Lesson 2` Reflection

After watching the videos on Vision and Hearing, describe how this information impacts you as a teacher.

Though I have mentioned this already in the participation assignments for this lesson, learning about the ear has stimulated a few considerations in regard to how I articulate myself and how I articulate material sonically in my classroom. Hearing makes up a fifth of our perception; sound wields great power in shaping how we perceive information, both foreign and familiar. As a teacher, I can take advantage of my students' sensitivity to sound by incorporating a range of sonic textures in my lectures. Rather than maintaining a single mode of speech or sonic input, I can include music, recordings, oral histories, all kinds of sonic input to stimulate student engagement with particular subjects.

I have actually already done this without really thinking about it. My classes are in the middle of reading Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen; it's a novel told in the perspective of a slave living on a plantation leading up to the Civil War. Paulsen writes in a sort of dialectic narrative, reminiscent of slave narratives of the 1800s. I thought it might be useful for my students to actually hear what this kind of speech sounded like. So I played a couple of interviews with former slaves from the Smithsonian's collection from the 1930s and 40s, had my students try to transcribe what they heard. Upon hearing the records, they perked up; they were fascinated and intrigued, ready to learn.