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Learning to Listen

It is paradoxical that listening is the easiest way to learn but the hardest study skill to master. If you love to listen you will gain knowledge, and if you incline your ear you will become wise. – SIRACH

INTEREST MEASUREMENT TEST

1 Do you hear the names of people who are introduced to you?

2 Are you waiting to listen when your teacher begins to speak or do you miss the beginning remarks?

3 Are you thinking of what you are going to say next while someone is speaking to you?

4 Are you addicted to the fatal belief that you can listen to two things at once?

5 Have you ever consciously tested yourself to see how much you can remember of what is said to you?

If the answer to each of these questions is an honest “No,” you need not despair. You can console yourself that you are with the great majority. You can also resolve to train yourself to listen and be successful in the training.

While listening is the easiest and quickest of all the ways to learn, learning to listen—and to use listening as one of the most effective of all the learning processes—is the hardest of all the learning processes to master. Your teachers have been able to help you learn to read and to think, but it is almost impossible for the teacher to give more than awareness-aid to the process of listening. It must be almost wholly self-taught. It was not emphasized in your early training; it is the least susceptible of all the learning processes to discipline; and it is never accomplished except by active and continued practice. Few ever achieve it, but those who do are counted among the students who learn the most, and the persons in society most desirable to know.

Now to learn to think while being taught presupposes the other difficult art of paying attention. Nothing is more rare: listening seems to be the hardest thing in the world and misunderstanding the easiest, for we tend to hear what we think we are going to hear, and too often we make it so. In a lifetime one is lucky to meet six or seven people who know how to attend: the rest, some of whom believe themselves well-bred and highly educated, have for the most part fidgety ears; their span of attention is as short as the mating of a fly. They seem afraid to lend their mind to another’s thought, as if it would come back to them bruised and bent. This fear is of course fatal to sociability, and Lord Chesterfield was right when he wrote his son that the power of attention was the mark of a civilized man. The baby cannot attend, the savage and the boor will not. It is the boorishness of inattention that makes pleasant discussion turn into stupid repetitive argument, and that doubles the errors and mishaps of daily life.¹

Before books and printing, the primary element in acquiring knowledge was listening. A “lecture” originally meant a “reading” from some precious manuscript. The reader read slowly and stopped to explain difficult passages to his listeners. The process has changed; reading is no doubt the primary element in acquiring knowledge, but listening remains the second most important element.

Why is listening, doubtless competing with the proper use of time for first among good study methods, the most difficult of the learning processes? The practices of seeing (reading), writing, and thinking are exercised within the person. But listening takes on the complexity of the listener having to coordinate their mental powers with an outside force—the person or thing to which the listener is listening. This demands the discipline of subjecting the mind of the listener to that of the speaker.

The second problem in learning to listen arises from lack of associated control. When you learn to read, your eyes control the speed with which you read. When you write there is actual physical control in your hand. In thinking, the analysis of thought travels at exactly the speed capacity of your mind. But when you begin to train yourself to be a good listener, you are faced with a difficulty not unlike that of trying to drive a car without brakes. You can think four times as fast as the average teacher can speak.

Only by demanding of yourself the most unswerving concentration and discipline can you hold your mind on the track of the speaker. This can be accomplished if the listener uses the free time to think around the topic—“listening between the lines” as it is sometimes called. It consists of anticipating the teacher’s next point, summarizing what has been said, questioning in silence the accuracy or importance of what is being taught, putting the teacher’s thoughts into one’s own words, and trying to discern the test or examination questions which will be formed from this material. If you can train yourself to do this you will: (1) save yourself much precious time by not having to read what has already been taught; and (2) you can give a more thoughtful and acceptable answer either in the give and take of class discussion or on a written test.

When you have learned to adjust your speed of thinking to the rate of a speaker, you have added two valuable elements to your character: (1) ability to discipline your mind to the present; and (2) you have made yourself a follower. Your mind performs in time, but it tries desperately to steer your thoughts into the pleasant, relaxing, reverie of past time; or toward the freedom of unlimited speculation and dreams which the future provides.

The classroom is the place to learn, and the classroom is the place to learn to listen. One of the most complimentary comments a teacher can make about you is, “Always attentive in class.” It carries with it many connotations: good classroom manners (posture, responsiveness, determined approach, etc.), a will to accomplish the job of learning, a desire to contribute your part, and above all an awareness that the classroom is an important place for you. If you can train yourself to listen, all these things become a natural part of you.

Learning to listen is learning to follow a leader. The student who listens is the student who learns, because listening, above everything else, makes the task of acquiring knowledge easier. The wise student listens with both their ears and eyes, hearing what the teacher is saying, and, at the same time, watching closely when the teacher is writing on the board or pointing on the map. When directions are given they are written down quickly, and one is never insulting to the teacher by asking, “Should we write these down?” Again, when the teacher says: “This is important”— “It is essential that you know this”—“You will need this later,” the wise student hears such words as a signal that introduces material which will be needed for further understanding of the course, for tests later, or for the examination at the end of the course.

Poor listening is worse than none. A student put it correctly when he said, “There are only two kinds of listening, (1) good listening and (2) not listening at all. The student who half-listens not only misses a lot, but distorts what is heard, mixes truth with error, and makes the mistake of learning mistakes. Gradually, the student develops the bad habit of closing one’s ears and eyes until proper listening could not be accomplished even if desired. Then the student wonders why he or she works so hard and makes such little progress.

Now is the time to learn to listen. Next year and the next you will be given more and more in class that you must remember. In college more than half your knowledge is acquired through listening; in life, in the rapid tempo of the age in which we live, perhaps more than half your knowledge will be acquired by listening.

Listening takes will power; and it requires actions that will train the mind to behave itself. To that end the following suggestions are offered to help you become a good listener in class and in the lecture hall.

SUGGESTIONS FOR BETTER LISTENING IN CLASS

1 Get ready to listen as soon as the bell has rung. Usually important information is given at the beginning and at the end of class. If you practice listening attentively the first ten minutes of the period, you will develop the power to listen to the entire period.

2 Watch the teacher closely. Listen to every word he says, turn a deaf ear to all other sounds, and keep your eyes glued upon the teacher. Practice listening around the subject. Listen to other students when they speak. Hear what they say, note the good points, spot the errors, and be ready to supply information they lack.

3 Have your ear tuned for directions. Your work can be lightened greatly by following the teacher’s DIRECTIONS; the teacher is working for you and is trying to help you. But if you do not listen and do ten problems rather than the tenth problem, you haven’t saved much of what is most precious of all in school—time.

4 Adapt yourself to each teacher’s methods. Some teachers unconsciously bury valuable information under a mass of accessory detail. Here you must overcome their difficulty; you must listen so attentively that you will be able to find the important parts of information. Sometimes a clue can be found in repeated phrases, such as: “The important point,” “we must remember,” etc. Other teachers almost blueprint the information for you. They enumerate: One, two, three, etc., they outline or diagram on the blackboard as they talk. Never affront them by asking, “Do you want us to remember this?” You can be sure that they are making the information clear for just that reason.

5 Check every tendency toward mind-wandering. The brain, the ear, the eye must be working together if you are to hear what is being said. How many times have you asked a question in class, only to be humiliated by finding that the teacher had just finished an explanation of the same. Mind-wandering can be checked by taking notes. Writing is one of the best ways to train yourself to listen. In order to write you force yourself to listen.

6 Listen critically, thoughtfully, and understandingly. If your listening can do the same. Test each statement as you hear it. If you do not understand a point, ask for an explanation then or after the class.

SUGGESTIONS FOR BETTER LISTENING IN THE LECTURE HALL

1 Don’t enter the hall and slouch in a back seat. How would you feel if you were the speaker? By that act you are insulting the speaker—the very act says for you, “I am here. I will listen half–heartedly, if at all; just try to teach me anything.” Always fill the lecture room from the front; take the front seat if possible.

2 Put yourself in the speaker’s place. Perhaps for every minute the speaker talks, he has spent three hours in preparation. Would you like to see such effort on your part wasted?

3 Respect is essential. Do nothing to distract the speaker. Leave your knitting at home and dispose of your chewing gum outside the door.

4 Save your questions until the end of the lecture, unless the speaker asks you to speak up if you wish a point made clear.

5 Remember that you can always learn. Never approach a classroom with the feeling that the speaker cannot teach you.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1 According to Jacques Barzun, how many people are you likely to meet in your lifetime who know how to listen?

2 Explain why listening is the easiest and quickest way to learn.

3 Explain the two conditions which make listening the most difficult of all the learning processes to master.

4 Listening improves the whole of classroom attributes; explain.

5 State briefly the five suggestions for improving your ability to listen in the class.

¹Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, Little, Brown and Company, 1945, p. 35.