Hacker News Reader

Comment by glenda | Hacker News Reader

Speaking in front of people and working in groups are extremely valuable skills, even for introverts. This is like saying that people who don't enjoy physical activity should skip P.E. class -- in both cases there is both a developmental and health component at play.

I am extremely introverted, but have no problem speaking to groups of people or even working in groups. I've always felt that my voice has been heard and respected because when I do talk people know that I have definitely thought it through. However, there are always those people who expect you to act exactly as they do.

The actual problem seems to be that kids aren't really taught to hold respect for one another. Because of that once you exhibit any kind of quirky behavior you become the target of joking/teasing and other forms of alienation that may only amplify your initial weirdness.

View on HN

I'm also very introvert, and find that speaking in front of people feels nothing like being forced to interact closely with people to me. I held the commencement speech for new students at university, in front of thousands and a TV crew, and everyone wondered how I was able to keep so calm. And I went around participating in political school debates during the election my senior year of high school and couldn't care less that there were audiences of hundreds of rowdy teenagers.

The thing is, one of the things that is stressful to me about social situations is that I have to work to read the situations, and work to ensure I respond "correctly", and work to engage in chitchat and all the other stuff that creates social bonds, and that I tend to overly negatively interpret social reactions.

To stay calm when speaking to large groups, on the other hand, is then very easy: I just don't invest the effort in dealing with the social stuff. It never hits me that it's something worth being nervous about, because I've just "switched off", and worry about whatever subject I'll be talking about, which I'm generally certain about, not least because I have a very easy time learning a manuscript, and I know I'm effectively insulated from everything that makes close social situations exhausting.

I strongly believe that introversion in social settings and ability to speak to groups are affected by very different things.

Like you I'm also usually fine with working in groups, for the same reasons: There's usually not that many social cues to worry about, and when they are, they tend to be more focused and less effort to deal with, at least for some time.

"Speaking in front of people and working in groups are extremely valuable skills, even for introverts."

Yes -- and the problem is that very few places actually teach these skills to introverts. Rather, you are supposed to already know them.

"This is like saying that people who don't enjoy physical activity should skip P.E. class -- in both cases there is both a developmental and health component at play."

It's funny you should bring up PE here, because the same mechanism is usually at play there. PE classes don't focus on the kids who are bad at sports. They focus on those who are already good at it, for whatever reason.

"It's funny you should bring up PE here, because the same mechanism is usually at play there. PE classes don't focus on the kids who are bad at sports. They focus on those who are already good at it, for whatever reason."

It's been a frustration of mine for a while that P.E. stands for Physical Education, but rarely are kids educated about exercise and nutrition. Kids don't learn about exercise increasing endorphins that, in turn, elevate mood. They don't learn about cardiovascular conditioning and how it helps with some asthmatic conditions. Forget about anyone mentioning the role of stretching in our health as we age. Nutrition is neglected entirely, but learning about "carb bombing" and its effect on mood would do a lot of good. Instead they throw a ball around and get out aggression (or try to hide from the kids who are getting out aggression).

I read an interview with Anne Hathaway which discussed her training for the Catwoman role. Prior to that role, she hated exercise and thought that just because she was skinny, she was therefore healthy. (Let's ignore that she admitted in another interview to being a heavy smoker for a good portion of her life.) Once her trainer got her past the initial strain of conditioning muscles, she found she liked how she felt when she exercised. I think a lot of people developed a dislike of exercise early in their lives due to an association of exercise with team sports, which developed in PE classes. I think it needs to change.

> due to an association of exercise with team sports

And intrinsic competitiveness. I remember from my school PE classes (UK) that even distance running was always practiced as a race.

Anyone who runs knows that unless of course you're very elite, your performance vs other people is almost entirely unimportant to you. It's your own personal performance that matters, and this is as true on a solitary training run as it is taking part in a massive 'race' event such as a marathon.

Competing against yourself (trying to improve) is incredibly rewarding in a totally different way to competing against and beating other people. In a solitary sport like running, nobody gets to judge you but you, the motivation and joy that comes from the exercise and fitness improvements is almost entirely internal - to put it bluntly nobody else cares when you shave 5 seconds off your PB, but to you it's a wonderfully satisfying experience.

I always wondered why PE teachers never seemed to approach exercise and sport from this angle. They're really missing a trick as I believe discovering this would really encourage a lot more kids to keep exercising throughout and after school as a result.

As it happened I was always reasonably competent at sport, never the best at anything but good enough to be competitive at all the sports I played (at least vs other amateur kids). So for me it was OK to have a competitive element, but I can completely see that that if sport and exercise is always focused around competition, and a kid is consistently losing at everything they try, that's going to be a huge long-lasting turn off from exercise. Focusing more on 'this is intrinsically fun to do on your own' might change that significantly.

In the United States, in my experience, PE teachers are generally employed primarily as coaches for the schools' sports teams. As a result, they're not especially interested in exercise for its own sake.

Every time I've been in a public school's PE room in the last few years (since I've had my own child) there's been a board on the wall describing what's currently being done at each grade level, and at least some of the time there was information about nutrition. Whenever the kids at my neighboring school are out on the field for PE, they start out by stretching, and the teacher seems to be talking to them about preventing injury and such.

It's not perfect by any means, but it seems reasonably age-appropriate.

I'm glad it's changing. We need to establish in kids' minds that exercise doesn't have to be tedious or scary. People need to see exercise and healthy eating as normal part of life.

Teachers don't really get to teach whatever they want. State's all have standards that must be taught to. These are the standards for PE in Texas:

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter116/ch116c.ht...

Foundations of Personal Fitness is a requirement for all the later gym classes and that has several of the things you are looking for:

(A) explain the relationship between physical fitness and health

(D) compare and contrast health-related and skill-related fitness;

(B) describe physical fitness activities that can be used for stress reduction;

(D) analyze the relationship between sound nutritional practices and physical activity;

etc...

Maybe there are a lot of bad gym teachers (why be a Gym Teacher when you could get paid more to be a Nutritionist?) or maybe some states have less rigorous standards. Or the standards were lower in the past. Or maybe when you were a student you didn't notice the lessons the teacher was trying to teach.

Schools are trying though. Even PE is getting better.

Those standards seem to have come into effect in 1998, although I suspect there were similar requirements prior to that. Speaking as a graduate of a Texas public high school, I'd like to point out that all of those requirements can be covered in that one class in February where the weather is horrible and the internal facilities (gym, auditorium, whatever) have been taken over for some other activity.

In any case, I'm fairly sure I know what lessons the teacher was trying to teach.

When I taught middle school history, I would always sprinkle some time in for in-class silent reading throughout the week. It was always interesting to see that many of the students who were amazingly comfortable in front of the class were unable to sit for 20 minutes and read without blurting something out.

In the same way that it is important to actually teach group work and public speaking skills to introverts, it is also important to teach the opposite to extroverts.

One year at school I had a really good PE teacher, in the first lesson he asked the class what we wanted to do, we all replied that we wanted to do 5-a-side football indoors, he organized it. For that year nobody brought sick notes, everybody was there every week and got really fit. After a month or two he started occasionally suggesting other things we might like to try, similar non-contact sports that wouldn't scare off our group of smart boys, by this point we trusted his advice and were happy to try the new things too.

How to you teach public speeching and team working? Except by just forcing people to practice them, do you know any other method?

Also, PE was all about forcing kids to play some sport. In my experience, it was too much emphasis on playing, and too little emphasis on basic practicing, so nobody really improved on sports, but improvement was never the goal. Anyway that's completely understandable, because basic practicing is boring to most people (even grown-ups).

Topics worth teaching re. public speaking:

1. How to structure a persuasive narrative,

2. Techniques for focusing on the material you intend to present (minimizing internal distractions),

3. Techniques for dealing with potential distractions externally,

4. How to evaluate your performance objectively (long time to master, but should be introduced early),

5. How to organize your material so that you have an appropriate amount prepared for the time allotted,

6. How to pace your delivery so that you deliver material in a consistent amount of time,

7. Techniques of rhetoric so that you can convey through your performance the emotion you intend (an inspirational speech is as much about how something was said as what, for example),

8. etc.

Topics worth teaching re. team work:

1. How to read the level of engagement of other members.

2. How to read the mood of other members.

3. How to be communicate clearly to a group and make sure that you were clearly understood.

4. etc.

I could keep going but I'm not developing a course for public speaking or intra-personal communication (teamwork). I could easily find as many topics for teamwork as I did for speaking.

All of these things must be developed with practice, sure, but a lot of them don't just spontaneously develop without teaching. I mean, I have been in plenty of group environments among adults who haven't learned these things. We send people to counseling over some of these issues. Practice is only useful if it is mindful: if the students know what they are trying to do. I could throw a ball on an empty field and tell my kids to practice soccer, but they'll learn a lot faster if they receive coaching with their practice.

There probably needs to be some sort of approach where students can start with something small - perhaps introducing themselves to the class - rather than just jumping into memorizing a 5 minutes speech.

Your comments on practice also apply to the classroom and public speaking. It is easy as a teacher to say students need to give eye contact to the class while speaking, but unless they have practiced it and been given time to get better, it will likely be the same scenario you describe in PE with no real improvement.

People often confuse introversion with fear and see it as being a totally unchanging facet of one's being.

I'm introverted, and I used to be incredibly shy when meeting new people and it was impossible to get me to do any public speaking in front of people. But I'm confident that my shyness and non-desire to be in front of people was a result of being fearful of what people thought of me and my yearning to not make a fool of myself as opposed to my being introverted. Perhaps there is a big overlap in those qualities though.

One of the turning points in reducing my social fear came through being a waiter during college which both forced me to speak to people I didn't know. Plus it forced me to be around groups of people regularly. After college I was a teacher and am now very comfortable meeting new people and speaking in front of groups.

Solitary pursuits still really energize me and social gatherings definitely continue to drain my energy which is able to be refilled with some solitude.

Better analogy is giving students poor grades for not participating in P.E. class well. I recall HS gym class having a few weeks focusing on football - totally presuming that everyone knew the rules; I garnered penalties for the team for merely twitching on the line just before the snap ("whadayamean called for 'movement' because I moved my foot one inch?"), and didn't figure out what a "down" was until my mid-twenties. Never occurred to the coach that some students had no idea what the rules were, yet the grade likely depended on how well they fulfilled those rules.

You're presuming all introverts already know how to speak before & work with groups. Many don't!

Kids should be better taught how to work in groups, really. It unfortunately goes both ways - you need to teach some of them not to blindly pick on introverts and teach the introverts how to communicate with others, including the art of lying and deception.

This. Some kids should definitely be put it special classes where they're taught to both deal with normal people and forgive them for their ways. If you don't spend much time deceiving people then you're far less able to detect lies. That or the subtle emotional manipulation demonstrated by any modern employer. It's an utterly essential skill in the "real world".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com