I’ve been thinking a lot about aural communication lately, how, in classrooms, we oftentimes overlook the aural in favor of the oral. When we do provide aural instruction, we couple it with visual instruction. Write on the board! Entertain! Give the students something to look at! I’m one of those old-fashioned educators–I bemoan the current trend of fashioning educators as clowns and spectacle.
When I hear a student complain that a class is boring, I think of John Berryman’s lines in Dream Song number 14: “and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’”
When I was in grade school, there was after-school training for competitions with other district schools. If you won, you went on to regional competition, and if you won at that level, you advanced to state. One of the activities I trained in when I was eight was a storytelling competition. The task wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to retell a story that you would have just been told. This training forced me to listen, to etch details in my mind, knowing that I would have to retell them. When this became easy, I began to interpret what I heard, to make connections, to go above and beyond the surface of what was presented. (I think this is why I didn’t do well in these competitions–even at a young age, I wasn’t keen on merely summarizing; I wanted to provide literary criticism as well.)
Somewhere along the way, (I don’t know when) I became a terrible listener. I’ll sometimes just slip into daydreams when I’m at a literary reading. I have to prompt myself to listen. I have to concentrate. When someone reads something aloud to me, I invariably begin to go elsewhere unless I try really, really hard to stay there in the passage. I retain better when I look at the text, and I don’t think this is a good thing. It’s probably something that starting happening by my being immersed in classrooms that coupled aural and visual instruction in the belief that children learn better this way. I think it’s hurt me.
We let our students read aloud things that are beautiful, that should not be read aloud by fumbling, untrained students–Shakespeare for example. (No wonder our students have a hard time listening!) Why don’t we let them listen to trained actors on tape? Or on an MP3 player? I recently saw a news clip that showed MP3 players being used in public school classrooms. I have reservations about a gadget, however, that allows us to pause and resume, allowing us the safety of getting lazy, of drifting off.
Perhaps students are bored because they aren’t listening or don’t know how to listen. They’re elsewhere. Perhaps they have no inner resources, or perhaps they have too many inner resources.
We train our students to be articulate, eloquent speakers, but are we training them to be alert, contemplative listeners?
I've the same concern as Jenny. I've given my view of this in About the Inbound. While related to Jenny's comment, it takes a broader view of the acquisition of data.
I agree with Jenny that we need to train alert, contemplative listeners. However, I'm not sure that's enough. I argue this point in the paper mentioned above.
Just yesterday at the Great Works faculty development session on incorporating performance into the course, I told a few participants about my high school experience with Shakespeare. Every year–except junior year, which was all American literature–we would read some Shakespeare, and we would read in class, and we would read along silently while listening to audio-cassette recordings of the play. This was what the school's budget would allow, and it did provide us with a sense of the sound of Shakespeare's plays, and with a version true to the written text, but it was so awfully lacking. Rather than inspiring us to imagine the visuals for ourselves, these tapes offered us a chance to get by without reading the materials in advance, to passively listen, to avoid taking the risk of thinking or reciting for ourselves.
I love the idea of an eight-year-old so sophisticated in her literary interpretation that she fails to summarize a story accurately. It's no wonder you have become the kind of thinker you are! I would love to design assignments that inspire active listeners like you trained yourself to be. I have always argued, but perhaps without enough people listening, that as fellows we need to emphasize reading and listening in addition to writing and speaking. Otherwise, our students are incomplete communicators, incapable of exchanging ideas with others.