Silence

Why is silence in the classroom so terrifying? I just want to muse for a moment on the issue of silence in the classroom.

I'm reminded of a professor from my grad school years, Mary Budd Rowe, who had done research on what she called "wait time." She discovered that teachers barely waited one second after asking students a question and after hearing a student's response before beginning to talk again. She recommended, based on her research, that teachers wait for 3 (or more) seconds -- 1. 2. 3. -- before starting to talk. Teachers who did that, she found, ended up doing much less talking because their students did much more.

This discovery always fascinated me. And it's relevant to Abigail's story, which I'm still mining, because it makes me wonder: What's so scary about silence?

Ask and ye shall receive. I actually posed this question to the teachers in Abigail's Teacher Support Group o so long ago.

Here are their answers. What they're afraid of when silence falls in class is, they said,

• "that we'll stare back and forth and nothing will get done."
• "that the students are judging me and deciding I'm not being responsible."
• "the pressure of having all eyes on you."

These are pretty dire predictions. Imagine: Silence falls. The teacher stares at the students. The students stare back. The teacher continues to stare, as do the students. The clock ticks and time passes. The bell rings and the students exit the room. Nothing has gotten done.

Or this: Silence falls. The teacher stares at the students. They stare back, thinking, "I can't wait to get out of here to report how irresponsible this teacher is being for not filling every waking moment with her own voice."

Or this: Silence falls. The teacher becomes intensely self-conscious, wondering if his fly is down but not daring to check.

I share these scenarios to point out how ludicrous our fears can be if we follow them down. And I do recommend this approach to irrational fear (as opposed to rational fear, which is an appropriate response to real danger): follow it down to its logical conclusion to see how unlikely that conclusion is. It's like an exposure therapy thought experiment that can make us laugh at our scary fantasies.

But, ludicrous or not, the fact remains: silence can be irrationally terrifying.

Why?

I wonder: Is it because silence invites us to get real, to get back into our own bodies, to feel things, to make contact, to actually notice what is going on around us and respond in the moment? spontaneously?

Is there something dangerous about spontaneity? or being in our bodies? or feeling? or making real contact with people or with our thoughts or with other people's thoughts? Is there something dangerous about just dwelling in the moment? in public?

I don't know. These are genuine questions. If you have any answers to the mystery of why silence in the classroom is so terrifying, I'd love to hear them.

But one thing Abigail's story demonstrates: silence can be very productive. Because, even as her colleagues were making helpful suggestions as to what Abigail could do with her resistant students, she remained silent. And evidently what her silence signified was this: She was thinking.

That's what Mary Budd Rowe presumed students would be doing in the 3 seconds of silence their teachers should allow after questions and answers. It's undoubtedly what teachers want their students to be doing as often as possible. And surely teachers deserve a few seconds -- even more! -- to ponder and process and organize their own thoughts as they guide their students through the exciting and unpredictable morass of learning.

Yet another reason why I love this story: Abigail chose silence. She turned inward and thought about her students' silence. And she had an epiphany that, I daresay, could alter her teaching forever. Not a bad moment's work.