Kate recently
posted about how difficult it can be to ask for help and/or accept help. Naturally this made me think of my completely dysfunctional relationship with school.
I was never one to ask for much help, even from my teachers. Part of this stemmed from what was termed shyness by relatives but, in retrospect, was more like extreme social anxiety. Yeah, I know, hard to believe. My reluctance to ask teachers for help turned to refusal after fourth grade. I remember that I didn't quite understand something on a worksheet, so I decided to go ask my teacher. There were several other kids waiting by her desk when I left my desk and walked towards the front of the room. In front of everyone, she said "Katy, go back to your desk. Whatever it is you can figure it out yourself."* Way to be helpful. I was mortified and did as she said. I never asked her for help after that. I didn't ask other teachers for help, either. This went on all the way through college. I never went to professors' office hours - I thought they would think I was stupid if I went to them with questions. I should be smart enough to figure things out myself, right? Obviously, I know better now, but I never understood that my professors were there to help me in this way. And I attended a very teaching-focused liberal arts college.
At the same time, I never wanted anyone to call attention to how smart I was or wasn't.
Eighth grade: Very few of my friends are in the same track as I am (college prep), so few that we are rarely in classes together. I'm in a language arts/advanced vocab course - the kind where students learn about words roots, etc. I only raised my hand to answer questions in this class when/if the rest of the students (who, by the way, didn't think I was all that smart) didn't answer and there was that long uncomfortable silence. The teacher wrote a word on the board as we were learning "ology" - theology - and of course no one raised a hand. So I did and answered correctly. Instead of just moving along, the teacher had to make a comment about how I have such a large vocabulary because I read so much. There was murder in my classmates' eyes. That class quickly became a very uncomfortable place for me for the rest of the term. My teacher did me no favors by singling me out this way.
Almost everyone else in that class was the good student-type, something I've really never been. I didn't suck up to my teachers. By then I had partially tuned out a lot of school and I would later tune out even more of it. Anyway, since I didn't play the game like the others (much to my parents' frustration), a lot of them didn't think I was in their league and thought they could make me see where my place "really" was. And here I am writing a dissertation when some of them didn't make it through college. Hmmmmm.
Even without stuff like this going on, school was never a good fit for me. Despite my reluctance to ask for help, I was a much better college student than high school or middle school student. It took me a little while to figure out how to be a student, but I eventually did and was happier for it.
But, I'm still not very good at asking for help. I feel like I have to figure out everything for myself or what I do won't be good enough or won't be mine. Intellectually, I know that this is ridiculous, but it's hard to change habits like these.
*I've tried to figure out why she responded to me this way while she was willing to help the other students. I can only think of one possibility. A little earlier in the term she had been reading
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to our class. One day, she read a section in which a character mentions having a little "'baccy(sp)". She told the class that she didn't know what that meant. I, having read the book before, raised my hand and told her that I thought the character was talking about tobacco.
Lesson learned: Don't indicate that you know more than the teacher or have better reading comprehension/decoding skills than the teacher. It can only cause trouble.
