I’ll Become the Sea by Rebecca Rogers Maher Read Free Book Online

describing an island with a house and trees on a lake. She instructed them to draw the scene as accurately as possible, following her description.
    Tanya drew all of the details, but drew them backward, confusing left and right. Lisa sketched about half of the scene, leaving out the flag on the house, the boat on the water, and other small details she’d been too busy mugging at the class to hear.
    While Tanya and Lisa worked at the blackboard, the students in their seats drew the picture as well. Jane walked the rows as she read, glancing at their work. She sighed.
    She tried another approach. She asked them to jot down key words in the instructions as she read them and repeated every sentence three times, emphasizing the important details. They began writing as soon as she started speaking each sentence, then got lost in the middle and stopped, slamming their pencils down. Half the class turned their papers over and quit.
    “Why did you get frustrated?” Jane asked. “Daniel?”
    “It was hard. We didn’t hear you.”
    “You didn’t hear me? I said each sentence three times. Did you get distracted? Were you thinking about something else?”
    Several students called out, “Yes.”
    “What were you thinking about? Getting your pictures taken?”
    “Yes.”
    “Does this happen a lot when I give directions, that you’re thinking about something else?”
    A few children nodded.
    “What do you think we can do about that?”
    “You can keep saying it over and over!” Tanya called.
    Jane agreed that she could say the directions more than once. “What can you do about it, to help you hear the important information that you need to know?”
    “We can listen.”
    “You can listen? How would you do that? What could you do to help you listen more effectively?”
    A hand shot up. “We can open our ears.”
    Another hand. “We can listen.”
    “Okay. You can listen. But what does that mean?”
    “We can listen,” Lisa nodded vigorously.
    Jane took a deep breath. “Let me show you one way to listen.”
    She sat down at a desk with a notebook and pen. At her request, a nearby student accepted the passage and began reading.
    Jane looked at the ceiling and wiggled her pen on the desk. The pen cap flew off and sailed across the floor. She stretched out to retrieve it and fell out of the chair.
    The students laughed.
    Climbing back into her seat, Jane hung off the edge with her legs extended. She mock-slapped the boy next to her. “Get away from my desk!”
    She opened her notebook and started drawing. She raised her hand and asked to go the bathroom and sang an off-tune song under her breath and clicked her pen against the desktop.
    When she was done, Jane asked them why it might have been hard for her to listen while moving all about like that.
    “Because you’re not listening.”
    “Explain to me what you mean. What was I doing instead of listening?”
    “You were hanging off your desk.”
    “You were playing with your pen.”
    Jane wrote down what they told her on chart paper, making a web of all the examples of non-listening.
    “Now watch this.”
    She modeled attentive listening, sitting up straight in her chair, hands on her cleared desk. She asked the student beside her to begin reading again and as he read, she looked at his face. She remained perfectly still.
    “What did I do differently this time?”
    She filled another chart with their responses and titled it Active Listening, posting it on the wall in the front of the classroom.
    She read the paragraph again, suggesting that students listen attentively to each whole sentence before they tried to write it down. This time, her students fared better. They worked in pairs, comparing their paragraphs to their drawings and evaluating how well they had managed the details. After twenty minutes, they returned to the whole group and shared their findings.
    They discussed why it was important to listen actively. She congratulated students who were exhibiting