(This post is drawn from an article in The Independent School)

Not long ago I sat with a bunch of students from different parts of the country, urban and rural, white, black and Hispanic.  They came from troubled communities and troubled schools.  We started with several activities to break the proverbial ice, including one where students paired off, interviewed one another and then with the whole group back together, they introduced their partner.  I was struck by the number of times they got it wrong.  They had the wrong name for their partner or her school, or maybe they got the name of a favorite movie wrong.

Why?

I’ve been a high school science teacher for over 25 years.  I had long been prepared to expect that I might not be understood; so when I started to work with inner city kids, I worked hard to engage them in conversations so that we could all be on the same page.  When a student offered a comment or question that I did not understand, I would apologize and ask him or her to please say it again.  They were patient and put up with this old guy.

I assumed that any trouble I had understanding them came from the linguistic/cultural distance between us.  But when so many kids were getting it wrong that afternoon, I started to see something else.  There were few linguistic/cultural divides amongst these kids.  They were the same age, immersed in the same pop culture and the same poverty.  Why did they not get it right?  Perhaps, these kids were not speaking to one another with the confident expectation that they would be understood…

Certainly, if we learn to look one another in the eye; if we learn to weigh our words and take their measure from the reaction we get; if we are empowered by that reaction, then when that doesn’t happen, perhaps we learn a different lesson…perhaps we learn to get by, to cope with less than clarity.

Another Anecdote:

Hans Furth, the author of Thinking Without Language (1966), a book about the deaf, was fond of making this observation:  that of all the natural groups within American society, groups defined by profession, by race, religion, etc., the healthiest mentally were the deaf.  Why would this be so?  Why would being deaf mean you were less likely to suffer from schizophrenia or to be institutionalized?  The answer he favored had to do with the sign language.  The argument goes like this…

The gestures of the sign language are everywhere complemented by facial expression.  This is because the signs themselves are open to interpretation that is completed by cues for intensity and the like which come across via the eyes, a nod of the head, etc.  For example, there are several words in English which indicate degree of obligation…ought, should, must.  But in the sign language, there is just one sign…you crook your index finger, somewhat like the way you might hold a pencil.  You indicate the degree of obligation by the intensity of the gesture, ranging from a slight pecking motion to an emphatic sweeping motion. As a result, the deaf look at one another squarely as they talk.  At the same time, as a speaker, you are more energetically committed to what you are saying and so it is difficult to deceive.  That is, the deaf are more straightforward with one another, which contributes to good mental health.

Talk is healthy; it’s important, and for too many it is not happening.  We know, for example, from considerable research that low-income children start to lag behind in vocabulary growth compared to middle class children by the age of three.  It is not a matter of exposure to the spoken word.  Having a television on in the background doesn’t do the trick.  There’s got to be a real person in the room.  But even here there is an important caveat.  It is not the amount of talk children are exposed to.  That is, children of low income parents who were very talkative still lag behind their middle class peers.  In their study, Pan et al (2005) point to a couple of considerations, most especially the degree of negative talk.  Low income parents used more prohibitions, discouragements, and directives than middle or upper middle class parents.  Such considerations heighten the importance of talk for school aged children, but we are sorely disappointed when we visit school classrooms where all too often we find a steady pulse of the wrong talk…talk with just this negative quality; talk that is about doing what you are told.

Anecdote number three:

            Back when I was in graduate school I found myself teaching at the University of Leeds for a year.  I had a lovely time.  Here are two of the more important stories I brought back to the States with me.  One came from the grading form used by the university, where students were listed in two columns as either regular or mature.  Intrigued, I inquired as to what constituted maturity and learned that it referred to those who has interrupted their trajectories as students and had gone off to work or perhaps to travel.  Presumably the university felt that such students returned to their schooling with a greater appreciation for their studies.  A perceptive judgement.

The other story is also about schools.  A senior professor at Leeds took me under his wing.  He was a lovely guy and I can still recall many of our conversations.  One morning as we walked to school he told me about a television program the evening before, where reporters interviewed students from the Westminster School.  Westminster is what we would call a private or independent school and can trace its history all the way back to the late 12^th century.  What Jerry Ravetz had found so striking was not that these young men and women were so bright, but how they took it as perfectly natural that adults would be interested in what they had to say.  This is the complement to what I had seen with students from troubled schools.  I have no doubt that we come hard-wired for language, á la Chomsky’s deep structures, but evidently our capacity to connect to people and to speak directly is learned.  So much of what we become is formed by the interest, or neglect, that others exercise.

Anecdote four:

Let’s look at the standard approach to classroom management.   Class time is choreographed.  Students come in and a warm-up task or drill is on the board, along with a timer that is projected.  Students have five minutes, make that four minutes and fifty-five seconds, to finish this assignment.  Meanwhile the teacher works the room, checking off those who have their homework.  When the five minutes has elapsed, these papers are passed forward and students retrieve books from the back of the room.  They are to read the first four pages of chapter 6.  The timer shows ten minutes.  Then they collect into small groups and work on certain problems.  Time again directs the dance.  An entire hour and a half is consumed this way, with nary a moment for a group discussion.  There are worksheets, exercises like coloring the nucleotide sequences of a stretch of DNA, or labeling items on a map of Europe in the 15^th century.  But there is no talk, no utterances that are whole thoughts or sentences strung together to explain a point of view or to frame a question…save the occasional request for permission to sharpen a pencil or go to the bathroom.  Students offer answers to questions posed, but they are the spoken equivalent of fill-in-the-blank questions and a word or phrase is all that is called for in reply.

Anecdote 4.1:

Such answers, are not really talk.  You can tell because no one is listening.  I am sitting in a physics classroom.  Students have been given a worksheet and the same sheet is projected onto the white board at the head of the class.  Diagram one shows a weight on a table attached to a spring.  The spring is compressed.  What do we call this the sheet and the teacher ask?  One student suggests it is momentum; another that it is newtons; yet another that it is kilograms.  No one is trying to figure out why the preceding answers were wrong.  They are calling out technical terms until the right one is spotted by the teacher.  “Potential energy,” says a student, and they move onto the second diagram.

An Anecdote about Ivanhoe:

            My uncle Marty was a great story teller.  One night he told me the story of Ivanhoe and I loved it so that I went to the library to read it for myself.  It was my first book from the adult section of the library and I was a bit trepidatious, not quite sure it would be OK.  I found it and checked it out, no problem.  When I started to read it, however, I was confused.  There was this swine herd, Garth, and he was walking across the English countryside.  No knights in shining armor, no Ivanhoe.  I took the book back, looking for the real Ivanhoe but all I could find was the one by Sir Walter Scott.  So I tried it again.  This time I must have read fifty or sixty pages.  Still all you got was Garth.  I couldn’t figure it out. Then I cam at it a third time, and somewhere around page 75 it all started to happen.  Garth, by the way, becomes Ivanhoe’s squire.  I loved that book, and I always remembered how you had to give an author a good 75 pages to get the story going.  If you didn’t, you might miss the best story ever.

I taught most of my career at the Park School and the students there were comfortable giving me my 75 pages.  I’d start a story and they figured I would bring it around to the topic at hand in time; though it might not be clear just how I was going to do that.  They were comfortable with the idea of trying to figure out where I might be going.  When I started teaching at the Baltimore Freedom Academy, it was clear I was not getting that lengthy grace period.  I only had a couple of pages, as it were.  We talked about it.  I told them the Ivanhoe story, and I talked about the value of listening and playing with the possibilities, and we talked about the difference between teaching where you tell students what they are supposed to know and teaching where you invite them to think about something that is puzzling.  Garth and I did a lot of walking.

Teaching is not just what we have to say.  It’s not about being thoughtful and clear.  If that were so, then textbooks would be far more effective.  The learning we seek thrives on the connection between the material and the open mind of the student.  That connection requires that we listen better…whether we are talking to a partner at a summer gathering or to a group of students.  If we would do that, who knows how much growth would follow.

References:

Furth, Hans. 1966.  Thinking Without Language: Psychological Implications of deafness. New York: Free Press.

Pan, Barbara, Meredith Rowe, Judith Singer, & Catherine Snow, 2005, “Maternal Correlates of Growth in Toddler Vocabulary Production in Low-income Families.” Child Development, 76(4), 763-782.