This morning, my husband asked Alexa to play the Beatles over breakfast.The songs began to shuffle. Unconsciously, as much as I love the Beatles, I tuned it out. About three or four down the playlist, I hear the familiar strings begin to mourn Eleanor Rigby, followed by my daugther's voice: "All the lovely people," she says, "like boys."
"Boys are lovely people."
I didn't correct her - lyrically or conceptually. What's the harm in letting her persist in this small misinterpretation? It might very well be an improvement on what Lennon and McCartney originally intended.
And many boys are, in fact, lovely people. (I resolutely refuse to acknowledge in any way that her comment, at five years old, might suggest she is becoming boy crazy).
But it did get me thinking. About listening.
Listening is an important part of our parenting philosophy. There's a whole book about it. And while we don't subscribe to all of the techniques proscribed therein, it does help give us a framework for one crucial strategy to maintain connection with our offspring.
Indeed our entire marriage succeeds only because we strive for good, solid communication - only achievable through listening. Not the passive kind that often suffices when jamming some tunes, but the active kind (of which you've surely heard) that involves soliciting feedback to make sure that you've heard (or been heard) accurately and that you understand.
And, yes, listening is an important part of our girl's musical education (through the Suzuki method), where we know if we've played it beautifully or not by the quality of the sound.
Someday, our daughter will find out that Eleanor Rigby (and all the rest of us), while perfectly lovely, are also a lonely lot. Who will give her this feedback remains to be seen... perhaps she will read the lyrics somewhere, or a friend or relative will offer correction, or she will hear a cover in a slightly different way than she heard the original and it will send her on a quest to find out the real words.
A harmless error in listening requires no feedback.
And yet, how many times, in my classes, have I offered some guidance or insight that was misheard and I never even knew it? It begs the question of whether I am giving my students enough opportunity to practice active listening. And other questions besides: do I solicit their feedback, sufficiently and effectively? Do I know not only how well they understand, but how well they have understood through me.
Lately, I have adopted some of the metacognitive strategies from the Reading Apprenticeship framework, that emphasizes reading for understanding. As part of this, I have stressed graphicacy skills and encouraged students to develop habits that build their learning independence. But reading is just one of many ways of learning. Perhaps I have been putting too much emphasis here while neglecting the other important modes: aural, visual, kinesthetic, social, etc...
Likewise, learning is not a solitary enterprise. One of the advantages of RA is the way it acknowledges and leverages the social aspects of learning.
So as I sit down to re-tool my classes, as I do during every intersession (but especially so in summer), my daughter reminds me of the fundamental thing that makes relationships work: listening.
Teaching and learning is the meta-relationship.
I'm going to have to open up my ears, to model active listening and thoughtfully consider how to get meaningful feedback from my students more regularly. They are all truly lovely people. And I know right where they belong: right here, right now, in relationship to where they sit in a sea of new knowledge.
