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The Listening Skill
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7 thoughts on “The Listening Skill”
If I go back to 2007, how many blog posts do you reckon I’m in for?
Byron 1,892 posts and 10,271 comments. I am trying to figure out a way to take the best stuff and make it into a more readable form, but it won’t happen fast. There is simply too much information to be put in one place, especially with all those comments. Any ideas? The only thing I can think of is to update each blog from 2007 into a revised – much smaller – category list (only the last year or so of blog entries are properly categorized). Until that is done, the best way to search for something on this blog site is to google “ben slavic blog” and then whatever phrase you want information on. Carla told me this and it works for any topic, but you have to limit your phrasing.
I miss Carla!!
Me too.
1892 posts as of last December? Holy haricots!
I got the same feeling when I started reading the NY Times blog “Disunion”–a day by day real-time re-telling of the events of the Civil War. I just started looking at it yesterday. There are 25 pages of titles of previous entries going back back back….lots of catching up to do.
Listening. Yes. As a culture, we have lost this skill. I am not even talking about language learning, necessarily. A few weeks ago, we had a presenter in our high school who came to talk to the juniors and seniors about finding the “thread” of their lives. He did this by masterfully telling/ asking his own life story. By “asking” I mean that he had us all engaged in listening for and thinking about what the “thread” was that wove through all these seminal experiences. At times he would ask a question and wait for a volunteer to answer, or give an example from her own life. Other times he would just pause and create silence. There were also a few questions where he asked us to turn to the person next to us to answer briefly…maybe giving us about a minute, and then weaving back to the talk. It was a very powerful experience for all. The kids were blown away by him. Many rushed up to speak to him at the end, and his name pops up even now, weeks later.
He was a captivating speaker / story teller who engaged everyone by his mere presence, which was basically to stand and walk slowly around, making eye contact with people, using body language, facial expressions, gestures, posing questions to the audience, pausing and waiting in silence for someone to volunteer an answer. Essentially he modeled all of the skills of a great TPRS teacher!
I remember feeling really great about what I am trying to do in my own classes, especially with regard to focusing on the interpersonal skills, which are really important life skills. It was amazing to have an outside person randomly come in and demonstrate and address by example all of these things that I have up on posters and that we work on every day in class. I was not naive enough to expect that the next day the kids would make the instant connection, and they didn’t.
In fact, they don’t get the connection between listening and their ability to understand. In their student feedback, so many of them stated that “The thing we did that helped them learn” was reading, yet when they reported “What they were most proud of” they wrote “understanding everything” or “being able to continue a conversation” or even “when sometimes French just pops out of my mouth in public and I don’ t even notice.” So, clearly they have not connected all the listening to the fact that they can easily understand spoken language. They think they can do this because of the reading?! Maybe this confirms Susie’s comment about us being “beaten” by visual learning?
Many of them also wrote “taking notes” as something they would add to improve their learning. I am mystified. I understand that writing helps with processing. This is true for me, but I am not going to let them take notes during a story. Yikes!
No notes. Most of them love not having to do anything but sit back and listen. Those who must take notes quit after the first few weeks. Those who continue to take notes are just scared, unwilling to show up as more than a mere cardboard cutout of a person in class. Those are the ones whose parents I call to explain what is going on.