Should I be concerned about one of my students?

I’m not sure if I should be concerned about one of my students.

So today I asked one of my students a question.

He didn’t know the answer and I noticed he started getting a little agitated. I tried giving him a couple of hints but he just didn’t know. He started getting really distressed. He put his head down and started shaking his hands a little repeating the phrase “I’m sorry I don’t know” again and again. I asked someone else pretty much immediately after that.

I’m not sure if this is cause for concern.

For background info: He is 16, he’s male. He is quite intelligent, doing fine in my class. 1. I have taught him since September and this is the first time anything like this had happened. 2. He seems to hate being the centre of attention for good reasons or bad reasons. 3. He appears nervous and shy when it comes to talking either to me, or in-front of the class. 4. He’s very very quiet in class, never chats with anyone else. He walks in, does his work, walks out. 5. When I ask him a question in class, he always sounds very very nervous, he seems to be low on self confidence because he always seems surprised when he gets a question right. 6. He also never volunteers an answer to a question, even if I ask him and it turns out he knows, he doesn’t ever put his hand up. 7. He seems to be a very literal person. I once asked him to go up and write something on the board. He did, but his writing was fairly small. I jokingly said to him “do you think you could write EVEN smaller?” sarcastically. But he then wrote the next thing even smaller. When I told him I was being sarcastic, he turned bright red and started wringing his hands a lot, very flustered. 8. I’m not sure if he has many friends, I never see his talking to anyone while walking in or out. 9. I have noticed that when he does talk to someone, he doesn’t ever make eye contact with them. He looks at the floor, the table, his hands, never the face of the person he’s talking to. And he seems to be quite awkward. 10. He seems a little childish. I’ll quite often notice him chewing on his fingernails, or softly on the collar of his jacket. And sometimes I’ll see him rocking slightly. Neither of these things are super pronounced but I do notice them. And he also sometimes sits a little oddly on his seat, for example he sometimes sits with his feet up on his chair hugging his knees. 11. However, he’s very very sweet and kind. Before a test once, the kid sitting across the table from him was really nervous and he went over to him and said “it’ll be fine. You’ll do great. Ok?” And then after the test, he gave the kid a big double thumbs up at the end! Which was really sweet because he was super nervous too!

Do you think I should be concerned about him? If yes, what do you think could be the problem with him? Could he have some sort of mental disorder? Or am I just worrying too much?

Submitted March 11, 2021 at 11:52AM by Domak04 https://ift.tt/3evBrJ2