Social confidence?

Another school year officially starts tomorrow, which always makes me a little bit more thoughtful than usual. (I realize that’s a pretty low bar.) The older I get, the more I’m struck by the dissonance between perception and reality, especially among teenagers. I don’t want to comment on others’ experiences, especially those of my students, so I’ll limit it to thinking back to my own high school experience. I was the poster child for low self-esteem. I firmly believed that I could never be attractive to anyone. I was nerdy and only marginally athletic, and believed that I was one of the least attractive human beings ever to exist. As I go back now as an adult and look at old pictures, I am struck by the fact that I was actually a pretty good-looking kid for a few years. I hope my senior picture will serve as evidence, although beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.

(I dream of looking this good now!)

I was not a modest teenager. I truly believed that I was smarter and (sadly) better than most of the people I encountered every day, and I suspect I gave off that vibe in a very negative way. I recognize now that a lot of that persona was a defense mechanism because I believed I was so unattractive. I wonder how much more I would have connected with people if I had possessed just a little more social confidence. That confidence would have earned more positive reinforcement, which would have bred more confidence in a self-sustaining cycle.

As a teacher, I think about where I fit in to this cycle. So much of a teenager’s social identity is based on peer interaction, yet that social identity affects everything they do for years. I cannot tell a student that he or she or they are much more attractive than they believe. Obviously that would be inappropriate and creepy! But what can I do to bolster their critical social confidence? This year, I pledge to do my best to nurture my students’ confidence both as mathematics students and as moral/ethical people. Hopefully that little push will help them as they navigate the rough waters of teenage social interaction. In that sink-or-swim environment, I plunged to the seafloor, but I see more and more kids like me raising their sails and catching a little air off the tops of the biggest swells of teen peer pressure. Can anything I do really guide them through this difficult time? Probably not. But I am going to be there with the rescue dinghy when they need it to patch up their wounds and send them back out into the storm a little stronger.