Oral participation
Just let quiet children be quiet!
© k_samurkas / Shutterstock
More participation, please! Antje Kunstmann grew up with this sentence, now her daughters feel the same way, and she asks herself: Why are they allowed to quieter children not just be what they are?
The other day it happened again: "You could get involved more" was the response to a project that our eleven-year-old daughter and her class had been working on for several weeks. It is the sentence that I heard most often in my school days. It was in every certificate; my mother came back with it from every parenting meeting. And now he's with me again. Since our eldest daughter started school over twelve years ago and then child two, three, four, it has been in every certificate and is formulated in every learning development interview, as it is now called. The only difference from before: We parents no longer have to pass on the teacher's message, because the children are now there themselves.
Why not just accept the child for who they are?
It is amazing how tirelessly the desire for more oral participation is put forward. And perhaps even admirable when, even after years, people still believe that it can be fulfilled. Doesn't this mean that there is a firm conviction that there is still undiscovered potential in every child that you just have to tease out somehow? I say no. Not recognizing a child's personality, but wanting to turn it into something else, is pedagogical overconfidence.
There are people who would like to communicate a lot more, but who don't dare to, and suffer from this fear. That is not nice, and they should be helped, not least by teachers. But apart from that, there are simply quieter people and those who are more communicative. Whether you are introverted or extroverted is one of the fairly stable personality traits. I'm more of the former, so are my children, no matter how different they are otherwise – and that's perfectly fine. I want them to grow up with this knowledge and not keep hearing that they should represent something that they are not.
A class full of Franks?
Last but not least, a class, just like any other group, simply does not work if everyone talks equally a lot. One of our high school daughter has a boy in her class, let's call him Frank. Frank has something to say about everything; as soon as he has finished speaking, he raises his arm again. When our daughter has online lessons and I overhear it, it sounds like a podcast for a long time with two interlocutors: teacher and Frank. Do educators really dream of a class full of Franks? Two would blow up any class. Actually, one is already unbearable.
It likes the so-called social homophilia, in other words, because you particularly like people who are similar to you, and I actually find people very likeable who are more likely to talk when they really have something to say and otherwise listen (a skill that not everyone is given and cannot be valued enough). To put it this way: I hardly know people who not only talk a lot, but also do a lot of clever things. Incidentally, Frank is not one of them. The quantity and quality of verbal contributions are generally inversely proportional to one another.
Sometimes, however, I have concerns that people like Frank will not only get better grades in school now (because, unlike me, oral participation is much more important today), but that it will often be easier later than my daughters. There are now many studies and books about the strengths of introverts – and also about the fact that it is not easy for the breastfeeding to show them, especially in a noisy and louder world. Wouldn't it be nice if at least the school created the conditions for this?
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