Well, today was my final* meeting for clinic. There were a GREAT! NUMBER! OF THINGS! that sucked about clinic, but to be fair, at some point I just got fed up and threw up my hands instead of continuing to try. Whether I would have made anything better, or done any good, for me or the case, is unknown; it was a decision I made, balancing what I would get out of it versus what I would need to put into it, and how other things that I am more committed to would be affected. Is the entire thing a shame, the clinic and my actions? Yeah, totally, and I take responsibility for my actions (or, uh, lack thereof - I think my only affirmative action was being cranky a lot). At the same time, I don't think I necessarily did that balancing test incorrectly. So, you know.
ANYWAY, what was interesting about my final reflection meeting with my supervisor was this: she tried to call me out on being too quiet. She wondered if maybe I had just decided to not try during meetings. I was surprised when she brought this up, and confused for a second, because I make a point of being very present in everything I do no matter how much I am annoyed, and I said, "Wait, no, I wasn't being quiet. I was listening."
It has never ceased to amaze me how strongly teachers correlate learning with actions they can see. This is why participation grades irk me - I mean, yeah, you want everyone to add to the discussion, and different points of view, whatever, I get it, but sometimes, it furthers MY learning a lot more if I don't try to come up with anything to say. Sometimes my learning is best facilitated by staying quiet and listening and then processing it all in my head. The classes that I had the most to learn from, throughout my life, are the ones I have been the most silent in. And the ones that have offered the least knowledge are the ones in which I will raise my hand the most.
This makes perfect sense to me. I don't know why it isn't obvious to all teachers. If I have a lot of shit to say, it's either because I am an opinionated ass who feels the need to get her two cents in all the time (HATE. THESE. FUCKERS), or I already know a great deal about the topic, or both, but I am never just the former. If I know a great deal about the topic, then I will feel like what I have to say is worthwhile and beneficial to everyone, and I'll share it. I am not one of those people so enamored with her own voice.
Yes, I know I am mouthy, and I am very opinionated and very strong-willed, and I fight. But I actually don't speak unless I have something thoughtful to say. I don't get into discussions unless I know what I am talking about. I know some people don't have a filter between their brains and their mouths, but I have a filter and it is DENSE. I say, "I don't know" if I don't. I don't feel the need to chime in. I don't feel compelled to tell people the inner workings of my thought process, unless I think it is useful and productive. I think my quiet ends up being surprising to people who assume that I am mouthy all the time, but I'm just not. If I think I just need to listen, I shut the fuck up, and I listen. And I process. And I think. And then if I feel I have something to say, I will say it. But if I am on unfamiliar ground, I am not going to get busy telling everyone my impressions on the landscape - I'm going to watch how everyone else navigates the terrain so I can decide how best to navigate it, too.
I really am quite the watcher. I like learning from watching people model things. If it were up to me, I would watch ten different people solve the same problem ten different ways, decide which pieces of which performances I liked, and then cobble them together to make my own way of solving the problem. And that's how to best teach kids, actually: you model, so they know one way to do it, and what the end product is supposed to look like, and then you give them a new problem for them to puzzle out themselves. They'll find their own ways of solving it, and then you have the students share with each other all the cool, different methods they all used to solve it, and everyone learns a lot, the end. Whereas in law school, they like to throw you into the sea with the sharks after giving you the direction to go find a pearl, but they have not told you: 1. what a pearl is; 2. what it looks like; 3. that it grows in oysters; 4. what an oyster is; 5. that oysters are found on the ocean floor; and 6. also, you might need some scuba gear to get down there. So there is a lot of thrashing and swimming around in circles and you get bit in the legs several times and you . . . I want to say, "hit your head against the wall repeatedly until your forehead just throbs," but I have been using this sea metaphor, and I have backed myself into a corner with that, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
SO YES. Basically, I think it's sad how much listening is NOT emphasized. I mean, I was on a litigation team with a lot of different lawyers who had a lot of different experiences and did things a lot of different ways. OF COURSE I LISTENED. I learned far more that way. And the interesting foil here is one of the other law students on our team (NOT MY PARTNER, she is the best person on earth) felt the need to speak ALL THE TIME. No filter in her head, no sirree, she'd just talk over people and through people she felt so compelled to mouth shit. But I never thought she had that much of value to add. And I never heard her say anything that was wise. Much that was foolish, and without any common sense, but nothing very thoughtful or helpful. My supervisor did make a point of noting how thoughtful I am. Which, well, YEAH, because I spend way more time observing and processing than just verbally shitting on everything, so of course I am.
So, yeah, I was a little surprised this afternoon at being called out for just listening. I can understand what my supervisor meant, and what she was going for, and why she would have thought what she did; like I said, I do think it's an easy mistake to make with me. I am quite the force, and when I go silent, I imagine people assume something is wrong, or I have turned off. But my silence goes hand-in-hand with the thing I was praised for today: I am very thoughtful. Thinking takes a still tongue. I am generally not foolish or quick to speak or frivolous with my words. I listen. I think it is so desperately important, listening. I wish there was way more listening in the world. And I wish people valued it and nurtured it, instead of assuming that in our ever-louder and increasingly shouty, insistent public universe, that silence and listening are failures of some kind, rather than the virtues they are.
*HAHAHAHA, just kidding, second-to-last, I still have one more. Clinic: the hell that never ends.
YES. A million times, YES. Because, seriously... this is me, also. I am quiet so often in face-to-face situations because I don't say something unless/until I feel I have something to say that will actually contribute. In a classroom, even if I have something to say, I will deliberately often not say anything until others have spoken first to make sure I'm not being that annoying person who always speaks up first. I like to only speak first if no one else is willing to start. If what I have to say is the same as everyone else, I keep my mouth shut. If I don't know what in the world I'm talking about, I stay silent. If I want to see different points of view, I shut up.
ReplyDeleteListening is a lost art, I think.
This is pretty much the story of my life in the academia world. I am very shy and I never spoke in class (I think in the four years... I might have raised my hands 5 times). My teachers (after grading papers/tests), would always say that they wished I would speak in class. As for me, I love listening to other people and what they have to say (or even what they don't say). That doesn't mean that I am not enjoying the class nor learning any less.
ReplyDeleteHOWEVER... the is a gender divide when it comes to speaking in class, and I remember hating all my graduate classes because it was male dominated 98% of the time, but I guess that is another story.
I was a quiet person in classes, too, and always get more out of discussions or lectures if I get to sit silently and scribble notes or doodles, and let things percolate for a while. Apparently my cohort was terrified of me because when I did have something to contribute, it was fully-formed and about something that someone had said several minutes earlier; it gave people the impression of, like, brooding angry intellect being used to nail people on offhand shit they said. This is a fine result of quietness.
ReplyDeleteListening = fuckin' awesome
Agreed. When I do participation grades, I make a point to tell my students that sometimes participation is listening and paying attention (which can include taking notes or doodling), and sometimes it is talking and joining into a conversation. I'm not sure why this is a difficult or contrary concept.
ReplyDeleteAnd Courtney, that is why you are an awesome teacher.
ReplyDeleteOh man, I am having SO MUCH trouble with this right now.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm struggling along with my first semester of grad school, and it's been pretty bad. One of my teachers has decided that every week, as a group, we must discuss the readings and come up with comments and questions about it, which we must then present to the class, because like that everyone participates.First, I don't see how this reflects MY performance at all; it's a group discussion. And second, I don't have questions about the damn readings, because I read and understood them. The only questions I might have are impossible to answer, because they're projections into the future and depend on a million variables.
I don't like participating in class; I only do it when my experience or knowledge can actually bring something to the discussion, otherwise I'd rather listen.
The emphasis put on participation in my program is making me uncomfortable. But then I'm pretty miserable about the whole damn thing fifty percent of the time!