One of my students from last semester came to visit me yesterday. He was in my junior-level Scientific and Technical Presentations class last semester. It’s a class with a relatively high assignment load, because I believe you learn to present by presenting, not by reading about presenting or by watching me constantly give presentations on presenting. I talk a lot for the first three weeks or so of the semester, and then they start talking. After they all talk, which takes at least a week, then I start talking again. We alternate back and forth as we move through the assignments until the last three weeks of the semester, when they do all the talking.

This means they give 5 or 6 speeches in front of the class. One of those is an impromptu. All of this makes it a rather difficult course for my students who are natural introverts. I’m sympathetic to them, because I used to be one of them. We spend a lot of time talking in my office hours and after class about how they can work on calming down and gaining confidence. But ultimately, the only way out is through.

This student was one of my introverts. On top of that, he was dealing with the fact that English is not his native language. He arrived from east Asia a few years ago, and while his English is actually very good, he's still very self-conscious about his accent and his grasp on American culture. He made it through, though — learned to look at the audience, keep his hands out of his pockets, stop shaking. Learned to speak up and speak conversationally. We were still working on how to to relate to American audiences when the semester finished, but he had made some progress there. He did all of this while carrying a very heavy senior load.

He came to tell me that one of his classes this semester required him to give speeches too, and that he could talk now in front of his peers without being afraid. The biggest thing, though, was that he was no longer afraid to raise his hand when he had a question. All this time, he was too afraid of talking in public to raise his hand. Imagine being an introvert, new in a country, learning the language, assimilating to a foreign education system, not understanding how things work, and being too shy to raise your hand. For three years.

I can’t really tell you how it makes me feel to hear him say that he learned that in my class. All this time I thought I’d be happy if they learned to present technical information to nonexpert audiences, or to use analogy and metaphor properly, or to do a five-person presentation without killing each other. Turns out that I couldn’t be more thrilled that someone simply gained enough confidence to raise their hand in class when they need to.