Minimizing Writing Apprehension in the Learner-Centered Classroom

Abstract

am an apprehensive writer because I was born poor, rural, and female. We had no running water, no bathroom, no heat upstairs. We burned coal when we had money and corn cobs when we didn’t. I went to a one-room school with my big sister and little brother. When I was nine, I defeated a seventh grader who couldn’t spell conscientious and won the all-school spelling bee. For me, fear and apprehension were never associated with school until one day when Miss Ball told me not to answer so many questions because the other children would begin to dislike me. What she didn’t understand was my feeling of inferiority because of my poverty. The only way I could get positive attention, I thought, was to be as smart as possible. I had been ashamed of my hand-me-down clothes and broken-down shoes, but never of my ability to do well in school. But I decided I could be smart without letting anybody know or hurting anybody’s feelings. The first chance I got I chose a seat in the back of the room, where I twisted my braids and sat on my hands when I knew the answer to an eighth-grade science question. I became apprehensive in everything. My confidence faded little by little, though my grades remained high. I had lost what Annie Rogers, Harvard psychologist, calls “ordinary courage” (1993, 265).

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