Can School Teach Confidence, or Is It Learned Through Experience? A Parent’s Perspective
The plastic chairs in our daughter’s school conference room were the same orange they’d used when I was a kid, which I noticed because I needed something to stare at besides the science worksheet Mrs. Alvarez was sliding across the table. “Lily can do the work,” she said, tapping the paper. “She knows these answers. But she won’t raise her hand. She looks at me and I can see she’s got it, and then she just stops.”
At home, Lily was not a quiet child. She staged full productions for her younger brother. She argued with me about whether dinosaurs had feathers and once corrected our neighbor’s father about the speed of sound. But put her in a classroom with thirty kids and fluorescent lights, and she shrank. She let other children answer. She asked to use the bathroom. She became a spectator in her own education.
Mrs. Alvarez suggested we do rehearsal presentations at home. “Let her stand on a chair, treat it like a stage,” she said. “She just needs more practice at being the center of attention.” We tried it. Lily stood on the dining room chair, looked at me, my husband, and her brother, and said, “This is stupid,” then went to her room. And honestly, I understood her. Practicing being watched doesn’t make you braver. It just makes you more aware of being watched.
So when Lily’s class got the “passion project” assignment a few weeks later, I expected another battle. The assignment was simple: pick anything you want to learn, and make something that teaches us about it. My first thought was that Lily would pick something easy and do the bare minimum, the way she approached everything attached to a grade that year.
She picked stop-motion animation. That was a surprise, since the only animation she’d ever seen was in commercials. She drew a storyboard on notebook paper with a pencil that needed sharpening. She made a turtle and a frog out of construction paper and decided they would argue about whether the moon is made of cheese. I don’t know where she got the idea, but she was glued to the kitchen table on a Saturday morning while her brother tried to get her to go outside.
Then it got hard. The figures kept falling over. The lighting changed whenever a cloud passed the window. Her phone’s camera was held to a stack of books with a hair elastic, and it kept sliding. I watched her get quiet in the way I hated—the pre-meltdown quiet. She said, “This is taking forever.” She swept the whole thing into a pile. She said she wanted to do volcanoes instead.
We let her quit for a day. That part is important, I think. We didn’t launch into a pep talk. My husband just made pasta and asked her what was wrong with the frog. She said the frog wouldn’t stand up. He said, “What if it had a stand?” and went back to the stove. The next morning she made a little base for the frog out of cardboard from a cereal box. She was back at the table before breakfast.
Over the next week she worked on it after school, the way kids do when something catches hold. She re-shot one scene eleven times until the frog’s leg didn’t flicker. She talked to me about the “problem,” which was how to make a flying bird when her hand was always visible. And somewhere in that mess of construction paper and broken animations, something took hold that had nothing to do with the classroom.
Her teacher called it “taking ownership.” That phrase didn’t quite land with me then. It sounded like teacher language. But watching Lily, I saw what it meant. She was in charge. No one was checking her work. She was answering her own questions. The mistakes weren’t embarrassing. They were just information about what to try next.
The day of the presentations, she was quieter than usual, but not panicked. She set up her phone and pressed play on her two-minute film. The frog and the turtle argued about the moon. The animation was janky, the lighting was bad, and the bird looked like a paper hat with feathers, but the class laughed in the way you laugh with someone, not at them. Mrs. Alvarez was watching, nodding.
But the moment that mattered wasn’t the presentation. It was after, when the boy next to her asked how she made the figures move. Lily showed him. Then she showed the boy behind her. And at the end of the day, Mrs. Alvarez told me, “She stayed in at recess to help Marcus make his own frog. She was explaining the stand thing. She had the patience for it.”
I think that’s where confidence actually lives.
It wasn’t the standing at the front of the room. It was the being the expert. The having done it. She knew how to do a thing that other people hadn’t done yet. And when you know a thing, you don’t have to perform knowing it. You just explain it.
Mrs. Alvarez’s class had a “growth mindset” corner by the door with a poster about “the power of yet.” Lily rolled her eyes at me when I mentioned it. The school tried hard to teach confidence directly—affirmations, encouragement journals, awards for participation. None of it did much for Lily. What moved her was the experience: the doing, the failing, the fixing, the doing again. The school gave her the assignment and the timeline, but the confidence was built somewhere else. It was built in her hands, in the cereal box cardboard, in the failed shots and the fixed ones.
That said, I’m not sure it works all at once or for everyone. Lily still won’t raise her hand sometimes. She still freezes when someone calls on her first. There was a spelling bee last month she trembled through, and I considered asking her about it later but didn’t. There are days I think we’ve made progress, and days she comes home silent and goes straight to my bed to lie next to me, watching something on her phone, not saying a thing.
I don’t think confidence is a thing you get once and keep forever. I think it’s more like a weather pattern. It moves. But she’s learning, through experience, which is the only route I’ve seen work. She spent a Saturday throwing construction paper across the kitchen counter and cried briefly over a leg that wouldn’t stand up. Then she fixed it. And the next week, at recess, she was patient with Marcus in a way I’d never seen her be patient at school.
I hope she keeps forgetting that she was supposed to be shy.
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