Maya Angelou did not speak for five years
Updated: 1 hour ago
One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.
Maya Angelou, As quoted in USA Today (March 5, 1988)
Maya Angelou did not speak for roughly five years.
In her own words: "I was a mute from the time I was seven and a half until I was almost 13." Something terrible had happened, and a child's logic concluded that her words had caused it. So she stopped using them.
She spent those years reading everything and memorizing poems in silence.
What brought her back was a teacher. Her name was Beulah Lee Sampson Flowers, born in 1883 to parents who had been enslaved, teaching in Stamps, Arkansas. Mrs. Flowers invited the silent girl into her home, lent her books from her own shelves, and read A Tale of Two Cities aloud to her.
Then she asked for something. She gave Angelou poems to memorize, and told her she had to speak them. As Angelou rendered it: you do not love poetry, not until you speak it.
It was a specific request, and a slightly frightening one, and it came from someone who had already spent weeks making the room safe enough to make it.
That is the order courage needs. Trust first, then the hard ask, then an adult standing close enough to see you try.
Try this tomorrow
The move is a map of three zones: comfort, growth, panic.
Use it precisely. Have each child name which zone a task sits in for them, then invite one step into growth. One step, which is the zone next door, rather than a leap past it into panic.
Then stand close enough that they can see you.
Angelou's line says we're born with potential, not courage. Potential is what Mrs. Flowers was looking at.
The Kikori activity
Comfort, Growth, and Panic Zones. The teacher marks three zones on the floor, comfort in the middle, growth around it, panic outside, and the class names what each one feels like. The teacher then reads scenarios one at a time and students physically step into the zone that matches how it makes them feel, and say why.
PreK to grade 8 · no materials
The full version on Kikori has the facilitation script, the grade-band variations, the reflection questions and the slides to run it from.
Free Kikori account. No card.
In Kikori’s Experiential Connection Calendar, this activity sits under Name It and Brave It.
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