I am uber energetic, fidgety, an overly loud, verbal communicator and mentally an overthinker, so silence is a frequent combatant of mine.
Recently, however, I have been put in situations where I have been forced to spend long amounts of time in relative or total silence.
An example is my role as a proctor in multiple sessions of End of Grade (EOG) testing sessions in the North Carolina public school I have been spending most of my educating time over the last four years.
I preface these thoughts with a “there is no umbrella statement that covers every student” understanding.
For as many students who cannot seem to keep their thoughts to themselves, verbally in my classes (karma bites some of us in the butt sometimes decades after our crimes against educators,) there are those who are happy as a clam to never speak, speak as rarely as possible or never speak above a whisper.
Sitting in the silence of the testing classrooms got me to thinking. Is silence a good, bad or something in the middle for students in school during testing or otherwise?
(Below) is a post from www.edweek.org discussing students, testing and silence.
The Sound of Silence
By Susan Graham
“We have to keep those hallways quiet!”
Research says the scores increase when end-of-year tests are taken online, so our students will be pulled from classes to be tested over the next three weeks in three computer labs. No talking in the testing area. And keep it down out there in the hall because they are doing testing in there.
We are not so much a school during these weeks but a testing center. We are not teachers; we are test proctors. What our students think may be interesting, but what they can recall is critical. They are grinding out the data by which they and we will be judged.
They are the producers, and we are the facilitators of that production. They, and we, need them to work without distraction, so quiet in the testing area is essential. But quiet isn’t the norm in middle school, so teachers diligently scurry out into the hallways during class changes, waving signs bearing a happy face with a zipper where the curve of the smile belongs.
“Shush! Zip it! We’re trying to find out what you know! So don’t talk!”
I understand the necessity, but it is a strange sort of pantomime game where we say: “I want to know what you know, but you have to tell me without speaking. No questions from you, no answers from me, no comments from either of us.” It doesn’t seem like a very elegant design, does it? What bothers me even more is that we’ve predetermined what the answers should be. It seems we insist that they answer in silence because the only answers we are interested in are the one’s we’ve provided. We really don’t seem to be very interested in what they think. Or how they think.
As I was waving my Zip It! sign last week, I thought of the concerns expressed by my colleague and friend Nancy Flanagan as she wrote about television’s fixation on singing as a competitive event. She maintains that our voices are immutable–a very personal aspect of ourselves, as unique and unchangeable as fingerprints. When someone says, “I don’t have a good voice,” it’s tantamount to saying “I don’t have a good face.” Your voice is your voice.
Well, sometimes your answer is your answer. And sometimes your answer may be as good as anyone else’s if you just had a chance to explain it. I know someone out there will read this and think, “Oh good grief! Last week it was about the flaws in test design. Is she now going to say there are no wrong answers?”
Of course there are wrong answers. But I’m not comfortable with assuming all the right answers have already been determined and the measure of an educated mind is our ability to recall someone else’s right answer. I say that because I have experienced it. Can a man walk on the moon? Is it possible to look inside a human heart and repair it? Can you carry a whole library in your pocket? The answer to all of those questions is YES, but when I graduated from high school, the answer to all was NO. The answers changed because someone decided “the right answer” just might be wrong.
I get why we have to “Zip It!” in the hall, but it still bothers me because silence isn’t the natural state of early adolescents. They talk a lot, and they talk loudly. They interrupt each other and their teachers. They are impulsive and often inappropriate. But they are also curious and passionate. They want to know, but they want to retain the right to challenge everything they are told. While they may come up with wrong answers, they deserve the right to defend their thinking. And when we take away the opportunity to challenge the existing answers, then we limit their ability to think for themselves.
I wonder, do adults subconsciously want to constrain the thinking of children? Do we resent their challenge to the rightness of our answers? Do we feel threatened by their formulation of questions that we never thought to ask? Do we fear being marginalized by their solutions that may leave us behind?
Do we really want them to “make their own kind of music and sing their own kind of song?” Maybe what really worries us is that we won’t be able to sing along. Maybe that’s why we seem to prefer the sound of silence in our classrooms and schools and accountability systems.
# # #
I spend a lot of time out of classrooms in solidary endeavors.
Most of those endeavors feature the background track of television or podcast audio.
So, although I might be alone, there is still conversation, scripted or unscripted, in the room and that doesn’t take into consideration the inordinate amount of time I talk to myself or comment on things in my life to myself.
Being forced to spend a long time with only one’s thoughts (at least in my case) can be quite challenging. My unmoored mind wanders for miles and into some interesting, odd and/or disturbing places.
Don’t we all, as a universe, live in such constantly noisy environments that it might do us (and our students) some good to turn it all off (except our brains) and enjoy or be challenged by the sounds of silence?
Hello darkness my old friend.