I mostly identify as awkward.

I highlighted the heck out of this week's Palmeri chapter. I got totally hyped up about how engaging, creative, and open-ended his assignment ideas are, and I marked all of them for later reference. But then I started thinking about how 15-year-old me would have felt about these assignments.

If you take my present-day awkwardness and multiply it by about five thousand, you’ll have some idea of how awkward I was at fifteen.

Talking in front of other people was really, really painful. Writing – quietly, in isolation – felt much safer.

I still feel that way. The only difference is that, back then, I didn't have a 20-year accumulation of awkward moments to ruminate about.

In eighth grade English, we had to research a topic of our choice and give a speech about it. At the time, I was really into dreams. I kept a dream diary and had a dream dictionary on my nightstand, and it seemed like a good chance to learn more. I threw myself into my research, where I had my first encounter with Sigmund Freud. I had never heard of him, so I didn’t know how to say his name.

When I got to ninth grade, my mom suggested that drama would be a fun elective. I was painfully bad. Everything I did on the stage felt wrong. Improv Fridays were the worst. I was not funny and I never knew what to say. In the end-of-the-semester class production, another girl and I were cast as gangsters named Rough and Ready. We had exactly one line each. 

When I was a senior, I took English through the local junior college. The professor really liked a piece of short fiction I wrote. He asked if I would read it for the class. I was horrified and said no, thank you. He asked if someone else could read it for the class. I said OK. Another student volunteered. She read it very badly.

I would have given anything to have been invisible.

Anything.

Even now, talking in front of other people can be difficult, especially when it’s an extemporaneous group situation. Zoom classes are particularly painful. I have to majorly psych myself up to say anything. And more often than not, the experience is…awkward.

(Dear colleagues, you guys are all really, really nice and really, really smart. The above is more of an exaggeration of my inner dialogue rather than a reflection of reality, and none of those little people are supposed to resemble any anyone.)

With my family or close friends, it’s another story. I homeschooled my kids for a few years and discovered a hidden talent for reading aloud. I do all the voices and everything. It is the one thing I did really, really well as a homeschooler. 

I like sitting quietly. Alone. So the thought that writing (and heaven forbid, reading) is somehow a vocal, collaborative, community activity is…hard. The solitary (for me, anyway) nature of reading and writing is exactly why I love them so much.

So my question is – how can we honor the introverts? I am completely on board with the idea that “drama is the perfect place to begin the study of rhetoric” (64), and I honor the fact that many people prefer vocal composition over writing an alphabetic text. But when I put my fifteen-year-old self into Palmeri’s classroom and imagine having to “literally perform each other’s scripts” (65), I die a little on the inside. 

Is it okay to add in an option for anonymity and/or privacy with assignments like these? (I say yes.) Or do we need to push awkward kids out into the spotlight for their own good? (I say no.) As a teacher, how do you control for things like stage fright, a preference for privacy, deep insecurity, and debilitating awkwardness? What about the option of working alone, despite the trend towards collaboration? (These are the things I don't know, because I'm not a teacher.)

Palmeri makes a compelling case “that the teaching of writing must necessarily be an auditory art” (52). He’s not wrong – I agree that it’s important that we stop over-privileging alphabetic ways of knowing and add in opportunities for vocal, auditory, and other forms of composition. But as we do, can we please remember the awkward kids?

[Credit due to Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, whose style I love and have shamelessly (tried) to copy here. Reading her webcomic makes me laugh so hard that I think I'm going to pee.]