Final Web Event: Losing My Voice

Somewhere between high school and college, I lost my voice.

Sitting the classroom circle, the same question is constantly circling and circling around my head: why, after all these meetings, books, essay, movies, tests, am I still silent? How can I come back to my room and excitedly recount what was discussed in class to my roommate, when I’ve left class without uttering a word? How is my eagerness to learn and to learn from the others in my classes untranslatable in my failure to externalize my thoughts?

Why is my silence such a hindrance?

Somehow in my head I’ve myself small, retreating inwards and renouncing any space my voice could take up in the conversations in class. Not just in this class, but all of them. Midway through my ESem class, I found myself in a conference with my ESem professor, assessing my participation in class. I was voicing regrets that I hadn’t contributed more to the discussion, for I was constantly hesitant to enter my perspective into the forefront of critical interpretation of one of the texts we’d read in class. My professor too wondered why my voice had waned to silence since the start of class, when I would participate regularly.

Why hadn’t I spoken more? Had I chose silence? Or had I fallen into comfortable shyness?

At first my answer to that question was that I had chosen silence, preferring the submissive role in the conversation, hoping that when I did choose to speak, I would something piercing and worthwhile. That idealistic expectation for myself proved to be a standard that I held myself too highly to. Adhering to my unsightly expectation became nerve-wracking and quite often deeply disappointing.

Thinking longer upon my silence, I realize that I didn’t choose it—I settled for it. Silence was my solace. A solitary, self-contained space where I housed my rarely outwardly publically expressed opinions.  A space where they could not heard by others, where they would not be misconstrued or judged (not even in a judgment-free, purely academic sense). Peter Elbow, a proponent of silence as a teaching method, said, “When we do not speak, we may listen, hear, understand, even communicate in other ways. Silence may function as an altogether alternative means of communication, not dependent on speech for fulfillment.” It’s true, my silence gave way to my internalization of other’s viewpoints and arguments during discussion. But, retrospectively, what was I communicating by being silent?

Of talking in class, Jane Tompkins says, “Talking in class involves a kind of formal exhibition of the self different from what takes place in ordinary conversation. You’re putting on a performance in front of a large group of people, and the performance is being judged.” Perhaps at times I was afraid of being judged for my lack of experience with feminism. But simultaneously I felt the atmosphere of our classroom was understanding, welcoming. I wasn’t expected to be an expert, yet I still held myself to an impossible standard of having to contribute only comments that were profound. Why wasn’t I more willing to voice concerns and confusions?

Tompkins also states that, “To not to be part of the conversation seemed shameful, as admission of weakness, a sign that perhaps one did not really have to right to exist after all.” In hardly ever participating and having a presence in class, was I not fulfilling my role as a student? My past 18 years of socialization had me believing that there was a rigid divide between teacher and student. I saw teachers as untouchable, expertly knowledgeable authoritative figures –that was their role. My past few months of college and tried very steadfastly to break down that barrier, to scramble that structure, to distribute that power. As Lisa Delpit believes, teachers are not the only experts in the classroom. Students have their own expertise of knowledge; the classroom, too, is their space to share it.

But in battling my self-suppression, I’m left to wonder: what kind of teacher am I going to be? If I’m here studying English and Education, now is the time to think critically on how I’m going to structure my classroom. Will I use silence in my classroom, will I create an environment where shy students will feel comfortable to contribute the conversation even if it’s occasionally,  will I have an friendly enough relationship with my students so that they would feel welcome to come to me after school if they needed?

For a long time I’ve been told that I would make a good teacher, but I’ve always wondered exactly what it was in me that people saw. Even from an early age, people suggested that I’d go into education. Other children’s mothers during a pause in a parking lot conversation with my mother would gaze down at me, with my khaki shirt and pigtails, and ask, “Maggie, what do you want to be when you group up?” In my elementary-age wisdom, I would answer, “I don’t know.” Time after time, no matter the person or scenario, I’d get the same response, “I can see you as a teacher. Why don’t you do that?” From an early age it felt as it my vision was narrowed, all other professions blacked out by the suggestion that I have a career in education. For the rest of my elementary education, I put any consideration of being a teacher in the recesses of my mind. What subject would I teach, anyway? Then, when my seventh grade teacher told me during my free period in his class that he had read aloud my essay on treacherous lies and life of Greek hero Theseus and hoped I hadn’t minded—him making my essay a prototype to supplement other student’s learning, coupled with his continual support and encouragement of my writing, singled out and fueled my passion for English.

For a good two years in high school, I was dead-set on becoming a book editor. Teaching was still in the recesses of my mind, and it hadn’t floated to the surface of my consciousness until my senior year, when I was sitting in my AP English class, across the room from one of my all-time favorite teachers. Every night after that class I’d find myself excitedly taking my classroom conversations and driving the dinnertime conversation with them. I was telling myself, if I ever become a teacher, I want to be like that. I want to create the same warm, entertaining and intriguing, all-inclusive environments for my students.

It all came together: I wanted to become an English teacher.

But first I must find my voice. Tompkins, a teacher that struggled with talking in class, said, “…talking came from both fear and love. Maybe the reason I became a teacher was that I loved to talk so much.” I think a part of me will always be a little nervous talking in front of others. With the refining of my voice over time, though, I am hoping this fear will be quelled.

That brings me back to the question: what kind of teacher am I going to be?

In terms of silence and teaching, I’m a proponent of the notion to implement silent exercises in the classroom. Elbow believes that:

In this silence, are we more together or apart? The question gets at the paradox of it. One feels the distance, awkwardness. And yet the communion is deeper too. . . . [Silence is] a chance to attend to what's inner. Not that chatter in the brain. Actually, of course there is a chatter— for me, most of the time, anyway. It's louder in the silence, but I can sort of peep around the chatter just a bit and wonder what's behind it. Get a few glimpses of something quieter behind it. . . .

As a future educator, I’m interested in creating a space in my classroom for silence so that my students have the opportunity to “attend to [their] inner.” My hope would be that opening up the room to silence would give students an opportunity to listen to the chatter in their minds and sort through it in order to contribute more thoughtful, patient answers to any concepts proposed in class.

Anne Dalke noted when she and a Haverford colleague jointly taught a class in which they implemented exercises of silence, “Opening class with a period of silence may have well induced me to talk more than I might have otherwise: it gave me time to father my thoughts, to figure out ways to articulate them forcefully.”

Even if the exercise is successful, I still have this fear: what if I overextend myself after I gather up my thoughts, and take up my student’s space in the classroom to demonstrate to me their expertise? I observed this happening when we were doing silent exercises in class. When we did the five-seconds of silence before speaking, most of those who participated in this exercise often spoke impulsively, without waiting the allotted time, and often they held the attention of the room by counting to five out loud. This provided no time for any others to add their input to the disjointed conversation that was underway, lest they interrupt the person’s counting. Those who spoke during this exercise had a lot to say, as they had the time to develop their thoughts and “figure out ways to articulate them forcefully.”

I want to create a space for my students to be able to articulate their ideas and not feel as though they are competing for class time; I ponder the possibility of this. Perhaps this will depend on my role as a facilitator of discussion, where I will have to master appropriate pacing of discussions—when a discussion needs to be reeled back and refocused, and when a discussion needs to be guided in a more active direction. But that will come with training and time.

Just like I became prone to self-suppressing for fear of taking up space, before I become a teacher, I have to consider how much space in the classroom is appropriate for me to take up and how much I want to leave open for my students.

Some of the most powerful moments that Anne’s Haverford colleague Kaye found during the duration of their class together not in the moments when “…we successfully nudged our reluctant students into articulation, but rather those in which some students refused to speak or even choose to excuse themselves from the conversation.”  

Sometimes language is not the only thing that has validity. Elbow feels as though, “The silence has helped me hear the voices better, to listen to myself. I feel more connected to myself, more grounded…”

When reflecting on her childhood experience with talking in class, Tompkins would raise her hand to “help the teacher out” after a lengthy silence preceding a teacher’s proposed question. She did this because she believed that she was modeling an ideal of good behavior. She did this out a sense of social obligation, whereas Elbow found that, “In fact, I've always been interested in people who don't write or talk— the silent ones. When they say something, their words often seem remarkably powerful: more umph, more conviction, more presence— their words more ‘gathered up.’”

At the crossroads of these teachers and their varying theories, there are two kinds (and possibly more) of ways silence can be perceived in a classroom. It can either been seen as “an unreadiness, an incapacity, an absence…” from the conversation, and the way in which to remedy that is to make oneself active and known in the conversation, such as Tompkins belief that “I feel if I don’t move or say something soon, I’ll just disappear.”

The other side of this perspective is being able as an educator to step back from constant performance, and allow students time to develop their thoughts with silence. Silence is a space created for reflection, fathering thoughts with patience, then letting them grow into statements of clarity and deeper meaning. After that the only part that is hard, perhaps the hardest, is articulating those thoughts clearly and concisely to a crowd of classmates so that they can learn from you as you are learning from them.  

Anne and Kaye’s “classroom performance was from the first a difficult dance of authority and humility and the choreography was not always smooth.”   

It’s difficult to say what kind of teacher I’ll be. But I’ll take my experience in this class with me when I’m teaching and I’ll take our discussions about silence and taking up space into careful consideration when trying to manage outspoken students and students who are silent like I was. Once I find my voice, and once I can once again feel confidence when I’m speaking, then I’ll truly try to implement silence into my teaching methods because in the classroom setting, I believe that silence is a time for self-reflection. Too much silence is not communicative enough and may cause students to drift too far into their own thinking and analysis, while not enough becomes students scrambling to articulate their ideas competitively. But I know that for any educator the “dance of authority and humility” is a difficult one.  As in nearly any situation, equilibrium is best.

With my awareness of the implications of silence in a classroom setting, I hope that to the best of my ability I can use my voice to encourage the voices of others, especially the silent ones, to speak in a space where the feel comfortable, but challenged. I just have to work on finding my voice.

And who knows, maybe in the future I lose my voice again, but this time it’ll be because I’m talking too much.

Word Cited

Anne Dalke. “Silence is so Windowful: Class as Antechamber.” Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach: Meditations on the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 95-114 (in our password protected file).

Lisa Delpit. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children.” Harvard Educational Review 58, 3 (August 1988): 280-298.

Peter Elbow. “Silence:  A Collage.” Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 173-183

Jane Tompkins. “Talking in Class.” A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. Reading, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1996. 62-65.