The Teacher Who Learned to Listen

There was a teacher who had, by the beginning of her thirtieth year in the profession, said approximately eleven million sentences in front of a class. She had been an excellent teacher for most of them. Her students loved her. Her colleagues respected her. Her exam results were among the best in the district. Her sentences were carefully chosen, brightly delivered, and, she was proud to say, not once boring.

One Monday morning in October, a fourteen-year-old girl in her third-period class raised her hand and said, 'Miss, can I ask something?' The teacher, who was already halfway into a sentence about the causes of the First World War, said, 'Of course, but hold it for the end,' and continued. At the end of the lesson, the bell rang, the girl gathered her books, and left without asking her question.

The next Monday, the same girl raised her hand at the same point in the same kind of lesson. The teacher, who was in the middle of a good sentence about the Treaty of Versailles, said, 'Just wait, we'll come to it,' and continued. At the end of the lesson, the bell rang, the girl gathered her books, and left.

The third Monday, the girl did not raise her hand.

The teacher noticed. It was not that she had been paying particular attention. It was that she had, for two Mondays in a row, seen a hand go up at approximately eleven-eighteen, and this Monday no hand had gone up. Something in her — teacher-instinct, mother-instinct, human-instinct, some old wiring — went quiet at the absence of it. She stopped talking. She stopped mid-sentence, in fact, about the League of Nations.

The class went, in the way classes do when a teacher stops mid-sentence, unusually still.

She said, 'I am going to be quiet now for two minutes. If any of you has a question, or a thought, or a thing you have wanted to say and haven't been able to, please say it. Nothing you say will be graded. Nothing you say will be repeated. I am just going to listen.'

The silence went on for what felt, to her, like an hour. It was, by her own count, forty-seven seconds. Then a boy at the back said, quietly, 'My grandfather was in a war. He never talked about it. I don't know which war.' Then another student said, 'I don't understand why we call it a world war when most of the world wasn't in it.' Then the girl who had been raising her hand said, 'Miss, my brother's about the age those soldiers were. I keep thinking about that. Is that a stupid thing to think in a history lesson?'

The teacher, who had said eleven million sentences in front of that class over thirty years, found that she did not know what to say. She said, 'No. That is not a stupid thing to think in a history lesson. That is exactly the thing to think in a history lesson.' And the lesson, from that point, was different. It was not a lesson she had planned. It was, in some way she was still working out on the drive home, better than any lesson she had planned.

She kept the two minutes. Every Monday, from that October onward, she gave her class two minutes of silence in which she was not allowed to speak. She kept it for the rest of her career. In her retirement speech, twelve years later, she was asked what she would tell a young teacher just starting out. She thought about it. She said, 'Learn to teach well. Learn to explain, to structure, to grade. Learn all of that. And then, at least once a week, shut up for two minutes and see what the room says.'

This is not a lesson for teachers only. It is a lesson for every parent who has ever explained something at length to a child; every manager who has ever briefed a team; every doctor who has ever run through the diagnosis; every friend who has ever given good advice for eleven consecutive minutes. The people in front of us are not empty rooms into which we pour our sentences. They are full rooms, with their own weather, and if we do not sometimes stop and listen, we will never know what was already in the room when we walked in.