Allowing Silence
As a teacher, I have had to force myself to become comfortable with something I’ve always found terrifying: silence in the classroom. It is very difficult to be comfortable with silence, and yet it is so important.
I am the kind of person who tends toward anxiety and perfectionism, which I try to keep out of my teaching. It creeps in occasionally, however, and that usually happens during class when we are discussing something challenging from a novel. I find myself lecturing at my students about these complicated concepts, rather than allowing them to grapple with these ideas themselves, thus depriving them of something important: independent thought. If I just spoon-feed them every answer, I am doing them a disservice. They are not learning how to think about literature—they’re just learning what I think about particular pieces of literature.
Recently, when reading The Secret Garden with my 5th grade students, I consciously held myself back from lecturing when reading a challenging chapter. There is a chapter in the book called “The Magic,” wherein one of the main characters gives a speech to his friends about how there is a force working within him and within the garden—he doesn’t know what it is called, so he calls it “the Magic.” He proceeds to chant over and over, “The Magic is in me.” The Magic to which he is referring is life. This character has been barely living his ten-year-long life, bed-ridden with ailments he has given himself by throwing too many tantrums. He feels life coming back into himself as he cultivates life in his secret garden.
I wanted to illustrate this important idea to my students. I looked out at them, ready to launch into a lengthy explanation of “the Magic,” but stopped myself short. Instead, I asked, “What is ‘the Magic?’” Several students answered incorrectly. They said things like “self-confidence,” “the power of nature,” and “friendship.” It was important that I allow these incorrect answers. In my first days as a teacher, they would have made me feel like a failure. I would have thought, “I’m not doing a good job. They should know the answer and the fact that they don’t makes me a bad teacher,” and then I would have begun to lecture and explain. This time I allowed them to be wrong.
I allowed these answers into our discussion, and rather than explain and jabber about what the actual answer was, I just said, “These things are related to the Magic, but they are not the Magic itself. What is the Magic?” You could hear a pin drop in my classroom it was so quiet.
Eventually, a student raised his hand. I called on him. He said confidently, “It’s life.”
Again, I felt the urge to agree and then elaborate for him. Again, I stopped myself. I said, “Yes. Exactly. Go on.”
My student continued and said, “Colin feels like he is coming back to life with the garden. He wasn’t really living before, and now he is.”
Very quickly, this turned into a lively subject of discussion. Other students eagerly raised their hands to add on to what this student said, and to connect it to other parts of the book. It was a fabulous discussion, and it would not have happened if I had jabbered the answer at them rather than allow them to figure it out.
Silence allows a student the space he or she needs to think about something and come to a conclusion. I often forget that I am older and more experienced with studying literature than they are, so what comes immediately to me will sometimes take a minute with them… And that minute is invaluable. That minute allows them to gain some of the experience I have with thinking about literature, and to learn better how to study the subject. If I just tell my students the answers, they’re not learning a thought process or a field of study—they’re just learning what I think about The Secret Garden, which won’t serve them nearly as well.
I also tend to forget that I teach really good books—which means that they do a pretty good job on their own of telling my students what they’re about. While lecturing certainly has an important place in the classroom, it is vitally important that a teacher of literature allow the books to do their job without interference. I must allow my students the time and space to think, without permitting my perfectionism to interrupt them with corrections.
My students have taught me a valuable lesson over the past couple of years: sometimes it’s better to just be quiet.