When I was eight, I moved to a new primary school. I’d spent the summer holidays writing an appeal to my mum, putting forward an argument for staying at the old school – that I loved – rather than starting at this strange new school. But to no avail. September came and I found myself in a new classroom, with a new teacher, surrounded by 30 new faces. As a shy child, this was fairly terrifying. And so when I was asked to stand up and introduce myself, I was trembling.
That first day, as I walked into the school hall for assembly, I didn’t know which hymn book to take so I copied the boy in front of me. When we sat down, cross-legged, on the floor, the head teacher spotted my error. “You were meant to take the blue book, not the green!” she shouted. I hadn’t realised and as a result it meant I messed up the whole line. I felt my cheeks burn as all heads turned to me.
That same head teacher announced in another assembly that I was going to be singing a solo in front of the 300 children I was sat among. I’d had no idea that this was going to happen. She called me up to the front, instructed the piano player to begin and I very reluctantly sang “Cuckoo, cuckoo, pray what do you do…” in a barely audible, high-pitched voice, with a sea of silent children staring up at me. The teacher stood next to the piano, shouting: “Louder! Louder!” But I didn’t know how to project my voice; I couldn’t make it any louder.
On reflection, I wonder if she was trying to exorcise my shyness. She thought that calling out my errors publicly and forcing me to perform, unprepared, in front of an audience, would somehow shake the shyness out of me. But it didn’t. It made me quieter and more withdrawn. I was scared of her and of whatever she might make me do next. And this made me not want to go to school. I developed a nervous cough.
“It’s interesting that we have such an aversion to shyness,” says psychologist Dr Emma Svanberg. “Like other personality traits, it is something that is very much part of who we are – and has a good evolutionary basis. We can’t all be explorers; some of us have to make sure the children are safe. …….