The Primary Work: Listening: Clarity
We must first determine goals for teaching foundations of verbal communication.
As I see it, all verbal communication is encompassed in four areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. I will assume here as a rule students who have all the average human senses and intellectual potential, rather than striving to point out the many possible exceptions and constructing special goals for them.
In the area of listening, anyone who has taught liberal arts even briefly knows that a great deal of information is conveyed through speech, and the student is expected to listen. So, even if our goal is only to prepare students for the remainder of their college career, listening is a skill we must specially cultivate. However, listening is a skill with many other applications than college study.
Listening requires a degree of clarity and focus.
Listening is not the same as hearing. Hearing is unconscious and occurs continuously. Listening is conscious, begins when a perceived sound is outside of a range of safety, and lasts only so long as the sounds perceived have not been characterized sufficiently to be sublimated.
In a world in which we are surrounded by sound, often by sound which could be meaningful, and furthermore by sound which, in a less artificial environment, would signify danger, consciousness of sound is rare.
Consciousness is driven by the will. If one does not wish to listen, one will not. The teacher, therefore, who wishes to communicate through sound, must find some way to command attention. However, once attention has been gained, the teacher must make clear that eventually the listener must self-direct.
One of the goals of the foundation of verbal communication courses therefore must be to provide students with techniques and tools whereby they may become conscious of sound.
One line of work has to do with emptying the mind of clutter, so that sound can enter.
Think of how often you have entered a classroom with thoughts other than those of the material you are to teach. Students are in the same position, although traditional college age students may be in a worse position, because of the neurology of adolescence. Assuming that you, the teacher, are physically an adult and your hormonal systems are relatively balanced, you are not in the same position as an eighteen-year-old. Thanks to past circumstances beyond our reach, we have a wide range of students, not all of whom are particularly verbally oriented, many of whom are ill-prepared for college, and many of whom, further, are not particularly interested in what we have to teach. Combine this with, in our circumstance, classes "early" in the morning, or in the afternoon after a full day of studio work, and the likelihood that a students has had far less than the recommended nine- to eleven-hours of sleep, has probably taken little or no time to prepare, and may have had a poor breakfast, and you should be amazed that any learning takes place at all.
It's not that students have no thoughts -- it's that they are too weak to resist the flow of thoughts.
What students need -- though they generally resist the idea for some reason (and we should explore this) -- is training in some meditation form or other which will provide a focused mind. I personally think this requires bodily relaxation and recognition of, but setting aside of, errant thought.
Posture, therefore, is a priority issue.
This sounds archaic, I know, or New Agey. I'll readily admit the eccentricity of suggesting that on the first day of college, the instructors should insist before anything else upon good posture.
I insist that we should so insist. All else follows from this.
We might also begin, as an "icebreaker", with "what did you have for breakfast?" Perhaps the wealthier among us might go so far as to bring something like granola bars in for those students whose breakfasts have been unacceptable. I cannot emphasize enough how basic health, hygiene, and nutrition will determine effectiveness of learning. Call me a nut.
One cannot listen until one has internal silence. This means a silence of unrelated thoughts, but also of related ones. If I am listening to a speaker and begin ruminating upon one of her points, I miss the others, because I am still back with that one point.
We must remember as speakers that 1) we must provide silence in which what we have spoken can be processed and 2) inexperienced listeners require guidance in interpreting nuance.
On the first point, this means:
Do not speak constantly (a lesson I have never learned well). Pause periodically. I often write main points on the board as full sentences, and while I write I try not to speak. This provides processing time. Have you ever attended a Power Point presentation and felt terribly rushed? Good. That is what your students experience everyday. Power Point sucks because everything is "there" already, usually too much, and the presenter tends to rush through it so fast that you can't take it in. So what if you have a print out of the whole thing. Are you really going to review it? Be honest. So, what have we learned?
Provide plenty of 'wait time' when asking questions. Two minutes is not excessive -- rarely will students take that long before someone "cracks" and answers. Use a watch, if you must.
On the second point, this means:
Most contemporary college students have no sense of the distinction between "irony" and "sarcasm". Never employ sarcasm, as much as you may be tempted to do so. Irony is a hallowed pedagogical tool, but note the Oxford primary definition: "ignorance deliberately feigned". Be certain that you are yourself clear on the distinction between irony and sarcasm. Feigned ignorance can draw a student out, but not if you give yourself the appearance of the Omniscient One. Socrates succeeded in using irony as a tool because he did so frequently and never made great claims for what he did, in the end, seem to know.
Most contemporary college students seem to have difficulty distinguishing between "example" and "ramble". We may rail at this as a deplorable circumstance -- and it assuredly is deplorable -- but we are where we are, and absent a vessel to transport us to the (probably non-existent) world in which example and ramble were or are or will be clearly distinguishable to students, we must take the situation as it is. We can either abandon illustrative tangents, or find a way to make it clear that we are, in fact, now going on a bit of a verbal excursion, giving examples and relating them immediately back to the point illustrated. Subtlety can be cultivated, but don't expect much of it in the average foundation-year student.
Remember: we have four years to accomplish the result. Don't rush. Slow and steady wins the race.
As I see it, all verbal communication is encompassed in four areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. I will assume here as a rule students who have all the average human senses and intellectual potential, rather than striving to point out the many possible exceptions and constructing special goals for them.
In the area of listening, anyone who has taught liberal arts even briefly knows that a great deal of information is conveyed through speech, and the student is expected to listen. So, even if our goal is only to prepare students for the remainder of their college career, listening is a skill we must specially cultivate. However, listening is a skill with many other applications than college study.
Listening requires a degree of clarity and focus.
Listening is not the same as hearing. Hearing is unconscious and occurs continuously. Listening is conscious, begins when a perceived sound is outside of a range of safety, and lasts only so long as the sounds perceived have not been characterized sufficiently to be sublimated.
In a world in which we are surrounded by sound, often by sound which could be meaningful, and furthermore by sound which, in a less artificial environment, would signify danger, consciousness of sound is rare.
Consciousness is driven by the will. If one does not wish to listen, one will not. The teacher, therefore, who wishes to communicate through sound, must find some way to command attention. However, once attention has been gained, the teacher must make clear that eventually the listener must self-direct.
One of the goals of the foundation of verbal communication courses therefore must be to provide students with techniques and tools whereby they may become conscious of sound.
One line of work has to do with emptying the mind of clutter, so that sound can enter.
Think of how often you have entered a classroom with thoughts other than those of the material you are to teach. Students are in the same position, although traditional college age students may be in a worse position, because of the neurology of adolescence. Assuming that you, the teacher, are physically an adult and your hormonal systems are relatively balanced, you are not in the same position as an eighteen-year-old. Thanks to past circumstances beyond our reach, we have a wide range of students, not all of whom are particularly verbally oriented, many of whom are ill-prepared for college, and many of whom, further, are not particularly interested in what we have to teach. Combine this with, in our circumstance, classes "early" in the morning, or in the afternoon after a full day of studio work, and the likelihood that a students has had far less than the recommended nine- to eleven-hours of sleep, has probably taken little or no time to prepare, and may have had a poor breakfast, and you should be amazed that any learning takes place at all.
It's not that students have no thoughts -- it's that they are too weak to resist the flow of thoughts.
What students need -- though they generally resist the idea for some reason (and we should explore this) -- is training in some meditation form or other which will provide a focused mind. I personally think this requires bodily relaxation and recognition of, but setting aside of, errant thought.
Posture, therefore, is a priority issue.
This sounds archaic, I know, or New Agey. I'll readily admit the eccentricity of suggesting that on the first day of college, the instructors should insist before anything else upon good posture.
I insist that we should so insist. All else follows from this.
We might also begin, as an "icebreaker", with "what did you have for breakfast?" Perhaps the wealthier among us might go so far as to bring something like granola bars in for those students whose breakfasts have been unacceptable. I cannot emphasize enough how basic health, hygiene, and nutrition will determine effectiveness of learning. Call me a nut.
One cannot listen until one has internal silence. This means a silence of unrelated thoughts, but also of related ones. If I am listening to a speaker and begin ruminating upon one of her points, I miss the others, because I am still back with that one point.
We must remember as speakers that 1) we must provide silence in which what we have spoken can be processed and 2) inexperienced listeners require guidance in interpreting nuance.
On the first point, this means:
Do not speak constantly (a lesson I have never learned well). Pause periodically. I often write main points on the board as full sentences, and while I write I try not to speak. This provides processing time. Have you ever attended a Power Point presentation and felt terribly rushed? Good. That is what your students experience everyday. Power Point sucks because everything is "there" already, usually too much, and the presenter tends to rush through it so fast that you can't take it in. So what if you have a print out of the whole thing. Are you really going to review it? Be honest. So, what have we learned?
Provide plenty of 'wait time' when asking questions. Two minutes is not excessive -- rarely will students take that long before someone "cracks" and answers. Use a watch, if you must.
On the second point, this means:
Most contemporary college students have no sense of the distinction between "irony" and "sarcasm". Never employ sarcasm, as much as you may be tempted to do so. Irony is a hallowed pedagogical tool, but note the Oxford primary definition: "ignorance deliberately feigned". Be certain that you are yourself clear on the distinction between irony and sarcasm. Feigned ignorance can draw a student out, but not if you give yourself the appearance of the Omniscient One. Socrates succeeded in using irony as a tool because he did so frequently and never made great claims for what he did, in the end, seem to know.
Most contemporary college students seem to have difficulty distinguishing between "example" and "ramble". We may rail at this as a deplorable circumstance -- and it assuredly is deplorable -- but we are where we are, and absent a vessel to transport us to the (probably non-existent) world in which example and ramble were or are or will be clearly distinguishable to students, we must take the situation as it is. We can either abandon illustrative tangents, or find a way to make it clear that we are, in fact, now going on a bit of a verbal excursion, giving examples and relating them immediately back to the point illustrated. Subtlety can be cultivated, but don't expect much of it in the average foundation-year student.
Remember: we have four years to accomplish the result. Don't rush. Slow and steady wins the race.
posted by M E Achtermann at 11:33 AM
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