I always remember having to stand in front of my class in Grade One to give a presentation on what my father did for work. This experience is still indelible some sixty-plus years later. My memory isseared by two poignant realizations, among others: firstly, speaking publicly is an uncomfortable occurrence and has to be practiced and re-practiced to achieve even a semblance of skill, and secondly, not everyone has a father. In our class, many, those who were mostly poor, didn’t. All-encompassing was a choking sense of shyness; as I began to talk, my throat constricted, and I felt as if I was going to faint. What steadied me was the visceral terror that I had of failure and its concomitant punishments, both at school and at home. This was a time of “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” The relatively modern phenomena of public emotions (think weeping with fear) and of ADHD (1) hadn’t yet been invented.