#classroomthoughts

[persimmonsrain]

Permission to speak: Navigating fear in the classroom

After five months together, three days a week, laughter shared, group tasks done, vocabulary games played, I thought we’d reached a kind of ease. A comfort.

And with some students, it’s there. A quiet honesty, a readiness to share thoughts, questions, even small confessions.

But others, some of the most cheerful, even, surprised me.

In a recent discussion, I noticed how carefully they chose their words. Not because of the language barrier, but something else. A hesitation. A look toward me, not for vocabulary help, but for permission. I realized they were afraid. Not of their classmates, but of me, their teacher. Not afraid of punishment, but of judgment.

That discovery stilled me.

I’d like to think I’ve built a safe space. I try. I listen. I laugh with them. But safety, I’m learning, isn’t just what we offer, it’s also what each student carries, or doesn’t, when they enter the room.

I am thinking about the deep-rooted fears that follow children into learning spaces. How many children learn early not to ask questions, not to speak freely. That it’s safer to be quiet than to risk being wrong. Even when the classroom changes, the fear doesn’t always leave. It travels with them. Sometimes all the way into adulthood.

In The Philosophical Child, Jana Mohr Lone writes:

"During early childhood, most children are wide open to the mysteries that pervade human life and are curious about the most basic framework of human experience, including such subjects as the meaning of being alive, the complexity of identity, the nature of friendship and love, how to live good lives, and whether we can know anything at all."

And I wonder now… how many of my students are still carrying an earlier silence? How many of their questions are sitting quietly, waiting to be invited out?

A language class isn’t merely about seeking grammatical correctness; it’s about the "why," why a sentence sounds the way it does, why we structure our thoughts the way we do in another language. I want to ignite curiosity, to spark reasoning, and to allow my students the space to wonder why language works as it does. It's not just about rules, it’s about the joy of discovery, of figuring out the patterns, and the connections we can make to our own worlds.

I don’t have answers today. Only this question I’m still holding: How do we help someone feel truly safe to think out loud, when their fear was planted long before we met them?

[localinda]

"I don't think if this nearly as much as I shouls, but goddamn am I lucky to be white AND a man." #sketch #classroomthoughts