Gargi

Chakrabarty Page 1 of 7

Anxiety inside the Classroom

Abstract
Anxiety is a frequently used word. We use it everyday and often, erroneously to imply petty worries.
The word in its truest sense has serious implications for a person and her life. If not arrested and
dealt with care in time, anxiety has the potential to negatively transform how an individual evolves
through life experiences. Inside the classroom, a multitude of factors can lead to intense classroom
anxiety. These factors range from the student’s personal traits and history, expectation of teachers
from assessment and the student’s understanding of her own achievement and motivation context.

Motivation behind the choice of theme
I have chosen to work on this theme as it makes sense to me at a deeply personal level. I have
struggled with classroom and performance anxiety throughout school as well as university. I have
grappled with anxiety in my life and I still battle with it every day to overcome and come to terms.
Separately, as a teacher I am able to identify kids with learning anxiety quite fast and in my
professional career with both normal and dyslexic children, I have learned how to empathize with
them. Nevertheless, largely untrained in dealing and healing anxiety, I have always known I could do
little to help them overcome the condition they found themselves in.

In my professional life as a teacher in the past three years I have been associated directly with
extremely vulnerable orphans who were stripped of their identities. I worked with these children
with a severe traumatic past, they carried with them backbreaking loss, insecurity and
abandonment. I have seen children who lived away from their parents in boarding schools mainly to
get two good and square meals a day and sometimes, clothes. In all these experiences, I could
understand where all those anxieties could come from but I also realized that those are not and
cannot be the only causes of anxiety in classroom. For while I had experienced none of their
misfortunes, I still went through similar and serious pangs of anxiety that kept me from reaching my
true potential in academics or so I believe.

In the school I visited for Practicum, I tried to probe into the theme by interviewing a few teachers
and students.

On hindsight, I realize the need to have done a bit more research. Speaking to teachers and
students about a potential disorder is a tricky matter and while I try to justify my analysis in this
paper, I feel whatever I could collect through my interviews may not be adequate to drive deeper
understanding and hypotheses for understanding anxiety, its types and its implications among
students in the classroom.

Another obstacle I encountered while probing into the topic was that I didn’t have the autonomy to
choose children I thought were the best candidates to interview. The teachers picked out the
“best”, usually the extroverts in the classroom for me to interview. Unknowingly or otherwise, they
made efforts that the children didn’t disclose information about students or the school that might
put the institution in a potentially disreputable position.

Gargi Chakrabarty Page 2 of 7

So what do we know about Anxiety?

Barlow (2002:64) concluded that anxiety can best be characterized as a “unique, coherent cognitive-
affective structure within the defensive motivational system”. Clark and Beck (2010:5) stated,
"anxiety is a complex cognitive, affective, physiological and behavioral response system (i.e. threat
mode) that is activated when anticipated events or circumstance are deemed to be highly aversive".

It is uncontrollable and unpredictable.

Barlow further explained that anxiety is a future-oriented mood that can be characterized as a
negative affective state accompanied by self-focused, physiological, or somatic symptoms; sense of
helplessness; and self-preoccupation with uncontrollability of future threat or potentially negative
events. In addition, the anxiety process could happen without the necessity of a rational appraisal,
and the process is seldom pathological, even when it is severe, until it becomes chronic1.

Using this definition alone we can begin to have some idea about the seriousness of anxiety and the
impact it has on individuals. On asking Mr. X - the fourth grade teacher - about the physical
implications of anxiety he notices in his students, he marked out some like the twisting of hands,
sweating and stammering.

Tarak - a fourth grader - described how he occasionally gets anxious and when he does, how his
hands go cold and his heart beats rapidly. He gets this feeling on stage when he has to perform in
front of a crowd. He added that after he starts speaking and begins to get comfortable with his
surrounding, the tension slowly melts away. He also gets anxious before tests, especially when he is
not prepared well for the examination. But soon he tries and gets a grip on himself and starts
writing what he knows.

Tarak’s example is just a cursory one of what anxiety can look like in its preliminary and controlled
stage. The anxiety he has can be passed of as nervousness for now, as he can control it and it really
doesn’t seem to bother him too much. But if we think about a kid for whom it is much more severe
than what Tarak experiences, teachers and parents – the two microsystems - have to intervene so
that the effects of anxiety doesn’t remain a companion for life and hinder the emotional and
physical wellbeing of the child.

The feeling of anxiety can ensue at anytime and anywhere. Thus there may be times where it could
be spotted by others, especially if the anxiety reactions are physical. Gaudry and Spielberger
(1971:7) believe that “the presence of signs such as tremor in the limbs, sweating of the hands and
forehead and flushing of the neck and face, is deemed to be an indication of anxiety”. The physical
reactions mentioned are some of the common anxiety indicators considered, but there are many
other indicators both obvious such as fidgeting or stuttering, as well as other indicators that are not
so apparent, exhibited by anxious individuals.

Liebert and Morris (1967), also cited by Woodrow (2006), have identified two types of anxiety
reactions. The first type is emotionality, which involves physiological reactions such as a racing

1 Teachers’ Awareness and Skills in Addressing Students with Anxiety Symptoms

http://digitalcommons.pcom.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1277&context=psychology_dissertations
Gargi Chakrabarty Page 3 of 7

heart and behavioral reactions, which include stammering and fidgeting. The second type of anxiety
reaction is worry, which signifies a cognitive reaction. An example of this is self-deprecating
thoughts or task-irrelevant thoughts. The feeling of worry in this context is normally related to what
the anxious person thinks of herself. The thoughts that play in the mind of the anxious person could
be negative ones, which then result in high levels of anxiety2.

The second type of anxiety reaction, that is worry, is self-deprecating. It may become chronic.

I learnt further from the teacher that children who are admitted through the 2009 RTE Act - that
mandates private schools to reserve 25% seats for children from disadvantaged backgrounds - are
those who often show higher levels of anxiety. Their parents, being uneducated unlike other
parents, cannot help them much with the English language, the medium of instruction and the
common language of communication among the kids of Lawrence School. As a result, they often
refrain from speaking in class and become unnaturally nervous when asked questions or when
assessed in any form.

Speaking Anxiety is another type of anxiety language learners experience. Learning a language
entails using four skills namely - reading, writing, listening and speaking. It is speaking that may be a
cause to affecting performance. MacIntyre (1999) reports that Horwitz et.al. (1986) are of the
opinion that language anxiety originates from three primary sources - communication
apprehension, fear of negative evaluation by others and test anxiety. All three sources can be
connected to speaking anxiety. It is “clear that communication apprehension and fear of negative
evaluation are related, the latter being a significant cause of the former: a fear of appearing
awkward, foolish or incompetent in the eyes of learners’ peers or others can inhibit attempts to
communicate confidently3.” (Jones, 2004:31)

Fear of getting judged by peers keep some children from speaking in the classroom and as the ninth
grade teacher described, some pupils excuse themselves to go to the washroom every time a
question answer session takes place in the classroom. Some children like Ganesh (9th grade) and
Preksha (9th grade) “do not care” if their peers judge them when they do not do well in a speaking
task or score badly in test.

Attribution Theory focuses on two types of goals – learning goals and performance goals. Students
with learning goals see failure as a motivation to do well whereas those who have performance
goals treat failure as anti-motivational. The later category of students gives up trying in fear of
failure. The theory suggests a relationship between students’ sense of control over the outcome of
an academic task and their motivation to succeed4.

2 Second Language Learning Anxiety - Razlina, M. Sabri; Chapter 2, Literature Review

3 Second Language Learning Anxiety - Razlina, M. Sabri; Chapter 2, Literature Review

http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/2421/5/c2.pdf

4 Academic Anxiety and Coping with Anxiety - Dobson Cassie

https://www.nmu.edu/education/sites/DrupalEducation/files/UserFiles/Dobson_Cassie_MP.pdf

Gargi Chakrabarty Page 4 of 7

Coping, metacognition, mindfulness and self-regulation are some of the ways that help in
combating anxiety. Children need to feel in control to cope with anxiety. They need to understand
the causes of an outcome and reason for a certain poor grade in an assessment. Identification of
anxiety and working on it by changing methods of study and meditation exercises can have a
positive impact. Teachers need to be trained in anxiety repair strategies and work with students
who lack in study skills. Every student is different and no one size fits all strategy will work for all
students. Different methods have to be adopted by parents, therapists and teachers to bring out
children suffering from classroom anxiety.


The School as a Context of Development

The school that I went to is a private school; Lawrence High School caters to children from middle
and high-income group families. I interacted and observed mostly children of grades 5 and 6, which
means they are in the age group of 10 to 11 years. It is quite challenging to develop insights on the
basis of a few sessions of observation and interaction with the children whom the teachers chose
for us to interview, as it leaves room for mistakes and inferences drawn can be inconclusive.

Sensitive Periods: Language Learning
The children are proficient in English as well as their native tongue. Both parents are usually
educated and fluent in language. They communicate with their children in English and Kannad. They
live in a community where families are educated and speak Kannad and English well. Some kids like
Anusha are proficient in three languages, the third language being Hindi as the parents’ native
language is Hindi. These parents speak some Kannad as well because they have been living for a
long time in Bangalore. English is the lingua franca and everyday mode of conversation at parent
workplaces.

This brings us to understanding plasticity and the concept of sensitive periods when children are
most sensitive to learning language that they are regularly exposed to. These children had the
opportunity to develop language skills as they thrived in an environment rich in different languages
that they picked up very fast.

Though I didn’t have an opportunity to observe an UKG or LKG class, while passing by the
classrooms, I could hear teachers speak with children both in English and their native tongue. The
murals painted on the walls of those classrooms depicted stories from western fairy tales and
suggested that the children were generally exposed to English stories. These children are in the age
group of 3 – 5.5 years and are at the prime for acquiring language.

According to Lightfoot and Cole5 children seem to be most sensitive to acquiring language in the
first few years of their lives and are able to acquire until the age of 7 after which their capability
diminishes.


5 The Development of Children -- Lightfoot and Cole
Gargi Chakrabarty Page 5 of 7

I used to teach in a home for orphans where children spoke a certain rural dialect of Bengali spoken
also by the primary caregivers of the home. As the children spent most of their times interacting
with these caregivers in the sensitive period of their childhood and started interacting with regular
teachers much later and for a lesser time period, they were not fluent in speaking the urban version
of Bengali in spite of rigorous classes offered to them later after they came of age 7 or 8.

Parents of the children in Lawrence High School are well established in their career and want the
same for their children. In my brief chat with Anusha I came to understand that her father asks her
everyday if she has received any feed back from her teacher. He is a software engineer and along
with her mother, wants their child to be successful in life in terms of occupation. They instill a
serious spirit of competition in her, evident in the way she believes in their goals for her and wants
what they want her to become. Even if just a class 4 student and only 9 years old, she has a clear
plan of what her career should look like – either to become a famous singer or a fashion designer.

Nurture does play a significant role in this child’s life, as when I asked the same question to some of
my 9-10 year old students in a boarding school for poor children from tribal communities, their
replies were quite vague.

Children in Lawrence High School come from middle to high-income group families and their
physical structure, unlike kids below poverty lines, look healthy and appropriate to their age. On
interviewing them about their food habits and observing that each one of them carry lunch boxes, it
can be assumed with a degree of confidence that the prenatal nutrition they received was also
wholesome. In developmental psychology, "a critical period is a specific time during development
when a given event has its greatest impact”6. Surely prenatal period is a critical period and if a
mother is diseased or ill nourished, the child in the womb will show some developmental disorder
or lag.

Sense of Competition
What do you want to be when you grow up? Anusha wants to be a singer when she grows up but
her parents, especially her mother has a say about her aspiration, which she agrees with. Either she
will be a famous singer or if that doesn’t happen she has an alternative career plan - to become a
fashion designer. The two microsystems that deeply influence her are family and school and they
instill in her a sense of necessity for achievement in terms of fame and money. Ironically during
immersion when we asked a child what he wanted to be when he grew up we were not surprised to
hear that his aspiration in life was to become a teacher. In his poor village, his microsystems - school
and family could offer him a limited option to success - becoming a schoolteacher. We can see how
nurture has a profound impact in these two cases, in life choices of these two children from two
different cultural backgrounds.

While observing a certain class in Lawrence High School, the teacher asked – How many of you think
you don’t get to spend enough time with your parents? Many hands were raised. These are the kids
whose parents go out for work. The teacher tackled their complaint by explaining how lack of
parental company is justified when they have the privilege of attending a good school and living a
decent lifestyle because both parents work.

6 Basic Concept and Principles in Developmental Psychology -- Derek Hook, Kate Cockcroft
Gargi Chakrabarty Page 6 of 7

It was interesting to see how the natural disillusionment of a child of not being able to stay in
proximity with her parents, as they both work, was in a way repressed by using the reasoning of
opportunity cost and material comfort. I think the development of this child is controlled and
conditioned by people in his microsystem - in this case parents and teachers. Parents strike a sad
chord by limiting companionship, creating loneliness and the teacher by justifying the act of the
parents. Nurture plays a significant role in this context. Children's emotional longing to be in
proximity to parents is an inherent trait but nurture is perhaps teaching him to compromise with
those traits for an external fulfillment. Of course we cannot overlook how the exosystem is
affecting children in this school. The want for money and climbing the career ladder leads to both
parents’ working and staying late hours at work. That surely affects children emotionally which led
them to vent out their disillusionment.

According to Section 12 of the RTE Act, it has been mandated by the government of India that every
private school has to reserve 25% of reservation of seats. They should be allotted to children from
disadvantaged background. This policy in the children’s macrosystem has both positive and
negative impact on the children of Lawrence High School who have been admitted under this act
according to the teacher I interviewed.

He said that these children, though with a chance to experience an advanced kind of learning, go
through major learning and emotional setbacks. They come from families where parents are not
educated and can hardly help them with studies. These kids have a hard time following class as
English is difficult for them to follow and the standard of education is high in the school. In time the
lack of confidence make them withdraw from participating in class. Eventually as they go on to
higher grades these kids drop off from schools.

On asking if parent teacher meetings help in restoring their confidence and better their academic
situation, the teacher said it does little help. They have a counselor at school for children who need
help but these children are not sent there. It is evident that interaction in the mesosystem between
parent and teacher is just a formality on both sides and partly helplessness on the parents’ side who
are “uneducated” and can’t keep up with the expectation of the school. As a result children who
stay in the classrooms because of the mandate that government has put on high-end private
schools are partly a burden on the school. There are no proactive measures that the administration
and the teachers take to help these children grow in the micro system they come to every day.

It is also a sad reality that these children experience a conflicting world in the two microsystems
they belong to and go through a sense of confusion. The micro system – home is poor with parents
having a meager income. This affects the nutrition they receive, their access to things like toys,
educational supplies and other necessary things. Unlike their well to do counterparts in school, the
home microsystem to some extent does not nurture in them the appetite for excelling in academics
to eventually compete in the market of jobs paying high salaries and providing social status.

However it cannot be denied that for a few underprivileged children, the education act has been
helpful as they can access a different, perhaps higher standard of education which if they are able
to pursue will help them get a ticket to a sophisticated standard of life that they and their parents
have aspired for.

Gargi Chakrabarty Page 7 of 7

There is a difference in the peer group the children from disadvantaged backgrounds have from
those who come to this school from middle to high-income group families. This contradiction in the
microsystem also leaves a negative impact on the children of the former group. These children
often have problems mingling with the latter group of children coming from affluent families and
stick with their own groups. As a result, they miss out on diversity and lose out on building a
network, which might have allowed them in exposure to other aspects of childhood like games,
language, knowing about cultures and practices other than their own.

Children in this school celebrate cultural festivals, participate in Indian dance, and celebrate
Independence Day. The institute takes all these events very seriously so that children understand
and stay rooted to the culture they belong to. This way the school helps connect children to the
macrosystem consisting of religion, culture, and national identity.

Lawrence school is preparing its students to be competent citizens and high achievers in life keeping
their sense of culture and Indian identity alive.
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