Tag: Listening

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Asking Questions

Last week, I had lunch with a colleague. As we parted, he said, “I enjoyed this, but next I have to ask you questions. It felt like you were interviewing me.”

This morning, I arrived to class 15 minutes early, and I had a ten minute conversation with a student about her two brothers, her dad’s motorcycle fascination, her summer job as a lifeguard, and her athletic injury. In the other five minutes, I discovered a a student had been playing Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” on repeat.

At lunch, I asked questions of two other friends between bites of food, discovering that one had taught Spanish in public high schools for 16 years and another had been a youth minister at a church plant in New Zealand.

During office hours, I recorded an interview with a senior English major about her honors project.

This, apparently, is one of my daily practices.

After lunch today, my friend asked me why I ask so many questions. I replied that so often, people never ask someone else how they’re doing because they just want to talk about themselves. I decided I would be the outlier and try to address that imbalance. I like hearing about how others are doing.

During the interview today, I was particularly engaged. I wanted to know what my student would say, and while I had questions to get to, I was never preoccupied with the next question while the student was providing a current answer. It was a real conversation. I left having learned something and, hopefully, I gave the student a chance to articulate some things that would otherwise have gone unsaid.

The only problem is that question asking can be a way of hiding. I can ask questions for selfish reasons: because I don’t feel like talking or feel like I don’t have anything smart to say or because I want to be seen as a good question asker.

The way I know my question asking is doing some good is if I’m not thinking about the person I’m having a conversation with more than myself. I pray have more opportunities like today to exercise this habit: informal conversations with students, longer conversations with colleagues from different disciplines, and celebratory interviews with budding scholars. I also pray that I help my interlocutors feel heard, and that when it’s time for me to open my mouth, I add something to the conversation.

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Asking the Question

How can I help?

What can I pray for?

These are just two questions I’ve asked my students repeatedly over the past two weeks, and I’ve been bowled over by the answers I’ve received.

Yes, they want help with writing. Great. That’s what I’m here for.

But they also have real prayer concerns that come from places of pain and guilt and shame.

The two are not unrelated. I am asking them questions because I’m teaching them how to read and write more effectively. My ethos as a Christian comes from my ability to show Christ to them through our shared coursework.

My students’ concerns are bigger than the course, however, and when I ask a spirit-led question and have the God-given patience to listen, I am right where God wants me to be.

I can’t address every need I here, even if it is more about writing than it is someone’s life. I know who can though. I know that He hears my questions too.

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Taking Time to Listen

I had 10 minutes.

To make it to my next class that’s a seven minute walk across campus.

To collect this pile of papers on my teacher’s desk because I rely on handouts so much that it takes a flurry of shuffling and paper clips after class to get things into or the kind of order necessary to even fit inside my bag.

To erase the board that’s filled, edge-to-edge, with class comments about the play Hamlet.

To thank my colleague from kinesiology who not only sat in on today’s class but brought with him a medical company skull for our performance of Act 5 Scene 1 (“Alas, poor Yorick!”) and actually read lines as the gravedigger.

And there they were, standing in front of me, two students with real questions about the play. One wanted to know more about Ophelia. Why did we keep calling it a suicide? Wasn’t it an accidental death? One wanted to discuss the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in more detail. She had always read the speech as referring to two responses to internal struggles.

And despite the fact that I had talked on Tuesday about listening and responding…

I was short and curt with my students in my haste to get out the door.

In reality, I wanted to sit and talk with my colleague for as long as I could about what worked and didn’t work in the class. The questions my students asked demanded more from me and asked for answers I couldn’t provide in 30 seconds. So

I had the chance to apologize later, which I’m grateful for. I want students to want to talk with me after class, especially after a class like that one.

Maybe that means coming to my office and discussing the question there. Maybe it means admitting I don’t have answers to the questions they have.

I know that it definitely means I need to listen, to wait, to be patient.

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Listen and Respond

[S]uit the action to the word, the word to the action… – Hamlet

I once had a whole batch of School Certificate answers on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by boys whose form-master was apparently a breeder of poultry. Everything that Chaucer had said in describing Chauntecleer and Pertelote was treated by them simply and solely as evidence about the precise breed of these two birds. And, I must admit, the result was very interesting. They proved beyond doubt that Chauntecleer was very different from our modern specialised strains and much closer to the Old English ‘barn-door fowl’. But I couldn’t help feeling that they had missed something. – CS Lewis

Paul admonishes the Roman church to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. There’s an aptness there, a symmetry, a decorum. Hamlet wants his actors to adopt a similar method. Match what you say with what you do. Respond accordingly. Reciprocate. Continue reading “Listen and Respond”