Can School Teach Confidence, or Does It Come from Experience? What I Learned Watching a Student Struggle Through a Science Project
I still remember the day I called on Jonah and he looked at me like I’d asked him to solve a stranger’s tax return. The question was simple—we were discussing a short story, and I’d asked why the main character changed her mind near the end. Jonah had finished the reading, and I could see he knew something. His hand had even twitched an inch off the desk before returning to his lap. But when I said his name, his face went carefully blank. “I don’t know,” he said. The class didn’t laugh. They didn’t need to. Jonah had already curled himself into himself, shoulders up, eyes on the floor.
I left him alone that day. For a long time, I left him alone a lot. I told myself I was respecting his quiet nature, but really I was scared of making it worse. Then I started doing the thing teachers do when they think they’re solving confidence: I gave him easy questions. I praised him in private for simple tasks. I said, “I believe in you,” when he turned in a half-finished worksheet. None of it moved him. If anything, he got more careful. He started checking his answers with the student next to him before he’d commit to a thought.
That’s when I began to wonder if confidence isn’t something you can hand to a kid. Maybe it’s something they have to get on their own—by blowing something up and cleaning up the pieces.
I saw what I mean in March, during the sixth-grade science fair. The project was to design a structure that could support a heavy book, using only newspaper, tape, and cardboard. No glue, no scissors, just tearing and rolling and folding. The kids worked in groups of four. Jonah ended up with three kids who were louder than him, especially a boy named Amara, who took charge immediately and started rolling newspaper tubes like she’d been waiting for this exact moment all year.
At first, Jonah was extra. He stood at the edge of the group, holding a roll of tape, waiting to be told where to put it. Amara would gesture, and he’d obey. He didn’t argue, didn’t suggest, didn’t even seem to breathe while she talked. I remembered the twitch of his hand in class and felt a familiar pang of pity. I thought about assigning him a different role—maybe the presentation, since that would force him to talk. But something stopped me. I let it run.
Their first bridge was a disaster. Amara had the genius idea of interlocking tubes like a log cabin, but the tape couldn’t hold the weight, and the whole thing buckled in the middle with a sad crunch halfway through the test. The book hit the floor. Amara groaned. The other two kids, Priya and Dan, immediately started blaming the tape. Then Jonah said something. It was quiet, almost a mumble, but it was his. “The tape isn’t the problem. It’s the base. The middle tubes aren’t vertical enough.”
Amara stopped. She looked at the collapsed bridge, then at Jonah. “What do you mean?”
I felt my chest tighten. This was the moment. If I jumped in, if I said, “That’s a great point, Jonah!” he would have shrunk back into himself. So I didn’t. I just stood at the back of the room, pretending to check on another group. And maybe the silence was the best thing I did all year.
Jonah bent down and picked up the wrecked bridge. He traced the middle section with his finger. “The tubes need to be more upright. Like columns. If we lean them against each other at an angle, they slide. We need vertical.” Apoplectic was the word I wrote in my head. Not because he was brilliant, but because he was speaking. He was wrong about a few things—angle does matter, but so does tension—but he was thinking out loud, and no one was laughing at him.
Amara didn’t say he was right. She said, “Okay, let’s try it.” That was enough. They rebuilt the bridge. Not with a lot of talking, but with Jonah rolling tubes and measuring angles with the edge of his shoe. The second bridge held the book for about four seconds before snapping. The third one held it for the entire minute of the test. It was ugly—lopsided, covered in tape, with one corner sagging. But it worked.
Afterward, I didn’t say, “I’m so proud of you.” That felt too big, too much. Instead, I said to Jonah as he was packing up, “That second bridge failed because the paper columns buckled under compression. Did you notice that?” He nodded. I said, “What would you try differently next time?” He thought, then said, “Maybe double-layer the columns, wrap them twice.”
That was it. No glow on his face, no sudden transformation. But the next week, when I asked a question about the novel we were reading, Jonah’s hand went up. It was a tentative, low hand, but it went up. He gave an answer. It wasn’t fully right—he’d confused a minor character’s motive—but he didn’t say “I don’t know.” When I said, “That’s an interesting idea. What made you think that?” he didn’t shut down. He fumbled, then explained his reasoning. The rest of the class listened, and one girl said, “Oh, I thought he was jealous, but that makes sense too.” Jonah sat down. He looked tired.
What I learned that March wasn’t a lesson I could put on a worksheet. It was about how confidence, real confidence, doesn’t come from praise. It comes from surviving a mistake that you structured and seeing what your own brain did after. Asking Jonah to give a speech would have been me forcing him to face a fear. That might have helped, but only if he’d been ready. Instead, he faced a different fear—the fear of being wrong in front of his peers—and he did it in a context where being wrong was expected. No one builds a working bridge on the first try. Failure was part of the assignment.
So what can school actually do? I think we can create the conditions. We can design moments where the stakes are low enough that kids can afford to fail, but the task is real enough that they have to think. We can hold back our own hands when something is about to collapse. I’ve started doing that more. When a group is stuck, I don’t walk over and fix it. I ask, “What do you think is going wrong here?” and then I stand there, silent, until someone answers. It’s uncomfortable. It’s the most uncomfortable part of my job.
I’ve also changed my phrases. Instead of saying “Good job” at the end of a project, I’ll say, “Which part was harder than you expected?” That gets kids talking about struggle, not achievement. Instead of praising speed, I praise persistence. “You kept trying even after the first one collapsed. What made you decide to revise instead of giving up?” It’s not magic, but it’s something. It tells kids that their effort was visible and that their mistakes were useful.
But I still don’t know if that means school can teach confidence. Jonah still hesitates when I call on him for a hard question. He still glances at amara before raising his hand for a literature discussion. He’s not a changed person. He’s a kid who has one more piece of experience under his belt—one moment where his voice mattered and the world didn’t end.
Maybe that’s all confidence is. Not a personality trait, but a pile of memories. You keep adding to the pile—a bridge that held, a wrong answer that wasn’t the end of the world, a hand that stayed up after it wavered—and eventually, you have enough to lean on. School can’t hand that to a child. But it can stop getting in the way of them building it.
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