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The other day at school “the children” seemed especially LOUD. While it wasn’t all the children and some individuals certainly stood out, there was also a kind of arms war of volume that I myself got caught up in, as we all struggled to be heard over the ever rising din. I am by no means a teacher that requires my students to be silent. I appreciate a raucous, rambunctious, and gregarious classroom where kids are talking to each other, squawking, laughing, squealing, singing, using language to communicate, learn and express themselves. I sometimes need to rein the kids in at meeting time or demand that a particular group or child pipes down, but in general I appreciate and encourage voices that sometimes to an outsider might seem loud, abrasive, disruptive and cacophonous. Today however they were too loud and I wanted to “turn down the volume,” no easy feat when one is dealing with children, human beings. It was so loud that nobody could hear nothing ( or at least that is how I felt).

The worst aural situation involving children and adults is an authoritarian silence where an individual teacher or institution enforces silence through force, intimidation, “dark sarcasm and thought control.” Places where children cower in anxiety and become overly sensitive to how they might disturb the powers that be.  Places where children are afraid to speak, where they learn to keep their questions, fears and desires to themselves. Places where the modes of response and engagement are so rigidly enforced and predetermined that the child’s voice is silenced in speaking. Places where the silence is so deafening that it howls and rips through the child’s soul and suffocates their voice. Places that clang, reverberate and echo with unexpressed anger, desire and fear.

Scene  from the movie Cool Hand Luke where the prison boss says about Luke (Paul Newman) that until he gets used to wearing his chains they will continue to have a failure to communicate!

There are two untenable situations in the classroom ( and the home) vis-a-vis sound in relation to teaching, learning and the wellbeing of the children. If the classroom is so loud and chaotic that people can’t talk to each other, play, draw, read, write and create; if the kids are becoming distraught, lashing out, or so excited that the situation threatens to get out hand, and it is unsafe, or if the rest of the kids are unable to play, work, learn in productive ways because of how loud some kids are: it’s too loud! If the classroom is silent the majority of the time, if children are not allowed to talk with each other, if children are not allowed to use language to explore and learn about the world, if kids learn that they are not supposed to express their feelings, and if they can’t sometimes cry, laugh, squeal, and yes even yell: it’s too quiet. Between these two unworkable extremes, individual teachers, children, teaching teams, schools, and families find what works for them.

I have been reading One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest To Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton. Gordon Hempton is an audio ecologist who has circled the world making beautiful recordings of the natural world including Global Sunrise, Cricket Thunder, American Prairie, and The Earth is a Global Jukebox.” His latest project is to work to preserve “one square inch of silence” in the Hoh (temperate) Rain Forest in Olympic National Forest. The book chronicles his cross country trip as he carries his decibel meter through urban and natural spaces, talking to people about the loss of quiet in the modern industrial world, and fighting to protect quiet natural places in  the USA and around the world. 

“I’ve come to think of silence in two ways. Inner silence is that feeling for a reverence for life. It is a feeling we can carry with us no matter where we go, a sacred silence that can remind us of the difference between of right and wrong, even on a noisy city street. It resides at a soul level.”

This is the silence, the calm abiding peace and quiet that I associate with meditation, taming and training the mind. As an adult this sort of quiet can be very elusive. Regrets, anxieties, obsessive, repetitive emotions, desires and internal conversations and monologues can drown out the quiet voice of the soul and a sacred, reverence for life. I recall at a very difficult, lonely time in my life that I had to have sports talk radio on all the time when I wasn’t doing something, so as to drown out the negative despairing voices in my head. This sort of quiet is elusive for children for other reasons. For them being present in the moment is very often a matter of doing something, being in a non-conceptual flow, and thus a meditative quiet can seem very forced and artificial ( this is of course often true for adults as well!) But I often “catch” kids in this soul calm when they are busy and engaged with something even if it is often teetering into over-excitement or exhaustion. I also try to help them with strategies including: taking a breath, meditating, listening with “deer ears,” listening to one another, music, paying attention to natural sounds to help them have more agency in accessing that sacred silence.

“Outer silence is different. It is what we experience when we are in a naturally quiet place without the modern noise intrusions that can remind us of modern issues beyond our control, such as economic aggression and the violation of human rights. Outer silence invites us to open up our senses and get connected, once again to everything around us. No matter in what direction you look it is all the same connection. Outer silence can recharge my inner silence. It fills me with gratitude and patience. I don’t think I have been either tired or hungry while in a place of outer silence. The experience of being there is so complete. And then, after I return home, I sleep long and hard.”

We need to get outside to have any chance to participate in this outer silence. And since we live and go to school in the city we don’t have the luxury of of being too precious, particular, or perfect in our search for outer silence. We have to get out into a park or the woods. It helps to be near a river or in the woods where we can hear the water burbling or the wind blowing through the trees. Making times where we are explicitly quiet and “walking like foxes” and listening like deer disrupts the routinized habitual functionality of the senses and our tendency to tune things out or focus on very specific things. Exploring our hearing range and investigating the softest sounds that we can hear gives kids a sense of the range and the power of their ears. Interacting with animals by listening to them, of course birds, but also dogs, cats, cows, goats, pigs, squirrels, crickets, frogs, cicadas, bees, raccoons, fish, coyotes, helps us connect with the inter-community of living beings that we are all a part of. And as we open up our senses and attune our ears to “the whole place” where we are at, the intricacy and interdependence, the grandeur and the beauty of the world of which we are but a part, begins to dawn on us.  Appreciating and connecting with the world around us through sound paradoxically helps us appreciate relative stretches and spaces of quiet and peace.

A poignant moment in  One Square Inch of Silence occurs when Gordon Hempton is in the car with his teenage daughter and is trying to share his love of “silence” with his daughter, who is tuning him out with her headphones, listening to music, and texting with her friends. “As I pull back on the highway, I think about an unwelcome silence: the silence between a parent and a teenage child.” Teaching and learning are a lot like a good conversation where listening is just as important as anything anyone might say. So I will end this meditation on sound, noise, and quiet by invoking  Psalm 98 :

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises!/Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody!/With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord!/Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it!/Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together.

In the biblical context this joyful noise is an appreciation and welcoming of god, but for our purposes let this joyful noise signify the sound of happy children playing, exploring the world, making sense of it, and expressing a profound sense of delight in being alive. And just as surely we need to be alive to, to have ears for, the earth, the places where we live, learn and grow: a river valley, a mountain top, an ocean beach, an open field, and yes, even a city street. As teachers, parents and adults we need to affirm both the joyful noise of our children and the inner and outer silence that makes hearing possible, that makes everything possible, makes everything matter.

The story of the week is Listen by Holly Mcgee and illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre. The story beautifully evokes both the inner and outer silence we need, to be totally open to the world and its wonders. “Listen  with your heart. It is your ears, your eyes,  your nose, your mouth, your hands. Your heart  can hear everything, see everything,  smell everything,  taste everything, touch everything. Your heart can hold everything. Including the world–its darkness and its light.Including your story, including my story– including the story of all of us.”

The song of the week is a live version of the Who’s “Pure and Easy.” The Who once held the  record for the loudest rock and roll show (1976) measured at 120 decibels. Townsend has always been obsessed with noise, music, creation, destruction, polyphony, cacophony, order and chaos, unity and division, peace and war. Yes “[t]here once was a note pure and easy. Playing so free like a breathe rippling by/The note is eternal/I hear it, it sees me/Forever we blend as forever we die.” But there is also “[g]as on the hillside, oil in the teacup,/Watch all the chords of life lose their joy,/Distortion becomes somehow pure in it’s wildness,/The note that began all can also destroy.”