A Column on Listening

Ever start a new job, meet someone, or find yourself in a new location and feel as if everything you ever said or did was left behind? It’s at these points in our lives that we reach back to our preschool and kindergarten memories because that’s the way it was back then; that’s the way a child’s world is – no recognizable past.

Does anyone ask questions anymore? Questions, after all, require a response, something to be listened to. More and more, adults seem like children; they are not asking questions. Most children can’t distinguish a question from a statement. When a question is asked, most little kids can’t respond. They don’t know how.

So what? Asking questions bespeaks a civility that moves people closer. It’s a format to gain information and make conversation, and it’s not happening. Without discourse, the exchange of knowledge remains a strictly functional, clodhopping approach to life.

The ability to ask someone a worthwhile question and then stop and really listen to the answer is a dying event. Why? Perhaps because listening to someone else means the asker may no longer be the center of the universe. He must relinquish center stage to the new speaker who is answering the question.

Listening is a learned activity. In an early childhood environment, it’s the mainstay of the early education curriculum. If children don’t learn to listen, they can’t learn anything.

Our new preschool teacher, Miss Mary Grace approached her three and four year olds by saying, “The first rule and most important rule we have is about listening.”

And what were the children’s responses? Three turned from her to watch the pet room, five started talking among themselves, three listened, and two more started crawling toward the family station.

I asked the chuckling Miss Mary Grace about her take on the children’s overall response. She quipped easily, “The ones whose parents read to them know how to listen.” Reading to a child every day is not only a sign that parents know the importance of listening for themselves, but they understand the importance of a child knowing how to listen as well.

Listening takes time to learn to do, and then it takes time to actually do. Activities that surround listening have to encourage it, like reading and conversations over the non-TV dinner.

There are several kinds of listening and all of them have their place:

*Attentive listening is the shortest kind of listening. You can expect children to listen for less than a minute to most things, so don’t lecture and don’t preach.

*Inattentive listening is what you get when you put on a video, a record or tape or CD. They get some of it, but not enough to learn well. So listen to good stuff and keep the volume down.
*Indirect hearing is a part of a sentence that they hear while they are doing something else. That’s why repetition is so important. If teachers say the same things in the same way, then a child knows who, what, when, where, why, how he’s supposed to act or act on because he’s heard it all before. It’s functional.

Functional listening is really a bottom line thing because it’s not the focus. It’s the extraneous stimuli that’s speeding past the window. The other daily parts of our lives that mimic functional activities are fast food and TV.

Think about it. Functional eating means we snarf without really tasting. It’s the filler that is always the same – like TV. Where people listen to radio, they watch TV. In fact, interestingly enough, the way we “watch TV” is about the same as the way we treat one another. When was the last time anyone asked TV a serious question?