A Child of The Dales, Gervase Phinn

From the classroom window rolled the great expanse of the Dale. The sad child in the corner stared out like a rabbit in a trap.

‘He has special needs,’ explained the teacher, in a hushed, maternal voice. ‘Real problems with his reading, and his number work is weak. Spelling is non-existent, writing poor. He rarely speaks. He’s one of the less able in the school.’

The lad could not describe the beauty that surrounded him, the soft green dale and craggy hills. He could not spell the names of those mysterious places which he knew so well. But he could tickle a trout, ride a horse, repair a fence and dig a dyke, drive a tractor, plough a field, ilk a cow and lamb a ewe, name a bird by the faded feather, smell the seasons and predict the weather. Yes, the less able child could do all those things.

Is anyone out there listening? continued...

As an experiment I got one of my classes to record—either with their mobile or good old fashioned pen and paper—the sounds in their home. There was the expected tv; siblings fighting, screaming; radio; sirens, traffic noise; however, what was so unexpected was the blaring volume of some of the audio clips that my students had recorded. It was worrying.

Surely a greater focus on listening would really increase literacy rates, not to mention the social benefits of listening to each other. Too often listening skills are pushed aside. My dad always says that we have one mouth and 2 ears and that we should therefore listen twice as much as we talk. From a teacher’s perspective, surely it is the most important of the five senses? Without truly listening to our students how do we know what they know? How do we know what they feel?

Is anyone out there listening?

This is a question that I would very often ask myself last year with my most challenging groups; however, I have recently become so concerned that we—staff and students—are fast losing the ability to listen—really listen—to others and the world around us. How many people do you see plugged into headphones on their daily commute?

Adults have always been concerned by children’s playthings: television, we used to be told, would turn our eyes square. Psychologist Sigman argues that time spent in a virtual world is displacing time that would once have been spent socialising. As a consequence, young people are not developing as they should and cannot make eye contact, they do not understand personal boundaries, they have a lack of respect for authority as well as ADD and other problems that come with sitting down for too long. Semantically, playing games used to mean going outside; now it means settling down in front of a screen.

I feel we must be wary, though, of assuming that using mobiles and laptops should be any more harmful than reading the latest bestselling book--Manga (look it up!). Increasingly, that’s the way we will read: as a download on a phone! Further, with spellchecks and predictive text that write for us, one might think that this will exacerbate literacy levels. However, listening to my students, they also do a good amount of writing when blogging and messaging each other--perhaps more than any generation before--we must, then, better harness and tap into these developments.