Could It Be Fear?

Students have been known to do annoying things in class: they come late and leave early; they talk to each other but won't answer teacher's questions; they look at the teacher but with emotionless faces. Behaviors like these and others can get under a teacher's skin and make it easy to conclude that these students are rude and probably lazy as well. And they may be, but authors Bledsoe and Baskin remind us that some students experience fear in courses and that fear finds expression in behaviors with multiple meanings. “It is important to realize that behaviors that appear uniform from student to student, such as anxious glances or nervous twitches, may have vastly different meanings depending on the person experiencing them.” (p. 33)

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