where this trail leads or whether we are anywhere near the right path. Every year during testing week, I can't help but feel like we've been here before. We've spent the year walking in a very long circle, and we are lost in these woods.